For more than half a century, Israel has maintained a cover of silence and opacity regarding its nuclear program and arsenal, backed up by the threat of severe punishment and persecution for any Israeli (see Mordechai Vanunu) who dares publicly breach the cover. In return for this silence, plus a pledge of restraint on certain nuclear development activities, the United States has reportedly agreed in writing not to pressure Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or get rid of its nuclear arsenal. (See this recent New Yorker article by Adam Entous.) US policy on Israel also includes its own public silence concerning Israeli nuclear weapons. But this policy should change as a result of a new scientific study of an event that took place nearly 40 years ago, during the Carter Administration. That study makes it virtually certain that the event was an illegal nuclear test. This strengthens previous analyses concluding that Israel likely carried out a nuclear test in violation of US law and the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The response to this new study will determine whether the United States and the international community of nations are serious about nuclear arms control.

On September 22, 1979, a US Vela satellite, designed to detect clandestine nuclear tests, recorded a "flash" off the coast of South Africa that every nuclear scientist monitoring the satellite's detectors at the time believed fit the classic description of a nuclear explosion. President Jimmy Carter's book based on his White House diaries notes that he was immediately informed of the "flash" by his national security team; with the information came speculation that the event was an Israeli nuclear test at sea, with South African participation.

Instinctively you might think that if we - humanity that is - could not read or write, then we would have difficulty remembering how to do things. You are right, of course, particularly when it comes to complicated tasks such as building Large Hadron Colliders or even organising a sports tournament, but perhaps we should not uncritically rush to such a judgement.

Research is showing increasingly clearly that pre-literate societies, in which no-one read or wrote, were capable of accumulating vast bodies of knowledge and passing these on in intelligible form for thousands of years.

When the Klamath people of Oregon, US, were first encountered by Europeans, they recorded stories about the terminal eruption of the massive volcano - later named Mt Mazama by geologists - that once towered over the landscape where iconic Crater Lake now lies.

The stories described the sounds and the nature of this spectacular eruption, leaving us in no doubt that the Klamath must have witnessed it. Until comparatively recently, the community passed on such knowledge only orally. Mt Mazama is now known to have disappeared from the Oregon landscape about 7600 years ago, leaving us to wonder how such stories could endure so extraordinarily long.

This is not an isolated example. From all around the coast of Australia - a land area about the same size as the conterminous United States - we find 22 groups of indigenous stories recalling a time when the ocean surface was much lower, shorelines were further out to sea (sometimes by hundreds of kilometres), and places that are today offshore islands were joined to the mainland.

Most of these stories can only be memories of the time, after the end of the last Ice Age, when the sea level across the entire planet was rising as a result of land-ice melt. Around Australia, this process ended about 7000 years ago, meaning that the stories must have endured at least this long, transmitted orally across some 300 to 400 generations to reach us today in a form that allows little uncertainty about what they recall.

Teenage girl 'Denny', the latest breathtaking discovery from the Denisova cave in Siberia has understandably made headlines around the world this week.

Earlier finds from here have shown how the cave - in mountainous Altai region - was shared in prehistoric times by three groupings, early Homo sapiens, the more advanced (at the time) but extinct Denisovans and the Neanderthals, also long gone.

A tiny fragment of bone now proves that girl of around 13 was the result of an unexpected match between a Denisovan man and a woman from the more primitive Neanderthals, scientists reported in Nature journal.

Here we look inside the remarkable cave which - as this scientific breakthrough was announced - remains a hive of activity with archaeological researchers painstakingly scouring the dirt floor for yet more jaw-dropping discoveries.

Our video and pictures take you into the limestone cave that is a remarkable shrine to the evolution of modern man.

An international team, including researchers at Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has found the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in eastern Africa. The Lothagam North Pillar Site was built 5,000 years ago by early pastoralists living around Lake Turkana, Kenya. This group is believed to have had an egalitarian society, without a stratified social hierarchy. Thus, their construction of such a large public project contradicts longstanding narratives about early complex societies, which suggest that a stratified social structure is necessary to enable the construction of large public buildings or monuments. The study, led by Elisabeth Hildebrand, of Stony Brook University, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Lothagam North Pillar Site was a communal cemetery constructed and used over a period of several centuries between about 5,000 and 4,300 years ago. Early herders built a platform approximately 30 meters in diameter and excavated a large cavity in the center to bury their dead. After the cavity was filled and capped with stones, the builders placed large, megalith pillars, some sourced from as much as a kilometer away, on top. Stone circles and cairns were added nearby. An estimated minimum of 580 individuals were densely buried within the central platform cavity of the site. Men, women and children of different ages, from infants to the elderly, were all buried in the same area, without any particular burials being singled out with special treatment. Additionally, essentially all individuals were buried with personal ornaments and the distribution of ornaments was approximately equal throughout the cemetery. These factors indicate a relatively egalitarian society without strong social stratification.

