June, 1980. Over the previous weeks Israeli air and sea attacks on "Palestinian and leftist positions" have been "almost nightly events." According to Christian Science Monitor journalist Helena Cobban, however, a "more sinister Israeli hand is seen behind some of the increased unrest throughout the country." Indeed, "several enormous car bombs have exploded here recently in locations with a heavy concentration of Palestinian or Syrian population." At least two were claimed by a group calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF).

The mysterious group's modus operandi, Cobban writes, "seem[s] to indicate the influence of some Israeli extremist groups" like the ones behind car-bomb attacks against three Palestinian mayors in the West Bank on June 2. To an "embittered Palestinian scholar," who spoke to Cobban, they also brought to mind "the terror-bombings launched against Palestinian villages by Mr. Begin's own Irgun extremist group" in the 1940s. "Then, the aim was to drive us out of Palestine, and they largely succeeded... Now they want to drive us out of Lebanon. Where can we go? The Israelis are going mad, but this time round, the world cannot support their terror. Or can it?"

The Tower of London is perhaps best known as a dungeon and burial ground where Anne Boleyn, Thomas More and various other friends and exes of Henry VIII were laid to rest after losing the king's favor (and their heads).

But for much of its 950-year history, the tower was also a thriving palace and community center. Within the medieval castle's walls were chapels, pubs, government offices and residences for the hundreds of Londoners who kept the place running. And as the first new skeletal discovery in nearly 50 years reminds us, not all who were buried there were ministered by the headsman's ax.

Two intact skeletons — one of a woman who died at approximately 40 years old and one of a 7-year-old girl — were recently exhumed from connected burial plots below the tower's Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula. The pair are the first skeletons discovered at the tower since the 1970s and the first complete skeletons from the tower to ever have their bones analyzed by an osteoarchaeologist, curators at the tower said in a news release.

An international research team led by scientists from McMaster University has unearthed new evidence in Greece proving that the island of Naxos was inhabited by Neanderthals and earlier humans at least 200,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

The findings, published today in the journal Science Advances, are based on years of excavations and challenge current thinking about human movement in the region -- long thought to have been inaccessible and uninhabitable to anyone but modern humans. The new evidence is leading researchers to reconsider the routes our early ancestors took as they moved out of Africa into Europe and demonstrates their ability to adapt to new environmental challenges.

"Until recently, this part of the world was seen as irrelevant to early human studies but the results force us to completely rethink the history of the Mediterranean islands," says Tristan Carter, an associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University and lead author on the study. He conducted the work with Dimitris Athanasoulis, head of archaeology at the Cycladic Ephorate of Antiquities within the Greek Ministry of Culture.

An ancient Byzantine-era church, complete with a floor mosaic and Green inscriptions, has been discovered in Ramat Beit Shemesh, with a mysterious dedication to an unnamed "Glorious Martyr".

Who was the "Glorious Martyr" immortalized by the Greek inscription, in whose memory this magnificent church was built and later enlarged under the patronage of the Byzantine Emperor Tiberius II himself?

This mystery has fixated archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) for the past three years during excavations conducted in Ramat Beit Shemesh, financed by Jerusalem district in The Israel Ministry of Construction and Housing and the CPM Corporation.

What kicked off the Earth's rapid cooling 12,800 years ago?

In the space of just a couple of years, average temperatures abruptly dropped, resulting in temperatures as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in some regions of the Northern Hemisphere. If a drop like that happened today, it would mean the average temperature of Miami Beach would quickly change to that of current Montreal, Canada. Layers of ice in Greenland show that this cool period in the Northern Hemisphere lasted about 1,400 years.

This climate event, called the Younger Dryas by scientists, marked the beginning of a decline in ice-age megafauna, such as mammoth and mastodon, eventually leading to extinction of more than 35 genera of animals across North America. Although disputed, some research suggests that Younger Dryas environmental changes led to a population decline among the Native Americans known for their distinctive Clovis spear points.

Conventional geologic wisdom blames the Younger Dryas on the failure of glacial ice dams holding back huge lakes in central North America and the sudden, massive blast of freshwater they released into the north Atlantic. This freshwater influx shut down ocean circulation and ended up cooling the climate.

Some geologists, however, subscribe to what is called the impact hypothesis: the idea that a fragmented comet or asteroid collided with the Earth 12,800 years ago and caused this abrupt climate event. Along with disrupting the glacial ice-sheet and shutting down ocean currents, this hypothesis holds that the extraterrestrial impact also triggered an "impact winter" by setting off massive wildfires that blocked sunlight with their smoke.

The evidence is mounting that the cause of the Younger Dryas' cooling climate came from outer space. My own recent fieldwork at a South Carolina lake that has been around for at least 20,000 years adds to the growing pile of evidence.

Archeologists have unearthed an engraved stone seal some 3,000 years old in southeastern Turkey.
3000-year-old Assyrian Seal was discovered around Zerzevan Castle, also known as Samachi Castle, a onetime important military base for the Byzantine Empire now in the southeastern Diyarbakir province.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Aytac Coskun, head of the excavation team, said that the castle had been known as 800-year-old military base but recent excavations showed that its history dates back much farther.

After the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the USSR needed to develop its own A-bomb fast to keep parity. The declassified papers provide a glimpse into how the elaborate task was achieved just four years later.


First Soviet first atomic bomb, RDS-1 or Pervaya Molniya (First Lightning), was successfully tested on August 29, 1949 at a range in the town of Semipalatinsk in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. The files, published by Russia's nuclear agency, Rosatom, contained the photos of the menacing weapon while it was still a work in progress.

An exploration of the evidence for eye-witness accounts of cosmic disasters and the great cataclysms of our past, as contained in the scriptures, myths and legends from religions and cultures around the world. Are these tales nothing but imagination? Or do they have their roots in the cosmic disasters of the ice age?

The largest ever Bronze Age hoard to be discovered in London, the third largest of its kind in the UK, has been unearthed in Havering.

A total of 453 bronze objects dating from around 900 to 800BC have been uncovered during a planned archaeological investigation, with weapons including axe heads, spearheads, fragments of swords, daggers and knives found alongside some other unusual objects, which are rarely found in the UK.

This discovery is hugely significant as these objects were recovered from four separate individual and deliberately placed hoards within a large ancient enclosure ditch, whereas most hoards are discovered in isolation.

This significant find will go on display for the first time as the focal point of a major exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands in April 2020.

Researchers have identified the elusive ancient "lost city" of Cambodia for the first time, according to a report published Tuesday.

In a project that has spanned years, an international group of scientists used aerial laser scans and ground-based surveying to map Mahendraparvata, or the Mountain of Indra, King of the Gods.

Mahendraparvata was one of the first capitals in the Khmer Empire, which lasted from the 9th to 15th centuries AD, but much of what we know come from inscriptions recovered from other sites. Scientists theorized that the city was located on the Phnom Kulen plateau, about 48 kilometers (about 30 miles) north of Siem Reap, but it was difficult to find evidence. The plateau was remote, inaccessible, covered with vegetation, and potentially home to landmines installed by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.