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."

Were there camels in Roman Britain? Archaeological evidence indicates that camels were used across the Roman empire well into the early medieval period. As historian Caitlin Green suggests, this includes the island province of Britannia.

In Roman antiquity, the camelus (from the Greek word κάμηλος) could come with one hump or two. The single humped camel is commonly called a dromedary. The dromedary was usually from the Arabian Peninsula and the African steppe regions. The two-humped camel was the Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus), which generally hailed from the colder desert regions of Asia. There is strong evidence to support the hybridization of these two types as early as the first millennium BCE, which produced a sturdier one-humped animal that could carry about 100 kg more per day.

Camels were commonly known to be used in North Africa, Egypt, and many parts of the ancient Near East. They were highly integral to the incense trade in particular. The elder Pliny (NH 12.32) noted that frankincense had to go through Sabota-Shabwa, capital city of the South Arabian kingdom called Ḥaḍramawt-on camels, and pass through a single gate. Bactrians could carry 220-270 kg between 30-40 km a day, though the ancient historian Diodorus Siculus (2.54.6) suggests over 400 kg. These Bactrian camels were particularly good for carrying freight along the Silk Road in caravans from China in the winter, for instance, but did not do well in heat. They gave hair and milk to traders in addition to their caravan services, but faunal remains would suggest they were not usually eaten along the Silk Road.

Artwork discovered on the walls of a limestone cave in Borneo's East Kalimantan province might just be the oldest figurative painting ever discovered.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, Maxime Aubert from Australia's Griffith University, reveals the red-orange painting - faint now, and depicting an animal that is not readily identifiable - as one of many put onto the walls of the caves in an area known as Lubang Jeriji Saléh, on island's Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat Peninsula.

After conducting uranium-series analysis of calcium carbonate deposits that have accreted on top of the painting, the scientists concluded that the minimum age for it was 40,000 years.

This is, write the researchers, "currently the oldest date for figurative artwork from anywhere in the world". As well as many other depictions of animals, the caves also contain scores of "hand stencils" - art created by placing a hand on the wall and then covering it with pigment, resulting in a negative rendition.

A Greek farmer's discovery of an antique fragment while tilling his field has led to the discovery of four ancient statues from the Archaic era and several historical graves.

The country's Culture Ministry says they were alerted to the stunning discovery by a farmer who stumbled upon the torso of an ancient kouros - the Greek name given to free-standing sculptures of nude young men.

Archeologists have been excavating the site near the central Greek town of Atalanti, about 150 kilometers (94 miles) northwest of Athens, since mid-October. The Archaic era spanned from about the eighth century BC to the fifth.

You might have seen the cartoon: two cavemen sitting outside their cave knapping stone tools. One says to the other: 'Something's just not right - our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30.'

This cartoon reflects a very common view of ancient lifespans, but it is based on a myth. People in the past were not all dead by 30. Ancient documents confirm this. In the 24th century BCE, the Egyptian Vizier Ptahhotep wrote verses about the disintegrations of old age. The ancient Greeks classed old age among the divine curses, and their tombstones attest to survival well past 80 years. Ancient artworks and figurines also depict elderly people: stooped, flabby, wrinkled.

This is not the only type of evidence, however. Studies on extant traditional people who live far away from modern medicines and markets, such as Tanzania's Hadza or Brazil's Xilixana Yanomami, have demonstrated that the most likely age at death is far higher than most people assume: it's about 70 years old. One study found that although there are differences in rates of death in various populations and periods, especially with regards to violence, there is a remarkable similarity between the mortality profiles of various traditional peoples.

A photo from a Leica camera, which spent 77 years buried in a WWII trench near Russia's southern city of Rostov-on-Don, has been restored by researchers, revealing a stunning image of volunteers fighting Nazis.

A team of amateur archeologists, devoted to recovering remains and artifacts from WWII sites, made the discovery when they unearthed the trench in one of the city's suburbs.

Analysis of remains from 66 ancient humans reveals that they suffered from an astonishing number of physical deformities, research reveals.

Anthropologist Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis, US, compiled examination records for two Late Pleistocene infants, six children, four juveniles, six adolescents, 30 prime age adults, and eight older adults, from several archaeological sites around the world.

He discovered that all up they showed evidence of 75 skeletal or dental abnormalities. Based on rates of similar disorders in modern human populations, Trinkaus finds the probability that the total is merely an artefact of comparatively small sample size to be "vanishingly small".

In a paper published in the journal PNAS, the author says that there is no single factor that could plausibly account for the high number of deformities.

"A substantial number of these abnormalities reflect abnormal or anomalous developmental processes, whether as a result of genetic variants altering developmental processes or as the products of environmental or behavioural stress patterns altering expected developmental patterns," he writes.

The deformities found included soft bones caused by the blood disorder hypophosphatemia, hydrocephaly, dwarfism, abnormal bone growth, and a wide variety of skull, jaw and dental problems.

In the Fall of 1943, as American troops were working their way northward through Italy, U.S. commanders were doing their best to address a basic problem of military intelligence: troops in the field couldn't tell different kinds of German troops and weapons apart.

This could have life or death consequences: An American squad armed with a bazooka could stand fast against a thinly armoured halftrack, but had little chance of harming the heaviest German tanks. Likewise, GIs had to be far more careful when fighting elite German infantry units than with the conscripts and armed prisoners from the eastern front that the Wehrmacht threw into the field as the conflict wore on. And so the U.S. War Department produced a 400-page book called Handbook on German Military Forces, with the purpose of giving officers and enlisted men "a better understanding of their principal enemy." A set of colour plates within the book show German soldiers in a variety of uniform styles and poses, from the Continental uniform style seen in most war movies, to tropical uniforms (which included shorts), to winter-wear for mountain troops. An updated edition of that handbook was published in early 1945. But then the war ended a few months later, and the books were discontinued: The war-fighting machine that Handbook on German Military Forces described no longer existed.