A new species of horned dinosaur has been unearthed in New Mexico that is deemed the 'long lost' relative of the triceratops by a team of scientists led by the Univeresity of Bath.

The dinosaur, known as Sierraceratops turneri, roamed the area of Sierra County about 72 million year ago.

It was named after Ted Turner, founder of CNN, who owns the ranch where the fossils were discovered.

The fossils show the new species had short, but massive horns at the brow of its five-foot-long skull, and the extinct creature measured about 15 feet long.

Afghanistan is on many people's minds lately, though the sentiment is rather mixed. Some think of it as a cause for celebration, others for deep concern, and then there are those who think it an utter disaster that justifies foreign re-entry.

Most of the western concern arises out of 9/11 and the Taliban's supposed connection to this through Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, however, as Scott Ritter (who was the lead analyst for the 7th Marine Amphibious Brigade on the Soviet war in Afghanistan) wrote:

"The entire Afghan conflict must be examined considering this reality - everything is a lie. Every battle, every campaign, every contract written and implemented - everything was founded in a lie...

Admiral McRaven, when speaking of the operation to kill Bin Laden, noted that there wasn't anything fundamentally special about that mission in terms of the tactics. 'I think that night we ran 11 or 12 [other] missions in Afghanistan,' McRaven noted. Clearly there was a military focus beyond simply killing Bin Laden. It was secretive work, reportedly involving the assassination of Taliban members, that often resulted in innocent civilians beings killed.

It should be noted that, as of 2019, McRaven believed that this kind of special operations activity should be continued in Afghanistan for years to come. So much for the US mission in Afghanistan being defined by the death of Bin Laden. The mission had become death, and the careers that were defined by those deaths.

The fact is the war in Afghanistan did not need to be fought. We could have ended the threat posed by Bin Laden simply by negotiating with the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, providing the evidence we claimed to have linking Bin Laden to the terrorist attacks on the United States. Any student of Afghanistan worth their salt knows the fundamental importance of honor that is enshrined in the concepts of Pashtunwali, the unwritten ethical code that defines the traditional lifestyle of the Pashtun people. If, as we claimed, Bin Laden carried out an attack on women and children while he was living under the protection of Pashtunwali, then his dishonor is that of the Pashtun tribes. To clear their honor, they would seek justice - in this case, evicting Bin Laden and his followers from Afghanistan.

In fact, the Taliban made precisely this offer.

For America, however, this would have been an unsatisfying result. We needed blood, not justice, and we sent our troops to Afghanistan to stack bodies, which they did, in prodigious numbers. Most of these bodies were Taliban. We excused this by claiming the Taliban were providing safe haven to Bin Laden, and as such were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Which was a lie."

Considering the prehistory of spectacles.

As with many everyday objects, it is difficult to determine who invented glasses, or where and when they were first used. In fact, they were not really "invented" in the sense of being a great discovery, a unique inspiration that provided a solution to a hitherto unanswered problem. It was more of a gradual process that went hand in hand with other scientific and technical discoveries — accompanied by persistent speculation and questions. In prehistoric times the Inuit apparently used a sort of protective eyewear made of walrus ivory against snow blindness. And among the unanswered questions from those early times is the matter of Nero's emerald. Pliny the Elder wrote in his c. 77 Natural History that Emperor Nero held an emerald to his eye to observe gladiator contests: "The princeps Nero viewed the combats of the gladiators in a smaragdus." Pliny used the term smaragdus for a variety of green minerals and made several observations about the soothing effects of green gemstones.

New dating of an archaeological site in the Thar Desert to 177,000 years ago shows the use of stone handaxes persisted for over 1 million years in India, and may have endured until the arrival of Homo sapiens

The longest lasting tool-making tradition in prehistory, known as the Acheulean, appears more than 1.5 million years ago in Africa and 1.2 million years ago in India, and mainly consists of stone handaxes and cleavers. New research led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has re-examined a key Acheulean site at the margins of the monsoon zone in the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, revealing the presence of Acheulean populations until about 177,000 years ago, shortly before the earliest expansions of Homo sapiens across Asia.

The timing and route of the earliest expansions of our own species across Asia have been the focus of considerable debate but a growing body of evidence indicates Homo sapiens interacted with numerous populations of our closest evolutionary cousins. Identifying where these different populations met is critical to revealing the human and cultural landscape encountered by the earliest members of our species to expand beyond Africa. Although fossils of ancient human populations are extremely rare in South Asia, changes in the stone tool kits they made, used, and left behind can help resolve when and where these encounters may have occurred.

The earliest bird reared by humans may have been a cassowary -- often called the world's most dangerous bird because of its long, dagger-like toe.

Territorial, aggressive and often compared to a dinosaur in looks, the bird is a surprising candidate for domestication.

