A Polish-American archaeological team studying a 2,300-year-old Red Sea fortress now believe it was a staging area for the widely feared war elephants of the Egyptian Ptolemy dynasty, the tanks of ancient warfare.

The Egyptian port of Berenike on the Red Sea was settled many times throughout history from the ancient Egyptians to the Romans. It was also used by the Ptolemies, a line of pharaohs descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals, as both a trading post and a fortified military base complete with "sizable fortifications" and "double-lined walls."
"The biggest and the most heavily fortified part of the Berenike fortress is about 525 feet (160 meters) long and 262 feet (80 meters) wide," authors Marek Wozniak and Joanna Radkowska wrote in the journal Antiquities.

Many of you know that a B'nai B'rith organization gave birth to the ADL while defending its Atlanta chapter president Leon Frank, who raped and murdered a 13 year old girl who he was also employing along with many other teens, against child labor laws. Leon Frank ran a pencil factory sweatshop and often flirted with his illegal underage employees. The ADL was formed to defend him when he murdered and raped Mary Phagan. The details were disgusting. Her underwear was ripped and bloody and she was strangled to death with a wire. Her head had also been pummeled with a pipe. She went to get her paycheck of a meager $1.20 and never returned home. She was raped and murdered and then her body was dragged to the basement. Police found strands of her hair and blood on the floor above, right across from Frank's office. Frank nervously revealed the victim's name in front of police before they had given him any such details.

The ADL was going to get him released based purely on the fact that he was Jewish and a high profile crime made Jews look bad. Arguably a Jewish organization trying to get a child murderer off the hook, makes Jews look worse. They would like one to believe that he was innocent with fake news history and will tell you so on Wikipedia, which has Israelis paid to edit it. Leon admitted on the witness stand to the jury that he was "unconsciously" at the scene of the crime when the murder occurred. What we don't know is if he raped her before or after killing her. He was convicted. The grand jury vote 21 - 0 for indicting him. Four of those jurors were Jewish. That shouldn't matter, but it does because later the ADL would try to argue that the jury wrongly convicted him because of antisemitism rather than because of all the evidence showed that he did it in everyone's eyes. He was convicted. After the Judge, Leonard Roan, rejected all the appeals, he ordered Leon to be hanged on his birthday April 17, 1913. However Frank, who was unanimously elected president on the B'Nai Birth Chapter again even after being convicted of rape and murder, had one last method to weasel out. With Jewish Pressure groups, he appealed to the Governor. The lame-duck governor, John M. Slaton, in a very Clinton-esque move, commuted Leon's sentence his last week in office. He changed it form the death penalty to life in prison.

The first time anthropologist Nicole Smith-Guzmán noticed a nob of bone protruding from the ear canal of an ancient skull in Panama, she didn't know what to make of it. "I never expected to find this sort of bony growth because we're taught this is a cold-water thing." And the isthmus of Panama is nothing if not tropical.

The little spur Smith-Guzmán identified had created a slight mound in the skull's ear canal-an annoying impediment for the person who once had to deal with it. Known as external auditory exostoses, or EAE, the bony masses can be globular or shaped like teardrops. Depending on their severity, these growths, commonly called "surfer's ear" today, can cause repeat ear infections and even deafness.

Scientists still don't understand the precise mechanisms behind the formation of EAE. For a time, the growths were thought to be caused by some genetic anomaly. Further research, however, pointed to a different source: repeated exposure to and submersion in cold water. Just how cold the water has to be and how often people have to swim in it remains up for debate. But for such ear canal growths to be found in human remains in a place like Panama was unexpected and perplexing.

Today, Cubans are commemorating the 60th anniversary of their independence. On this day in 1959, the Cuban Revolution was successfully conducted by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement[i] and became an enduring symbol of resistance to neo-colonialism, capitalism, and hegemony. As a result, Cuba's corrupt and brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973), who had the full backing of the US government, left the island and escaped to the Dominican Republic, along with some of his loyal supporters. The victory of the Cuban Revolution meant that January 1, 1959 marked the first time in 467 years that Cubans were not subject to serfdom and exploitation by a foreign power.
Spain was the first country to exercise dominion over Cuba, beginning in 1510. However, Spain's defeat at the hands of the Americans in the Spanish-American War of 1898 did not bring about the emancipation that Cubans were expecting, as the island was subsequently transformed into a US neo-colony.

