The golden eagle has been hunted and revered by human cultures for thousands of years. Yet this may not have been a uniquely human devotion-Neanderthals, too, may have targeted these impressive birds of prey some 130,000 years ago, according to new research. What's more, modern humans may have learned their eagle-catching techniques from their hominin cousins.

With its luminous auburn feathers and massive 2.2-meter wingspan, the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is associated with solar deities in religions around the world, from Native American traditional belief systems to Roman and Greek mythologies.

A family team of anthropologists wanted to find out whether Neanderthals were part of that heritage. Eagle bones and talons have been found across dozens of sites in central and western Europe occupied by both Neanderthals and modern humans. So the researchers combed through the literature on 154 Neanderthal-associated sites to see whether golden eagle remains stood out in any way.

Archaeologists working at the site of Scotland's largest Pictish fort have made an "incredible" discovery after unearthing part of the power centre's defensive wall.

The discovery has been made at Burghead in Moray, the largest known fort of its kind in northern Britain which is believed to have been occupied by the elite of Pictish society more than 1,000 years ago.

Around 10 feet of rampart wall has been unearthed with preserved pieces of timber lacing, which strengthens the structure, also found.

It is now known that the wall dates to the 8th Century - putting it right at the heart of the Pictish period.

A 15,600-year old footprint discovered in southern Chile is believed to be the oldest ever found in the Americas, according to researchers.

The footprint was first discovered in 2010 by a student at the Universidad Austral of Chile. Scientists then worked for years to rule out the possibility that the print may have belonged to some other species of animal, and to determine the fossil's estimated age.

Karen Moreno, a paleontologist with the Universidad Austral who has overseen the studies, said researchers had also found bones of animals near the site, including those of primitive elephants, but determined that the footprint was evidence of human presence.

Moreno said this was the first evidence of humans in the Americas older than 12,000 years.

"Little by little in South America we're starting to find sites with evidence of human presence, but this is this oldest in the Americas," she said.

Any follower of Catastrophism the last few years has seen extraordinary confirmations of ancient cataclysm and novel contributions to our way of thinking. To the Tusk, three revelations have characterized the period: The discovery of an extraordinarily youthful late Pleistocene crater in Greenland; a series of popular, comprehensive and unrefuted major journal articles which exquisitely defined hard evidence for the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe; and the singular contribution of Dr. Martin Sweatman, as made in his fabulous book, Prehistory Decoded.

Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world's very earliest and most mysterious art.

Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman's initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world's first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.

Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth's precession.

(Don't you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)

It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).

Some of those who witnessed the Bovedy meteorite which crashed in Northern Ireland 50 years ago have been remembering the event at the Armagh Planetarium.

The meteorite is named after the townland near Kilrea where it fell on 25 April 1969.

It had been seen passing over the South East of England and over Wales before it crashed - and was described as looking like a shooting star or fireball as it fragmented coming into land.

It was found three days later and had broken into two traceable pieces, one which had fallen through the roof of a shop in Lisburn and the other on a farm in Bovedy.

Former director of the planetarium Terence Murtagh is one of those who saw the shooting star and helped locate it after it fell to Earth.

People living at least 2,000 years ago near the Pacific Coast of what's now Guatemala crafted massive human sculptures with magnetized foreheads, cheeks and navels. New research provides the first detailed look at how these sculpted body parts were intentionally placed within magnetic fields on large rocks.

Lightning strikes probably magnetized sections of boulders that were later carved into stylized, rotund figures - known as potbellies - at the Guatemalan site of Monte Alto, say Harvard University geoscientist Roger Fu and his colleagues. Artisans may have held naturally magnetized mineral chunks near iron-rich, basalt boulders to find areas in the rock where magnetic forces pushed back, the scientists say in the June Journal of Archaeological Science. Predesignated parts of potbelly figures - which can stand more than 2 meters tall and weigh 10,000 kilograms or more - were then carved at those spots.

This viper fang, likely from a rattlesnake or copperhead, was preserved in a prehistoric coprolite.

Photograph courtesy Elanor Sonderman Culture & History 1,500 years ago, someone ate a venomous snake whole. Why? Is the puzzling find evidence of an ancient ritual, or just a prehistoric dare gone wrong?

Analyzing coprolites-the preserved poop of people-is dirty, stinky work. But every once in a while, it reveals something truly surprising.

In the case of a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science, that startling something was the fang of a venomous snake, digested by a person and left in a rock shelter in what is now Texas about 1,500 years ago.

Archaeologist Elanor Sonderman, who found the fang as part of her graduate work at Texas A&M University, wasn't looking for that particular needle in a haystack of prehistoric feces. Rather, she wanted to learn more about the indigenous people who used the Conejo Shelter, a cave in the Lower Pecos canyonlands of Texas, as a latrine. The shelter became an archaeological dig in the 1960s before a dam project inundated the area with water.

In November 2016, a swastika was painted on an elementary school in my Denver, Colorado, neighborhood of Stapleton. As an archaeologist who specializes in identifying the remains of animals hunted by early humans, my work doesn't often involve symbols. But after this event, I started to pay attention to the symbols around me. I began to wonder about the creation of symbols-and society's investment in them-and what these phenomena say about our culture, both old and new.

Archaeology is often assumed to be limited to the realm of the ancients. However, the point of archaeology is not to dig up static moments in time from long ago but to use material items to track the ebbs and flows of human culture: to show how things change, how values change. We build statues, then later deface or demolish them. We create symbols, then alter their meanings. Some argue vehemently that monuments, such as Confederate statues, should be left in place-that their part in history should not be "erased." But change is not an erasure of history; it is a part of it.

The swastika is a case in point. In the late 1800s, the life's ambition of German businessman and self-appointed archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was to prove that cities named in Homer's The Iliad were real-that the kings, princes, places, and battles of the Greek poem were more than just stories. In his excavations, using methods that would be considered destructive plundering by today's standards, Schliemann excavated a site on the coast of Turkey that he identified as the ancient city of Troy. He discovered over a thousand variations of crosses with arms that extended to right angles, or swirls. He named them after the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning well-being.

Schliemann's famed expeditions propelled the symbol into Western pop culture. In the early 1900s, the Coca-Cola company used the swastika on their products as a sign of well-being, housing developments sprang up with names like Swastika Acres (a name that until recently existed on housing deeds in a subdivision of Cherry Hills Village in the Denver metro area), and the Boston Braves baseball team wore it on their hats for good luck in a 1914 game against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the Russian military has been training "psychic" special forces to use in combat to "defeat the enemy with non-contact methods," according to the official magazine of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Armeysky Sbornik (Army Digest).

"Fighters can see right through the enemy soldier: what kind of person they are, what their weak and strong sides are and whether they can be recruited [as a spy]," read the magazine.

"By force of thought, it is possible to shut down computer programmes, burn crystals in generators, listen in on conversations and disrupt radio and telecommunications," the article continues.

These 'goat-staring' specialists in "parapsychological" warfare are said to have honed their skills during combat in Chechnya, using their purported abilities for applications ranging from managing the amount of pain felt by a wounded soldier, to locating caches of enemy weapons

Russia's chief skeptic, Yevgeny Aleksandrov who chairs the Russian Academy of Science's committee for combating "false science" called claims of psychological warfare capabilities "complete rubbish," according to Sky.com

Declassified documents held by the investigative agency reveal the FBI received rumours of Hitler's survival just five months after his death on April 30, 1945.

US spooks received information claiming the Nazi leader had fled Germany via U-boat in the dying days of the war as the allies pressed on Berlin.

It is said Argentine officials welcomed Hitler and he remained hiding out in the foothills of the Andes.