An enormous ancient Chinese pyramid has been discovered in an 4,300-year-old lost city, which regularly hosted human sacrifices and was once one of the largest settlements in the world.

The astonishing find was documented in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, in which researchers revealed that the newly excavated step pyramid is at least 230-ft high and covers a staggering 24 acres at its base.

The article, written by a team of professors at universities in China and California, says the city, now named "Shimao," flourished for five centuries across a 988-acre region surrounding the pyramid, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

The pyramid is decorated with eye symbols and part-human, part-animal figures which, the researchers say, could have given the pyramid religious power in the eyes of the Shimao citizens of the day. Both the city and pyramid were surrounded by a series of sophisticated defensive stone walls, ramparts and gates, which the team says indicates highly restricted access to the complex. Decapitated human heads were also discovered, suggesting human sacrifice was a popular tradition at the time.

Like any good story of discovery, the journey that led archaeologist Don Blakeslee to uncover one of the largest lost cities in North American history began with a fresh look at centuries-old documents.

In 2013, scholars at UC Berkeley revisited a series of maps and texts written in 1601 by Spanish conquistadors about a failed expedition into the Great Plains region of the United States in search of gold and other treasures. Instead, the explorers detailed the discovery of a massive settlement of nearly 2,000 grass huts with an estimated 20,000 occupants.

Whereas earlier translations muddled the exact site of this city, labelled on the map as Etzanoa, the Berkeley researchers were able to interpret the accounts and accompanying maps with greater accuracy.

The area still has much to reveal
Recent weeks have been some of the most exciting in years for Irish archaeologists studying the area around Newgrange in Co Meath.

You might expect the area - a Unesco World Heritage Site - to be so well documented that everything of note has turned up, but it has yielded yet more fascinating discoveries.

First, drought conditions in the area started to reveal shapes in fields, suggesting the presence of previously unknown enclosures or henges right on the footsteps of Newgrange.

Mythical Ireland's Anthony Murphy and Ken Williams of Shadows & Stone photography found two henges using a drone, located right beside Site P, an already documented site. Murphy described it as a 'mind-blowing'.

The Left's route to promoting their radical agenda around the world is engineering the enactment of a United Nations treaty that contains their distorted "women's rights" policies that can then be used to impose their alien feminist views on third world nations. I know this from my experience of more than 20 years at the UN -- including working as an NGO delegate advising official delegates plus being an official U.S. delegate appointed by President George W. Bush to two sessions, The Children's Summit (2002) and the Commission on the Status of Women (2003). I've learned that whatever the theme of the session and whether it's an official or NGO meeting. And this week, March 13 - March 24, the UN is holding its 61^st annual Commission on the Status of Women.

The remains of the oldest public library in Germany, a building erected almost two millennia ago that may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, have been discovered in the middle of Cologne.

The walls were first uncovered in 2017, during an excavation on the grounds of a Protestant church in the centre of the city. Archaeologists knew they were of Roman origins, with Cologne being one of Germany's oldest cities, founded by the Romans in 50 AD under the name Colonia. But the discovery of niches in the walls, measuring approximately 80cm by 50cm, was, initially, mystifying.

"It took us some time to match up the parallels - we could see the niches were too small to bear statues inside. But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls," said Dr Dirk Schmitz from the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne. "They are very particular to libraries - you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus."

A small piece of bone found in a cave in Siberia has been identified as the remnant of a child whose mother was a Neanderthal and father was a Denisovan, a mysterious human ancestor that lived in the region.

Researchers made the discovery when they examined DNA extracted from the bone and found that it contained chromosomes from a Neanderthal female and a Denisovan male. It is the first time that the offspring of such a coupling has been identified.

"If you had asked me beforehand, I would have said we will never find this, it is like finding a needle in a haystack," said Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "And then we stumbled across it. I was very surprised."