Homer used two adjectives to describe aspects of the colour blue: kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos, to describe a sort of 'blue-grey', notably used in Athena's epithet glaukopis, her 'grey-gleaming eyes'. He describes the sky as big, starry, or of iron or bronze (because of its solid fixity). The tints of a rough sea range from 'whitish' (polios) and 'blue-grey' (glaukos) to deep blue and almost black (kuaneos, melas). The sea in its calm expanse is said to be 'pansy-like' (ioeides), 'wine-like' (oinops), or purple (porphureos). But whether sea or sky, it is never just 'blue'. In fact, within the entirety of Ancient Greek literature you cannot find a single pure blue sea or sky.

Yellow, too, seems strangely absent from the Greek lexicon. The simple word xanthoscovers the most various shades of yellow, from the shining blond hair of the gods, to amber, to the reddish blaze of fire. Chloros, since it's related to chloe (grass), suggests the colour green but can also itself convey a vivid yellow, like honey.

NASA recently discovered of a massive, 19-mile (31km) wide crater, found hidden underneath Greenland's Hiawatha Glacier. This crater is the result of an asteroid impact, from a nearly 1 mile-wide mountain of iron, weighing somewhere around, get this, 11-12 BILLION tons, and was traveling at approximately 12 MILES per second - which is equivalent to more than 43,000 miles per hour - when it slammed into the earth some 12,000 years ago - And...with the mind-boggling force of essentially a 700-megaton bomb. And without a doubt, THIS is the reason why there is so much mystery and why we know so little about lost Ancient human civilization

Today, when we've unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya writing and hosts of far lesser known scripts, it seems as though there's nothing left for enterprising linguists. Fear not, for there are actually a number of ancient writing systems still to be cracked by archaeologists. They include texts of the Olmec and Zapotec (Mesoamerican cultures preceding the Classic Maya), Proto-Elamite (writings of the earliest civilization of present-day Iran) and Rongorongo of Easter Island.

But if it's fame you're after (as well as intense scrutiny and even death threats) there's no better challenge than the symbols of the Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished some 4,000 years ago in present-day Pakistan and northwest India.

From this culture, archaeologists have recovered several thousand short inscriptions, most with just 4 or 5 signs. There is no consensus on how to read them, although dozens of speculative decipherments have been proposed over the past century.

Complicating efforts, the underlying language the script is tied to is disputed, and there are complex modern-day political ramifications to the question. Rival ethnic groups claim to descend from this once-great civilization and knowing its language would help cement cultural ties. Hence the reported threats to scholars immersed in the matter.

Furthermore, some researchers go so far as to deny the existence of an underlying language. That is, they argue the Indus inscriptions were not true writing - visible signs that unambiguously represent speech - but an alternate symbolic system similar to emblems, conveying more general meanings.

Despite naysayers and challenges, decipherment efforts have progressed in the past decade, thanks to better databases of texts and new computational methods for finding patterns among the signs. Here's what we know, for now.

Mexican experts say they have found the first temple of the Flayed Lord, a pre-Hispanic fertility god depicted as a skinned human corpse.

Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday the find was made during recent excavations of Popoloca ruins in Puebla state.

The institute said experts found two skull-like stone carvings and a stone trunk depicting the god, Xipe Totec. It had an extra hand dangling off one arm, suggesting the god was wearing the skin of a sacrificial victim.

Priests worshipped Xipe Totec by skinning human victims and then donning their skins. The ritual was seen as a way to ensure fertility and regeneration.

Youngsters have probably been playing their way into cultural competence for at least tens of thousands of years. So why are signs of children largely absent from the archaeological record?

A cartoon that Biblical scholar Kristine Garroway taped up in her college dorm helps to explain kids' invisibility at ancient sites: Two men in business suits stare intently at an unidentifiable round object sitting on a table. "Hey, what's this?" asks the first guy. "I dunno, probably a toy ... or a religious object," says the second.

Archaeologists have long tended to choose the second option, says Garroway, now a visiting scientist at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Ambiguous finds, such as miniature pottery vessels and small figurines, get classified as ritual or decorative objects. Some of these artifacts undoubtedly were used in ceremonies. But not all of them, Garroway argues.

For the well to-do residents of Georgian London, serving chilled drinks at a festive party was a more complicated process than today. In the absence of electricity to make ice cubes and keep them frozen, they had to source their ice from elsewhere.

For the most discerning hosts, that meant using blocks of purest frozen Norwegian fjord, which was shipped to London's docks and then carefully stored until required to be chipped into glasses and clinked.

Archaeologists have now uncovered a link to the capital's lost ice trade with the rediscovery, under one of London's most prestigious addresses, of an enormous 18th-century ice store, the existence of which had been almost entirely forgotten.