Thermopolia used by poorer residents with few cooking facilities, archaeologists say

A well-preserved frescoed "fast food" counter is among the latest discoveries unearthed by archaeologists in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

The 150 or so thermopolia, or snack bars, dotted across the city were mostly used by the poorer residents, who rarely had cooking facilities in their home, to grab a snack or drink. Typical menus included coarse bread with salty fish, baked cheese, lentils and spicy wine.

A new study suggests that a group of Neanderthals in southeast France resorted to cannibalism to survive lean times. If that says anything about Neanderthals, it's that they weren't so different from us-for better and for worse.

The bones in the cave

Something awful happened in Moula-Guercy cave in southeastern France around 120,000 years ago. Archaeologists excavating the site in the early 1990s found the bones of six Neanderthals near the eastern wall of the cave, disarticulated and mingled with bones from deer and other wildlife. That mixing of bones, as though the dead Neanderthals had been discarded with the remains of their food, is strange enough; there's plenty of evidence that Neanderthals typically buried their dead. But at Moula-Guercy, at least six Neanderthals-two adults, two teenagers, and two children-received very different treatment. Their bones and those of the deer show nearly-identical marks of cutting, scraping, and cracking, the kind of damage usually associated with butchering.

Washington has again shown that all is fair in war and business, calling for the extradition of a Chilean ex-arms dealer who sold cluster bombs to Iraq in the '80s, despite claims the CIA supported and approved the deals.

Before being inducted into Bush's 'Axis of Evil', Iraq's war with neighboring Iran made it a useful proxy to help Washington crush the nascent revolutionary government in Tehran. To accomplish the task, Baghdad needed bombs, and wealthy businessman Carlos Cardoen happened to have supplies in stock.

According to former National Security official Howard Teicher, part of the reason Cardoen found himself in the right place at the right time to seal the lucrative deal was that the CIA had stepped in to help manufacture and facilitate the sale of cluster bombs to the Iraqi government.

On September 10, 1968 Rafi Eitan and three other Israeli nationals arrived in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small city north of Pittsburgh that was home to a company called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. NUMEC packaged and stored enriched uranium, which it supplied to nuclear power plants in northeastern United States.

Rafael Eitan, who died Saturday at age 92, was an already legendary intelligence operative by the time he came to America in 1968. In 1960, he led the Mossad operation in 1960 to capture Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi functionary who presided over the liquidation of the European Jews. Eichmann's trial and subsequent execution was a milestone in world understanding of the Holocaust. As his obituaries noted, Eitan would go on a storied career that including running Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy whose arrest in 1985 cause a serious rift between the U.S. and Israeli governments.

The New York Times obituary mentioned of one of Eitan's most audacious and consequential operations:

"He was also suspected of being involved in the late-1960s disappearance of at least 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium from a nuclear fuel plant in the Pittsburgh area; many believed that the uranium was diverted to Israel to help its atomic bomb program."

After an online complaint from pro-Israeli watchdog group CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, the Times deleted the offending facts and appended a correction that was, unfortunately, more misleading than the original. The Times correction stated, "though Mr. Eitan visited the plant around the time of the disappearance, it was never shown conclusively that he had had an important role in it."

'The new discovery will change, for the first time, the plan of the temple more than 160 years since its discovery,' said the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Excavation work carried out in Ramses II's temple in Abydos, Sohag, has uncovered a new temple palace belonging to the 19th Dynasty king.

The discovery was made by the New York University mission, directed by Sameh Iskander.

"It is a very important discovery which will change, for the first time, the plan of the temple more than 160 years since its discovery," said Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

He describes the new discovery as "an important contribution to our understanding of the development of the temple palaces during the Ramesside period."

The location and layout of the palace exhibits a noteworthy parallel to the temple palace of Ramses II's father Seti I in Abydos some 300 metres to the south.

During the work of the mission around the temple to recover the architectural elements south of the temple, Iskander told Ahram Online, the mission accidentally stumbled upon a stone walkway at the south-western door of a temple.

This walkway led to an entrance of a palace building that contains the cartouches of Ramses II.

Northern Ethiopia was once home to a vast, ancient lake. Saber-toothed cats prowled around it, giant crocodiles swam within. The streams and rivers that fed it-over 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene-left behind trails of sediment that have now hardened into sandstone.

Deposited within these layers are fossils: some of early hominins, along with the bones of hippos, antelope, and elephants. Anthropologist Jessica Thompson encountered two of these specimens, from an area named Dikika, in 2010.

