Members of the human genus, Homo, left Africa far earlier than thought, reaching what's now central China by around 2.12 million years ago, a new study finds.

Some stone tools unearthed at China's Shangchen site date to roughly 250,000 years before what was previously the oldest Eurasian evidence of Homo, say geologist Zhaoyu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou and his colleagues. Toolmakers visited the Chinese spot on and off until as late as 1.26 million years ago, the scientists report online July 12 in Nature. No hominid fossils have been found at Shangchen.

Until now, the Dmanisi site, in the western Asia nation of Georgia, had yielded the oldest hominid remains outside Africa. Homo erectus fossils unearthed at Dmanisi date to between 1.85 million and 1.77 million years ago (SN: 11/16/13, p. 6).

"An early form of Homo probably made the Shangchen artifacts, but it's too early to say if that was H. erectus," says coauthor Robin Dennell, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in England.

After learning how to make stone flakes sharp enough to slice meat off animals' carcasses around 2.6 million years ago, African hominids may have had the survival skills to fan out into Asia and reach Shangchen by 2.1 million years ago, Dennell says.

Whatever Homo species made that roughly 7,000-kilometer journey, Shangchen now stands as the oldest hominid site in China by some 400,000 years, says archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Petraglia did not participate in the new study.

History is littered with executions of women suspected of dabbling in black magic. Now archaeologists believe they have found the ancient remains of a so-called witch, buried with her hands propped behind her back.

It's unknown how the woman - who was from a third-to-fourth century Chernyakhov settlement in modern day Ukraine - came to meet her death.

The propaganda specialists over at The Daily Mail have apparently been working overtime. Here on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the murder of Russia's last Royal Family, The Daily Mail has published a cynical, demonic piece of trash, slandering Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

With no respect for the dead, and with even less respect for this family of Christian Saints, they have scraped up all the lies they could find about this good family, and they have collected them into one location, so that anyone seeking disinformation and delusion can achieve their goal by clicking on a single website.

From the myth of Nicholas II being a "Weak Tsar", to the lies about the royal family being manipulated by Rasputin, they have pulled almost every trick in the book. (Of course, we probably shouldn't be surprised, since it was the British who attacked Rasputin in the first place, over 100 years ago.) Perhaps they believe all their readers are ignorant of history.

Giant natural balls in the Franz Josef archipelago that leave scientists flummoxed.

The huge stone balls up to two metres in height are found on appropriately-named Champ island above the polar circle.

Perfectly spherical they are scattered all over this northern uninhabited outpost.

We reveal the latest pictures of this remarkable sight as the final of the FIFA World Cup 2018 is played 2,842 kilometres to the south in Russian capital Moscow.

The temple was discovered when archaeologists were analyzing the damage in Teopanzolco pyramid. (National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH))

In the latest discovery, archaeologists scanning a pyramid in Mexico have uncovered an ancient temple inside.

The discovery comes after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Mexico in September causing considerable damage to the country's historical sites - including the Teopanzolco pyramid in the southern state of Morelos.

Scientists made the discovery at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) using a radar to check for structural damage to the pyramid.

A Bronze Age cemetery has been discovered in Wales following the recent scorching temperatures.

The cemetery is one of dozens of finds that have emerged due to the hot weather which include a Roman villa, prehistoric animal enclosures and an iron age farmstead.

The "crop marks" for the large Bronze Age barrow cemetery were discovered on the Llyn Peninsula in Gwynedd by Senior Aerial Investigator Dr Toby Driver from Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW).

What are crop marks?

Cropmarks are a way which archaeological features below the soil can be visible from the air or a high vantage point.

Despite receiving little attention in the mass media, the November 2017 and April 2018 release of more than 35,000 and 18,000 documents by the Trump Administration, relating to the assassination of former President Kennedy-which had been withheld from the public for more than 50 years-sheds new light on the president's murder and the two soldiers who attempted to stop it.

While the mainstream media did cursorily cover the two releases, virtually none of the coverage was aimed at the most damning revelations, which included the fact that two U.S. soldiers in separate locations uncovered cryptographic messages indicating that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated, prior to his murder in Dallas.

Ominously, both of these soldiers were subsequently institutionalized after attempting to get the information they had uncovered to authorities.

The first case involves an army code breaker named Eugene V. Dinkin.

U.S. Army Private First Class Eugene Dinkin served in Metz, France, in the 599^th Ordinance Group and worked in the cryptography section of his unit. His duties at Metz reportedly included deciphering cable traffic from the European Commands, NATO, etc.

At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. The findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period.

A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University College London and University of Cambridge have analysed charred food remains from a 14,400-year-old Natufian hunter-gatherer site - a site known as Shubayqa 1 located in the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan. The results, which are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the earliest empirical evidence for the production of bread:

"The presence of hundreds of charred food remains in the fireplaces from Shubayqa 1 is an exceptional find, and it has given us the chance to characterize 14,000-year-old food practices. The 24 remains analysed in this study show that wild ancestors of domesticated cereals such as barley, einkorn, and oat had been ground, sieved and kneaded prior to cooking. The remains are very similar to unleavened flatbreads identified at several Neolithic and Roman sites in Europe and Turkey. So we now know that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming. The next step is to evaluate if the production and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of plant cultivation and domestication at all," said University of Copenhagen archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, who is the first author of the study.

Looking out across the yellow-washed angular buildings that clutter the inner city of Phnom Penh in 2016, hindsight fills me with anxiety. Imagining myself here in 1975, I recall the jubilant and cheering crowds in the spring of that year who weren't privy to that hindsight as they welcomed Khmer Rouge communists into Cambodia's capital city after months of siege.

On the morning of 17 April, word had arrived that the Khmer Rouge had captured the government's last beleaguered military stronghold on the outskirts of the city. Prime Minister Long Boret could hardly believe the news. He demanded to be driven to the riverside to see it with his own eyes. By the time he arrived, order had already collapsed in the streets and men wearing the black shirts of the Khmer Rouge surrounded his small entourage and demanded his guards put down their guns. Managing to slip away in the chaos, Boret reported back to his cabinet at the Defence Ministry that the enemy was already in the streets. The rush then began to evacuate senior government members from the country on any government helicopters still available amidst the anarchy. Had he taken action, Boret might have escaped with his wife and children on a helicopter reserved for him, but he delayed, trying to find a helicopter with enough space for his extended family.

On this day 100 years ago, Russia's last reigning monarch, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and five children were murdered by the Bolsheviks. Follow #Romanovs100 Live Feed to find out what exactly happened on July 16th-17th, 1918.

16 July 2018

16:55 GMT

It's heartbreaking to see how the royal children had to grow up fast, caring for each other in captivity.