Scientists have found hundreds of perfectly preserved footprints, providing evidence that Neanderthals walked the Normandy coast in France.

The prints suggest a group of 10-13 individuals, mostly children and adolescents, were on the shoreline 80,000 years ago.

Neanderthals, the closest evolutionary cousins to present-day humans and primates, have long been thought to have lived in social groups, but details have been hard to establish.

What could turn out to be one of Scotland's largest Pictish burial grounds is being excavated on the Black Isle in the Highlands.

Archaeologists have confirmed the presence of a number of barrows, or burial mounds, near Muir of Ord.

Enclosures ranging in size from about 8m (26ft) to more than 40m (131ft) across have also been uncovered.

Archaeologists said the possible Pictish barrow cemetery could be about 1,400 years old.

Glass shattered high above Seventh Avenue in Manhattan before dawn on a cold November morning in 1953. Seconds later, a body hit the sidewalk. Jimmy, the doorman at the Statler hotel, was momentarily stunned. Then he turned and ran into the hotel lobby. "We got a jumper!" he shouted. "We got a jumper!"

The night manager peered up through the darkness at his hulking hotel. After a few moments, he picked out a curtain flapping through an open window. It turned out to be room 1018A. Two names were on the registration card: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook.

Police officers entered room 1018A with guns drawn. They saw no one. The window was open. They pushed open the door to the bathroom and found Lashbrook sitting on the toilet, head in hands. He had been sleeping, he said, and "I heard a noise and then I woke up."

"The man that went out the window, what is his name?" one officer asked.

When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev received his peace prize in 1990, the Nobel Prize committee declared that "the two mighty power blocs, have managed to abandon their life-threatening confrontation" and confidently expressed that "It is our hope that we are now celebrating the end of the Cold War." Recently, U.N. General Secretary António Guterres funereally closed the celebrations with the realization that "The Cold War is back."

In a very short span of history, the window that had finally opened for Russia and the United States to build a new international system in which they work cooperatively to address areas of common interest had slammed back closed. How was that historic opportunity wasted? Why was the road from the Nobel committee's hope to the UN's eulogy such a short one?

The doctrinal narrative that is told in the U.S. is the narrative of a very short road whose every turn was signposted by Russian lies, betrayal, deception and aggression. The American telling of history is a tale in which every blow to the new peace was a Russian blow. The fact checked version offers a demythologized history that is unrecognizably different. The demythologized version is also a history of lies, betrayal, deception and aggression, but the liar, the aggressor, is not primarily Russia, but America. It is the history of a promise so historically broken that it laid the foundation of a new cold war.

But it was not the first promise the United States broke: it was not even the first promise they broke in the new cold war.

Researchers have found the earliest direct evidence of milk consumption anywhere in the world in the teeth of prehistoric British farmers.
The research team, led by archaeologists at the University of York, identified a milk protein called beta lactoglobulin (BLG) entombed in the mineralised dental plaque of seven individuals who lived in the Neolithic period around 6,000 years-ago.

The human dental plaque samples in the study are the oldest to be analysed for ancient proteins to date globally and the study represents the earliest identification of the milk whey protein BLG so far.

On July 22, the world should have remembered the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Majdanek, the first of Hitler's infamous extermination camps to be captured and shut down. But of course the brave Russian - and Ukrainian, Kazakh and other Soviet nationalities - soldiers of the Red Army got no credit across the West for doing so.

It was one of the most important liberations of World War II. On that day in 1944, troops of the Soviet Second Tank Army liberated the notorious death camp near Lublin in Poland.

What happened at Majdanek dwarfed the future discoveries of at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and the other well-publicized German concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies. Probably close to a quarter of a million people were killed there. First estimates at the time put the figure as high as 1.5 million. (Current conventional estimates of 78,000 victims are simply ludicrously low, as respected Polish historian Czeslaw Rajca has rightly pointed out)

The horrific facts of Majdanek were reported around the world almost immediately. Alexander Werth of the British Broadcasting Corporation, one of the greatest of Western war correspondents sent graphic reports which ran on BBC News. But they were virtually totally ignored in the West as (supposedly) communist propaganda.

