Chaco Canyon, a site that was once central to the lives of pre-colonial peoples called Anasazi, may not have been able to produce enough food to sustain thousands of residents, according to new research. The results could shed doubt on estimates of how many people were able to live in the region year-round.

Located in Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, Chaco Canyon hosts numerous small dwellings and a handful of multi-story buildings known as great houses. Based on these structures, researchers think that it was once a bustling metropolis that was home to as many as 2,300 people during its height from 1050 to 1130 AD.

But Chaco also sits in an unforgiving environment, complete with cold winters, blazing-hot summers and little rainfall falling in either season.

"You have this place in the middle of the San Juan Basin, which is not very habitable," said Larry Benson, an adjoint curator at the CU Museum of Natural History.

Two skulls chiselled from a slab of Greek rock have deepened our understanding of early humans living on the European continent.

The specimens were found in the Apidima Cave - a site etched into a seaside cliff - in Southern Greece in 1978. Their significance is only now being revealed, in a paper published in the journal Nature.

Both skulls - named Apidima 1 and Apidima 2 - were washed into a gap in the cave wall and then cemented into place thousands of years ago.

Despite being found just 30 centimetres apart in the same block of breccia, the new study reports that they aren't the same age. Nor are they from the same species.

"Previous studies have all assumed that these two specimens were of the same geological age, but also the same taxonomic attribution," says palaeoanthropologist Katerina Harvati from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, who led the study.

Harvati and her colleagues created careful 3D reconstructions of both skulls, and compared them, using a shape analysis technique known as geometric morphometrics, to other fossil specimens and modern-day human skulls.

The idea that there were once "pure" populations of ancestral Europeans, there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since well before the Nazis. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the United States.

Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who Europeans really are and where they came from. Their findings suggest that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Europeans living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe.

The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis of ancient teeth and bones, and from linguistics. But above all it comes from the new field of paleogenetics. During the past decade it has become possible to sequence the entire genome of humans who lived tens of millennia ago. Technical advances in just the past few years have made it cheap and efficient to do so; a well-preserved bit of skeleton can now be sequenced for around $500.

For the past ~40,000 years, Homo sapiens — modern humans — has been the only Homo species on Earth. But for most of our history, there were close evolutionary cousins of ours, human but not quite like us, coexisting and evolving at the same time in different regions.

Some of our now-extinct relatives, such as the Neanderthals, are well known. Others, like the recently-discovered Denisovans or Homo naledi have hardly made it into textbooks yet. And hints of even more human forms have been found in incomplete fossils and genetic patterns, although these relatives are poorly understood. Modern humans were just one of many variations on the Homo theme.

Now, as cutting-edge techniques uncover new evidence and reassess old finds, we're closer to knowing how many types of humans coexisted with our ancestors

Unlike a dozen other leading archaeologists, Prof. Yosef Garfinkel had no intention of searching for the lost biblical town of Ziklag when he commenced excavations in 2015 at Khirbet a-Ra'i, located between Kiryat Gat and Lachish. However, as the twice-yearly dig seasons progressed at the site, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of Jerusalem, he and his two co-excavation directors, Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Dr. Kyle Keimer of Macquarie University in Sydney, noted that it was starting to resemble the biblically attested Philistine town of Ziklag, a well-recorded site where the future King David sought refuge from King Saul.

After seven dig seasons that uncovered some 1,000 sq.m., the archaeological team found evidence of a Philistine-era settlement from the 12-11th centuries BCE under layers of a rural settlement dating to the early 10th century BCE, largely considered the Davidic era. Among the findings were massive stone structures and typical Philistine cultural artifacts, including pottery in foundation deposits — good luck offerings laid beneath a building's flooring. Some of the olive pits and other organic objects found in the deposits were sent for carbon dating, which confirmed their contexts, said the archaeologists.

With the nearly weekly revelations that the British Foreign Office, MI6, and GCHQ have been behind the long standing agenda to undermine the Presidency of Donald Trump and undo the peaceful alliance between nationalist leaders in America, Russia, China and elsewhere, a new focus on the British hand in undermining the United States has become a serious thought for many citizens. In the first week of the new year, fuel was added to this fire when internal memos were leaked from the British-run Integrity Initiative featuring a startling account of the techniques deployed by the anti-Russian British operation to infiltrate American intelligence institutions, think tanks and media.

For those who may not know, The Integrity Initiative is an anti-Russian propaganda outfit funded to the tune of $140 million by the British Foreign office. Throughout 2019, leaks have been released featuring documents dated to the early period of Trump's election, demonstrating that this organization, already active across Europe promoting anti-Russian PR and smearing nationalist leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn, was intent on spreading deeply into the State Department and setting up "clusters" of anti-Trump operatives. The documents reveal high level meetings that Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly had with former Trump Advisor Sebastien Gorka, McCain Foundation director Kurt Volker, Pentagon PR guru John Rendon among many others.

