An incredible ancient drawing hidden inside a church for 1,800 years is shaking up our views on how Jesus really looked. The historical image is a far cry from the bearded character predominantly portrayed in depictions of Jesus.

So faded you could almost miss it, the lines etched on the ruins of a Byzantine church in the Negev desert show a young Jesus with a clean-shaven face, a head of curls and a large nose.

Inside a 2,100-year-old pit in China, archaeologists have discovered a miniature army of sorts: carefully arranged chariots and mini statues of cavalry, watchtowers, infantry and musicians.

They look like a miniaturized version of the Terracotta Army - a collection of chariots and life-size sculptures of soldiers, horses, entertainers and civil officials - that was constructed for Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China.

Based on the design of the newfound artifacts, archaeologists believe that the pit was created about 2,100 years ago, or about a century after the construction of the Terracotta Army.

We are now before the 100th anniversary of World War I, the war that was supposed to end all wars. While honoring the 16 million who died in this conflict, we should also condemn the memory of the politicians, officials and incompetent generals who created this horrendous blood bath.

I've walked most of the Western Front of the Great War, visited its battlefields and haunted forts, and seen the seas of crosses marking its innumerable cemeteries.

As a former soldier and war correspondent, I've always considered WWI as the stupidest, most tragic and catastrophic of all modern wars.

The continuation of this conflict, World War II, killed more people and brought more destruction on civilians in firebombed cities but, at least for me, World War I holds a special horror and poignancy. This war was not only an endless nightmare for the soldiers in their pestilential trenches, it also violently ended the previous 100 years of glorious European civilization, one of mankind's most noble achievements.

What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was. This is the story of WWI that you didn't read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.

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When archaeologists made their way through a 4,500-year-old necropolis and found an extraordinarily rare collection of mummified cats and beetles, they could hardly imagine their exploration would lead on to something even bigger.

On Saturday, a team of explorers crept through walls dating back to about 2,500 BC and unearthed a collection of cat mummies and scarab beetles as they scavenged through the Sarraq necropolis on the edge of the King Userkaf pyramid complex.

Two scarab beetles were found in a limestone sarcophagus with a vaulted, decorated lid, the antiquities minister said in a statement.

It's hard to imagine what the end of World War I must have felt like, but we can at least get a sense for what it sounded like: A 100-year-old recording captured the war's violent final seconds - followed by a stirring silence.

Made near the River Moselle, which flows through France, Luxembourg, and Germany, the recording documents the moments leading up to the war's official end, at 11 am on November 11, 1918. The audio begins with loud gunfire and explosions, followed by an abrupt but undoubtedly welcomed silence after the clock struck 11.

The Third Reich viewed tobacco as a threat to the health of the "chosen folk."

Nazi Germany's well-known obsession with creating a master Aryan race led to many atrocities. But from these same sinister motives came research that may have had health benefits for the German people during World War II-studies on the dangers of smoking that led to the most advanced anti-tobacco campaign of its time. Unfortunately, the campaign was only concerned with protecting the health of Aryan Germans.

"Nazi Germany was governed by a health-conscious political elite bent on European conquest and genocidal extermination," writes Stanford researcher Robert Proctor in his book, The Nazi War on Cancer, "and tobacco at the time was viewed as one among many 'threats' to the health of the chosen folk."

LET'S GO BACK IN TIME roughly, oh, 20 million years. It's the Miocene era, which formally began 3.03 million years prior, and India and Asia are just beginning to collide and form the impressive mountain ranges we know today. Kelp forests and brown algae are appearing and diversifying oceans at rapid rates; in Europe and Africa, around 100 different species of early apes are monkeying around.

With this as the backdrop, let's zoom in on North Africa specifically. Libya, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on the north and Egypt to the east, is about to experience a geological miracle. Unbeknown to the colliding mountains and swinging apes of the Miocene, the 420,000 square miles that make up the Libyan desert (which is part of the Sahara) would soon be caramelized into shards of foggy green glass. This rare and precious material, known as Libyan Desert Glass, was found in King Tutankhamun's burial tomb millions of years later.

Libyan Desert Glass' value comes from the miraculousness of its origin story. As Dr. Jane Cook, chief scientist at The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, explains, "glass happens when just the right ingredients are heated up and cooled down quickly." But in the case of Libyan Desert Glass, the series of events was much more elaborate. "About 20 million years ago, either a meteor impact or atmospheric explosion got to the desert part of the lower atmosphere, heated it up and fragmented and exploded," she says. "It dumped a huge amount of heat, like in thousands of Fahrenheit degrees, into that portion of the desert, which was a relatively pure deposit of quartz sand. And it brought it up hot enough that it was able to liquefy for a short period of time." When this liquefied quartz cooled down, desert glass was formed. Cook adds: "Because it was almost pure silica it was able to solidify without crystallizing," making it glass instead of geological crystal structures.

People genetically linked to the Clovis culture, one of the earliest continent wide cultures in North America, made it down to South America as far back as 11,000 years ago. Then they mysteriously vanished around 9,000 years ago, new research reveals.

Where did they go? It appears that another ancient group of people replaced them, but it's unclear how or why this happened, the researchers said.

These findings, published online today (Nov. 8) in the journal Cell, suggest that this population turnover happened across the entire continent of South America.

On arrival in North America, Europeans' hopes were dashed by the harsh winters — not because they were unprepared for the ice and snow, but because they were all too familiar with the deprivations of a cold climate. As Sam White writes in A Cold Welcome, colonists had left a continent roiled by what is now known as the Little Ice Age. This is part of a series of excerpts from finalists for McGill University's US$75,000 Cundill History Prize. The winner will be announced on Nov. 15.

During late 1606 and early 1607, while the first Englishmen sailed to Jamestown, the weather in Europe turned eerily warm and dry. In parts of Germany, the flowers bloomed in February. Coming after decades of cold, wet seasons, it seemed to some that this year there was "no winter" at all.

That suddenly changed in late 1607, when the continent plunged back into some of the worst cold in generations. The winter of 1607-1608 has gone down in history as one of Europe's "great winters," bringing Arctic cold, snow, and ice. In the Netherlands, the freeze began in late December and continued with few interruptions into late March. Horses and sleighs travelled over the Zuiderzee from Haarlingen to Enkhuizen, and the extraordinary sight would inspire some of the most famous winter landscape paintings of the era. Even Spanish diplomats travelled by sleigh over the ice to broker their truce with Dutch rebels in early 1608. By late winter the rivers were solid and the ground lay under sheets of ice. Birds froze to death; livestock and wild animals starved; fruit trees perished of frost. "In short," Dirk Velius observed from Hoorn, "it was a winter whose like was unheard of in human memory."