Social Science Questions & Answers

Most know hobbits as the fictional dwarf-like creatures from J R R Tolkein’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. But scientists discovered the fossilized remains of hobbitlike creatures in Indonesia. They believed them to be a separate species and called them Homo florsiensis or Man of Flores. But some anthropologists refuted that they were a separate species and said the …

In about the tenth century, groups of people began to leave northern India and to travel all over Europe. Being very independent, they kept their original language to a great extent – this is what we now call Romany, and it is a descendant of a form of Sanskrit. Gipdies’ beliefs are basically Christian, but they also have a very …

When Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1942, he thought that the Earth was much smaller than it actually is. As a result, he believed that he had reached India and that the people in the Caribbean islands were Indians. In fact, the ancestors of these people came from north-eastern Asia, perhaps 40,000 years ago. They spread southwards and …

The druids were the priests of the Celtic people who lived in Britain before the Romans came. It is thought that these people arrived in Britain in 500 B.C., when Stonehenge was itself a thousand years old. The druids worshipped trees such as oak and the rowan, and especially the mistletoe, which was supposed to hold the life of the …

The Zodiac killer was a serial killer in California, supposedly responsible for five murders and two failed attempts that took place from 1968 to 1969. He created a sensation and a scare by publishing letters in newspapers with Zodiac as his pen name. In his letters, he used to claim responsibility for murders that had taken place and would disclose …

Father’s Day most influential promoter was Mrs. John Bruce Dodd of Spokane, Washington. The idea of a Father’s Day celebration came to her first while listening to a sermon on Mother’s Day in 1909. Her own father, William Jackson Smart, had accomplished the amazing task of raising six children – Mrs. Dodd and her five brothers – after his wife …

Daniel Defoe’s fictional hero Robinson Crusoe is well known today. But not so well known is the real castaway, a Scotsman named Alexander Selkirk, who chose to be left on Juan Fernandez, an island named after Spaniard who had discovered it a hundred years earlier. After living there alone for over four years, Slekirk was found and rescued by a …

Queen Victoria founded The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India in 1861, which was an order of chivalry, meant to be given to viceroys of India, nawabs and princes for their meritorious service and loyalty to the British empire. The people admitted to this order were called knights. In the year of its founding, Nawab Sikandar Begum Sahiba, …

The Ramayana, originally written by Valmiki, consists of 24,000 verses in seven cantos (some say six i.e. excluding the Uttara Ramayana). The Ramayana tells the story of a prince, Rama of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita is abducted by the demon (Rakshasa) king of Lanka, Ravana. The Valmiki’s Ramayana is dated variously from 500 BC to 100 BC, or about co-eval …

Buddhism is not a religion so much as a way of life, as it has no god and no prayer. Buddha, which means ‘the enlightened one’, was Gautama Siddhartha who founded the religion about 528 BC. He came from an aristocratic family in northern India. Having decided that worldly success meant nothing, he had a vision one night, as he …