While excavating a 3,600-year-old palace in the once-great city of Avaris, Egypt, a team of archaeologists unearthed four pits. What's in the pits? It's hands. There are no bodies - just a bunch of dismembered hands. Most of the hands are quite large and some of them are very large, further signifying that they were all taken from adult males, and possibly that ancient Egypt was full of giants.

These 4 ancient hand recycling bins were found in the palace of King Khayan of the Hyksos, a West Asian people who once ruled over part of Northern Egypt - 2 in an outer portion of the palace and 2 just outside the throne room, indicating some ceremonial importance.

So, like, what the hell?

Actually, these large to very large hands are the very first physical evidence archaeologists have found of a practice that's widely represented in ancient Egyptian art.

Greece's Ministry of Culture issued a statement on Friday afternoon, regarding recent discoveries in a neolithic settlement that is located in Phthiotis region and dates back to 6,000 - 5,800 BC.

The settlement, known to archaeologists as Koutroulou Magoula, from a local toponym, underwent its tenth season of excavation, with major discoveries having been made.

A large, middle-Neolithic building was discovered, with stone walls measuring a total of 9.5 meters in length and nearly 8.5 meters in width.

It sounds just like the kind of joke that is ubiquitous in today's cheap-and-cheerful souvenir industry: "I went to Rome and all I got you was this lousy pen." But the tongue-in-cheek inscription recently deciphered on a cheap writing implement during excavations in the City of London is in fact about 2,000 years old.

"I have come from the city. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me. I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able [to give] as generously as the way is long [and] as my purse is empty," it reads.

The message was inscribed on an iron stylus dating from around AD70, a few decades after Roman London was founded. The implement was discovered by Museum of London Archaeology during excavations for Bloomberg's European headquarters next to Cannon Street station, on the bank of the river Walbrook, a now-lost tributary of the Thames.

Archaeological excavations have unearthed a burial ground, belonging to 9th Century B.C. Urartian royals in East Turkey's Van province.

The burial ground was discovered in the 2,750-year-old necropolis area, which was unearthed two years ago, during the excavation at Cavustepe Castle, a fortified site in the Gurpinar district.

A team of 22 excavators -- including anthropologists, archeologists, art historians and restoration work officials -- discovered the burial ground. Experts believe that the discovery will help, to study ancient civilizations, in a more scientific way.

Led by Rafet Cavusoglu, a professor of archaeology at the Van's Yuzuncu Yil University, the team found 2,777-year-old male and female skeletons, along with a silver necklace, 39 earrings, an amulet, a lion brooch, as well as a belt depicting mythological characters.

The global expanse of US military bases is well-known; but it's actual territorial empire is largely hidden. The true map of America is not taught in our schools. Abby Martin interviews history Professor Daniel Immerwahr about his new book, 'How To Hide An Empire,' where he documents the story of our "Greater United States."


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Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire who now sits in jail on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors, has continued to draw media scrutiny in the weeks after his arrest on July 6. Part of the reason for this continued media interest is related to Epstein's alleged relationship to the intelligence services and new information about the true extent of the sexual blackmail operation Epstein is believed to have run for decades.

As MintPress reported last week, Epstein was able to run this sordid operation for so long precisely because his was only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive operation that began in the 1950s and perhaps even earlier.

Starting first with mob-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel and later with Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel's protege and future mentor to Donald Trump, Epstein's is just one of the many sexual blackmail operations involving children that are all tied to the same network, which includes elements of organized crime, powerful Washington politicians, lobbyists and "fixers," and clear links to intelligence as well as the FBI.

Someone plowing the field in Newton Grove had hit a large stone while working earlier and moved it over to the edge of the field, said Mary Beth Fitts, assistant archaeologist at the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology.

But when the property owner stopped to look at it, he discovered it wasn't just any stone. When he turned it over, he found a face carved into the front of it and called the Office of State Archaeology, Fitts said.

But experts are unsure what exactly it is.

"It's a very unusual artifact," Fitts said. "We haven't seen anything like that before."

The office posted a 3D model of the sculpture on Facebook on Monday in hopes of "crowd sourcing" to find out more about it.

"We're hoping maybe someone has seen something like it," Fitts said.

Life, as they say, goes on. Until one day it doesn't. For ancient societies, without the means to predict natural disasters, destruction could often come suddenly and completely by surprise. Below are four of the most devastating natural events in recorded human history, and the societies that they wiped off the map.

The Storegga Slides

Until about 8,000 years ago, the British Isles were a peninsula, joined to mainland Europe by a strip of chalk downs, swamps, lakes and wooded hills. Today, we call this submerged world Doggerland.

Today, fishermen routinely bring up carved bone and antler tools from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived here. But by the end of the 7^th millennium BC, a warming world caused sea levels to rise. The people of Doggerland must have watched with dread as their villages were swallowed up one by one. But one event would turn the slow advance of the sea into an apocalyptic terror.

The edge of the Norwegian continental shelf is an underwater cliff that runs for six hundred miles along the Atlantic Basin. And one autumn day around 6225-6170 BCE, this cliff collapsed. An estimated 770 cubic miles, or over 50 Mount Everests, of rock broke off and slid into the deep ocean. The rubble flow reached a speed of 90 mph underwater.

Despite his "sweetheart" deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Epstein's arrest has again brought increased media attention to many of his famous friends, the current president among them.

Many questions have since been asked about how much Epstein's famous friends knew of his activities and exactly what Epstein was up to. The latter arguably received the most attention after it was reported that Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein's "sweetheart" deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump's Labor Secretary following Epstein's arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for "intelligence."

Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues — whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway — with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.

Claims of Epstein's links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes.

In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA's "love traps." If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia.

When most members of the general public think of the Stone Age, they probably envision an adult male hominin wielding a stone tool. That picture is laughably incomplete. It assumes that only adult males made and used stone tools, and that stones were the only materials in these ancient people's everyday tool kits.

Both assumptions are at best questionable; at worst, they are simply wrong.

First, let's tackle the stereotype about raw materials. Recent discoveries in Kenya suggest that the earliest stone tools may be as much as 3.3 million years old. Other recent discoveries in China suggest that bone tools — used, for example, to re-sharpen stone axes — may be as much as 115,000 years old. A logical inference from these studies might be that our human ancestors crafted stone tools for nearly 3 million years before making and using tools created from perishable materials such as bone.

But can it possibly be true that our primate ancestors exclusively created stone tools for more than 3 million years, 30 times longer than they made tools out of materials that break down, like bone, wood, and fiber? It's possible, but it defies logic to think that was the case. A better explanation lies in the fact that perishable materials don't preserve well over time, whereas stone tools remain well-preserved for eons.

That difference in preservation rates has long affected our scientific understandings of the prehistoric past — and not for the better.

In the 1830s, Danish archaeologist and curator Christian Jürgensen Thomsen defined the "three age system." In that interpretive framework, Thomsen divided human history (as he understood it) according to the types of tools he found in archaeological sites in northern Europe. Thomsen didn't have any absolute dating techniques available to guide his analysis (like radiocarbon or tree-ring dating); instead, he used the law of superposition — a fancy way of saying that the oldest material found in an archaeological site is, barring any disturbance, buried deepest. Think of the garbage can in your office: At the end of the week, debris from Monday will be at the bottom, debris from Wednesday in the middle, and debris from Friday at the top.