More than 3,500 years ago, a rising kingdom called the Hittite Empire was expanding, testing the limits of its strength. It would soon destroy Babylon, but first, its army sacked and burned a city nestled in the mountains of modern-day Turkey called Sam'al — located on a major route of trade between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Sea.

The charred ruins from that fateful day were uncovered for the first time in millennia during an excavation by the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The excavation is part of the OI's mission to understand the ancient Middle East, which has helped shape our picture of Western civilization.

"It's an incredibly lucky find. Every archaeologist hopes for an intact destruction layer because it gives you a snapshot of a day in the life of this town," said David Schloen, a professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a leading scholar of the ancient Middle Eastern world who co-directs the excavation. "Pottery is still sitting inside the buildings where the inhabitants left it in 1650 B.C. You know that everything is where it would be on a typical day, which is really valuable cultural knowledge."

5000 years before the modern rise of millet as a popular grain, this Chinese crop was spread far and wide by ancient food aficionados, not for their plates but instead for their animals, suggests new research from an international collaboration led by Kiel University (Germany) and Washington University in St. Louis (USA).

At the newly discovered Dali settlement, ancient DNA from the skeletal remains of sheep and goats show that animals first domesticated in the Near East had reached eastern Kazakhstan by 2700 BC. Stable isotope analysis illustrates that these animals were fed millet spreading westward from its center of domestication in China to help them survive the punishingly cold winters of Inner Asia.

"A thriving pastoralist economy using Chinese millets at 2700 BC is a massive leap forward in understand the earliest food globalization processes in Eurasia," said Taylor Hermes, lead author of the study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, who is a post-doctoral researcher at Kiel University.

Ancient Xiongnu-era woman took stylish accessory to the afterlife
To archeologist Pavel Leus the striking new find resembled a modern smartphone.

The black rectangular object was located in a burial site known as 'The Russian Atlantis' in mountainous Republic of Tuva, for it only appears from under water for few weeks a year.

Archeologists jokingly nicknamed the ancient female Natasha, while her accessory was called 'an iPhone'.

''Natasha's' burial with a Xiongnu-era iPhone remains one of the most interesting at this burial site,' Pavel Leus said in a new publication summarising results of several years of recent archeological expeditions to the Ala-Tey burial site.
In fact, the discovery is a large - 18cm by 9cm - chic belt buckle made of gemstone jet with inlaid decorations of turquoise, carnelian and mother-of-pearl.

The woman's belt was decorated with Chinese wuzhu coins which helped the scientists to date it.

They believe it might be up to 2,137 years old because this is when such coins were first minted.

Joseph Abileah is considered as the first person in Israel to go on trial for refusing to join its military.

Appearing in a Haifa court a few months after Israel was founded in 1948, the violinist made clear that he would play no part in the war Israel was then fighting against its neighbors. He regarded Arabs as his brothers, not his enemies.

As his case was heard, the Austrian-born Abileah made no apologies for his stance. This included his objection to the establishment of a distinctly Jewish state.

Even before Israel was founded, he had refused to join the Haganah - the main Zionist militia in Palestine.

Abileah escaped a prison sentence, but the judges failed to persuade him to take on a noncombat role, which, in the words of the late Anthony Bing, author of Israeli Pacifist: The Life of Joseph Abileah, "he likened to the case of a thief who watched for the police while another thief performed the actual robbery."

"I feel very honored to be a descendant of the Abileah family - and I've been specifically inspired by Joseph's work and his courage," said his grand niece Rae Abileah, a Jewish Voice for Peace activist living in Colorado. Rae is best known for disrupting an address made by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to the US Congress in 2011.