In the dead-flat desert of northwestern Utah, archaeologists have uncovered a scene from a distant, and more verdant, time.

Just a few centimeters below the sun-baked surface, researchers have discovered a campsite used by prehistoric hunter-gatherers 12,300 years ago — when Utah's West Desert was lush wetland.

Artifacts found at the site include the charred remains of an ancient hearth, a finely crafted spear point, and, most surprising, a collection of tobacco seeds — likely the earliest evidence of tobacco use ever found in North America.

"What makes this interesting is there's no direct evidence of anybody using tobacco past 3,000 years ago," said Dr. Daron Duke, senior archaeologist with the Nevada-based Far Western Anthropological Research Group, in a press statement.

"And this was 12,000-plus years ago!"

Before I begin. No, D-Day was not the largest military operation of all times. No, D-Day was not the decisive battle of the war. No, the Western Allies did not defeat Hitlerism with minor help from the USSR. The largest military operation of all time was surely Operation Bagration which was planned in coordination with D-Day. The decisive battle - much argument there, so my personal opinion - was the Battle of Moscow in 1941 although David Glantz has persuasively argued that the German victory at Smolensk sealed their defeat. Either way, the only path to German victory was a quick one and that hope was gone by the end of 1941. (Hitler's rant to Mannerheim is instructive.) 80% of nazi military casualties were on the Eastern front, the rest of us did for the other 20%. But D-Day was important. And much more difficult than my Russian interlocutors think it was. And it had to succeed the first time.

The extensive influence of ancient Gnosticism on the Matrix movies is by now well known. Gnosticism itself was heavily influenced by Platonism, and I believe Plato provides an even closer analogue to the Matrix than Gnosticism does at certain crucial points. I am thinking of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Let's refresh our memories. Plato asks us to picture a small community dwelling in a huge cavern. The troglodytes have been born and raised there and do not even suspect the existence of the outer, surface, sunlit realm. Reality as they know it is pretty much two-dimensional. You see, each individual is bound firmly in place, head braced to face forward. They can converse with adjacent voices, but all they ever see is a sequence of shadows passing before them, projected from behind them by other individuals who hold up plywood cut-outs of men, women, animals, etc. The prisoners of the Cave see nothing amiss in all this, but one day one man somehow breaks free, moves his stiff neck from side to side, and is amazed to view the true situation!

He manages to escape the Cave, stumbling up the tunnel and into the blinding noonday sunlight. For a time he can see nothing, less than he could see down below. But his eyes soon adjust, and he looks about him in wide-eyed wonder and astonishment! He beholds the wonder of the world of living and substantial objects that you and I take for granted every day. Have you ever seen those videos in which a person, usually a child, congenitally blind or deaf, is fitted with some new device to supplement his senses? At once he or she is beaming with joy! And so is Plato's escapee. For the first time, he sees the real world. What he had seen previously he now recognizes as a false world of shadows, dim, flat effigies of things in the surface world.

"I can't keep this to myself!" he reflects, resolving to return to the Cave long enough to tell the dwellers what has happened to him and to reveal that a more real world awaits outside. (This is Morpheus in The Matrix.) Picture him making the descent and interposing himself between the cut-out bearers and their audience, proclaiming his gospel. And picture his chagrin at the jeering and abuse he receives from those he sought to liberate! The guardians of the Cave, whoever they may be, need not trouble themselves to seize or silence him. Their prisoners, who do not even know themselves to be prisoners, drive him forth, back to the surface world whose existence they refuse to acknowledge.

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest paintings on Czech territory. They seem to have been made using charcoal more than 6,000 years ago in a Moravian cave. A common place for scribbling messages, they were undetected until now, hidden among many other drawings made in latter periods.

The Catherine Cave lies just a few kilometres from the Moravian capital of Brno. It has been a popular place to visit for thousands of years, and its walls are littered by many scribbled pictures and messages, from various ages.

It is for this reason that its most ancient message may have been overlooked, says speleologist Petr Zajíček, who made the discovery with his colleague Martin Golec, an archaeologist from the Palacký University in Olomouc.

It all started when Dr. Golec got inkling that the Catherine Cave may be hiding something very old, says Mr. Zajíček.

"Dr. Golec had a feeling there could be something there. He is also a member of a group researching the nearby Býčí Skála cave, where one pre-historic painting was already found. He thought that since this cave was also settled in the pre-historic era, there was a chance one could find something here. So I let him in, we studied the walls and found them. They are actually quite visible, but no one attributed much importance to them before."

More abstract scribbles than paintings, the drawings were likely made with pieces of charcoal from the cave dwellers' fireplace, the research team believes.