At the time, she was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Given no explanation as to their history, she analyzed the bones and found signs of butchery. Percussion marks suggested someone may have accessed the marrow; cut marks hinted that flesh was stripped from bone. To her surprise, the specimens were 3.4 million years old, putting the butcher's behaviors back 800,000 years earlier than conventional estimates would suggest. That fact got Thompson, now an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Yale University, thinking there might be more traces of tool use from those early times.

In a wide-ranging review published in February's issue of Current Anthropology, Thompson joins a team of researchers to weave together several strands of recent evidence and propose a new theory about the transition to large animal consumption by our ancestors. The prevailing view, supported by a confluence of fossil evidence from sites in Ethiopia, is that the emergence of flaked tool use and meat consumption led to the cerebral expansion that kickstarted human evolution more than 2 million years ago. Thompson and her colleagues disagree: Rather than using sharpened stones to hunt and scrape meat from animals, they suggest, earlier hominins may have first bashed bones to harvest fatty nutrients from marrow and brains.

Exactly 233 years ago this week, two of America's founding fathers documented their first exposure to Islamic jihad in a letter to Congress; like many Americans today, they too were shocked at what they learned.

Context: in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or "Barbary," had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- then ambassadors to France and England respectively -- met with Tripoli's ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of the Barbary States' hitherto inexplicable animosity to American vessels in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:

We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary's] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise

One need not conjecture what the American ambassadors -- who years earlier had asserted that all men were "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" -- thought of their Muslim counterpart's answer. Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting.

It is an article of faith among Israelis that the Golan Heights were captured in the Six-Day War to stop the Syrians from shelling the settlements down below. - Avi Shlaim

The State of Israel took control of the Golan Heights in 1967 to safeguard its security from external threats. - Donald Trump

Avi Shlaim in The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World writes that Israel's escalation of tensions on the Syrian front prior to June 1967 was the "single most important factor dragging the Middle East to war". Prior to the war news stories told again and again of Syrian's firing at Israeli farmers from the Golan Heights but the full circumstances of those conflicts was not revealed publicly until 1997 when a reporter published notes of his interview with the military commander Moshe Dayan in 1976. In that interview

Dayan confessed that his greatest mistake was that, as minister of defense in June 1967, he did not stick to his original opposition to the storming of the Golan Heights. Tal began to remonstrate that the Syrians were sitting on top of the Golan Heights. Dayan interrupted,

Never mind that. After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow someplace where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was. I did that, and Laskov and Chara [Zvi Tsur, Rabin's predecessor as chief of staff] did that, and Yitzhak did that, but it seems to me that the person who most enjoyed these games was Dado [David Elazar, OC Northern Command, 1964-69]. (Shlaim, 250f)

Fifty years ago, between June 5 and June 10, 1967, Israel invaded and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. The Six-Day War, as it would later be dubbed, saw the Jewish David inflict a humiliating defeat on the Arab Goliath, personified perhaps by Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt.

"The existence of the Israeli state hung by a thread," the country's prime minister, Levi Eshkol, claimed two days after the war was over, "but the hopes of the Arab leaders to annihilate Israel were dashed." Genocide, went the argument, had been prevented; another Holocaust of the Jews averted.

There is, however, a problem with this argument: It is complete fiction, a self-serving fantasy constructed after the event to justify a war of aggression and conquest. Don't take my word for it: "The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war," declared Gen. Matituahu Peled, chief of logistical command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel's General Staff, in March 1972.

A small lump of iron found in ancient ruins in Turkey may upend commonly held beliefs about the history of ironmaking, as the relic appears to have come from somewhere else.

The question is, where?

A Japanese research team uncovered the oldest ironmaking-related relic of its class at an excavation site in the Anatolia region, the central area of the Hittite Empire (1,400 B.C.-1,200 B.C.).

The empire was a major power along with the New Kingdom of Egypt in the ancient Orient.

The relic is a weight-shaped lump with a diameter of about 3 centimeters and contains a high amount of oxidized iron.

The Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology (JIAA) of the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan (MECCJ) discovered it in September 2017 in a geological layer dating between 2,500 B.C. and 2,250 B.C.

The institute has been engaged in research into the Kaman Kalehoyuk ruins in Turkey since 1986.

The ruins are in the central area of the Hittite Empire that prospered in the ancient Orient by using iron and light tanks as weapons.

The empire is said to have acquired military advantages by adopting ironmaking invented by indigenous people. In those days, ironmaking was considered the most advanced technology.

After the empire collapsed, the ironmaking technology spread to surrounding regions, and the proliferation became a turning point toward the Iron Age.

According to JIAA director Sachihiro Omura, the unearthed relic is believed to be the oldest of its kind in the history of ironmaking.