However, a new study of more than 1,000 fossilized eggshell fragments, excavated from two rock shelters used by hunter-gatherers in New Guinea, has suggested early humans may have collected the eggs of the large flightless bird before they hatched and then raised the chicks to adulthood. New Guinea is a large island north of Australia. The eastern half of the island is Papua New Guinea, while the western half forms part of Indonesia.

In a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, an international team of researchers has unearthed a jawbone that represents the oldest human remains ever found in Wallacea. The group has published a paper describing their find on the open-access site PLoS ONE.

Over the past several decades, archaeologists have found evidence of ancient people living in Wallacea, a cluster of Indonesian islands relatively near to Australia. In a cave called Leang Bulu Bettue, they found tools, trinkets and cave art, but little in the way of human remains. In this new effort, the researchers found a jawbone with three molars attached. Dating of ornaments, pigments and portable art surrounding the find suggests the remains were from a modern human living in the area between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. The find could shed light on the people who lived in the area during that time — scientists believe they were ancestors of people who arrived by boat thousands of years before, and the forebears of the first modern people to arrive in Australia.

Hungary and Russia pipeline wrangle, China's new high elevation mega-hydro project near SanXingDui a mysterious civilization arising and disappearing with out a trace. Global powers maneuver for the cycle onset.


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While the world's attention is absorbed by tectonic shifts unfolding across America as "a perfect storm" of civil war, and military coup threatens to undo both the elections and the very foundations of the republic itself, something very ominous has appeared "off of the radar" of most onlookers. This something is a financial collapse of the trans-Atlantic banks that threatens to unleash chaos upon the world. It is this collapse that underlies the desperate efforts being made by the neo-con drive for total war with Russia, China and other members of the growing Mutlipolar Alliance today.

In recent articles, I have mentioned that the Bank of England-led "solution" to this oncoming financial blowout of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble is being pushed under the cover of a "Great Global Reset" which is an ugly and desperate effort to use COVID-19 as a cover for the imposition of a new post-covid world order operating system. Since the new "rules" of this new system are very similar to the 1923 Bank of England "solution" to Germany's economic chaos which eventually required a fascist governance mechanism to impose it onto the masses, I wish to take a deeper look at the causes and effects of Weimar Germany's completely un-necessary collapse into hyperinflation and chaos during the period of 1919-1923.

'An empire within an empire,' the Pashtun are essential to understanding the complexities of Afghanistan as a nation-state today. What is the 'Pashtun universe,' and why will they always outlast those who try to govern them?
It was bound to happen: the remixed Saigon moment at Kabul airport and the stunning comeback of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, led by Pashtuns, has unleashed across the West a cheap Orientalization avalanche.

The whole of Afghanistan is now 'threatened' by the return of the 'barbarians.'

Once again, Afghan women 'need to be protected,' all Afghans 'need to be rescued,' 'terrorists will rebuild' and Afghanistan may even need to be re-invaded for the sake of 'civilization.' All because of those wild tribal Pashtun barbarians.

Imperialist pathologies never die. 'Barbarian' yields from the Greek original barbaros - as in someone who could not speak Greek, or spoke it incorrectly.

When faced with the sophisticated Persians, the concept of barbarian evolved. And then the Romans gave it its final contours, encompassing people who could not speak Greek or Latin, those who deployed military skills, were fierce or cruel to their enemies, or came from a non Graeco-Roman culture.

All this eventually coalesced into a toxic Western cultural construct deployed for centuries, the ultimate, pejorative denomination for a warrior-like Other: uncouth, uncivilized, rural, non-urban, prone to violence and cruelty, maybe not a total savage, but close.

As a contrast, Imperial China always referred to various Central Eurasian tribes and peoples as warring, civilized, urban, nomads, agrarian, but never as barbarians.

Pashtun Afghanistan is a much more sophisticated universe than the prevailing reductionism that evokes rural subsistence economy, mud-brick architecture, caravans of nomads, burqas and bearded men in sandals brandishing Kalashnikovs.

So as a tribute to the late, great Norwegian social anthropologist Fredrik Barth, let's subvert Orientalism by taking an - Orientalist! - magic carpet ride to the twists and turns of the Pashtun world.

Archaeologists have found a 13-metre roof chamber sealed off for at least 40,000 years in one of Gibraltar's World Heritage Site caves where Neanderthals are thought to have lived for 100,000 years.

Located in steep limestone cliffs on the eastern side of the Rock of Gibraltar, the four caves in the Gorham's Cave Complex have been found to contain extensive archaeological and palaeontological deposits that provide evidence of Neanderthal occupation.

The roof chamber was found at the very back of Vanguard Cave, where a project has been under way since 2012 to find out if the cave had passages and chambers that were plugged by later sediment, Gibraltar National Museum said.