New ancient DNA analysis has shed light on how the black rat, blamed for spreading Black Death, dispersed across Europe - revealing that the rodent colonised the continent on two occasions in the Roman and Medieval periods.

The study - led by the University of York along with the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute - is the first ancient genetic study of the species (Rattus rattus), often known as the ship rat.

By analysing DNA from ancient black rat remains found at archaeological sites spanning the 1st to the 17th centuries in Europe and North Africa, the researchers have pieced together a new understanding of how rat populations dispersed following the ebbs and flows of human trade, urbanism, and empires.

Archaeologists in southern Mexico have discovered 30 carvings depicting capital I-shaped ballcourts cut into rocks. These carvings may have been used in ceremonies involving water and "ritual bloodletting," new research finds.

The carvings, in the ancient settlement of Quiechapa, are badly weathered, but small features in a few cases can be made out, such as one carving that appears to show a bench in the ballcourt.

"Ballgames were of great significance to people throughout ancient Mesoamerica," study researcher Alex Elvis Badillo, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Systems at Indiana State University, wrote in an article published Jan. 11 in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

Seventy years ago the greatest massacre in history began - with the financing from the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System of the United States.

A recent resolution by the parliamentary assembly of the OSCE declared that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany held equal roles in unleashing WWII. Furthermore, the resolution has the purely pragmatic goal of pumping Russian money into a few bankrupt economies while seeking to demonize Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union and prepare the legal groundwork for depriving Moscow from opposing this revisionist view the war. But if we are to debate the culpability for the war's outbreak, then we need to begin by answering this key question: who accommodated the Nazis' rise to power, who directed them towards global catastrophe? Germany's entire prewar history shows that the "necessary" policies were all provided for by guided financial turmoil - the same situation, by the way, that the world finds itself in today.

The key structures of the West's post-war strategy were the central financial institutions of the United States and Great Britain - the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System - coupled with financial-industrial organizations, who set out to establish absolute control over the financial system in Germany to manage the politics of Central Europe. The implementation of this strategy included the following steps:

1st: 1919-1924 - Preparing the grounds for massive American financial investments in the German economy.
2nd: 1924-1929 - Establishing control over the financial system and funding the National-Socialist movement.
3rd: 1929-1933 - Inciting and unleashing a deep economic crisis ensuring the Nazis would rise to power.
4th: 1933-1939 - Financial cooperation with the Nazi government and support for its expansionist foreign policy, aimed at preparing and unleashing the new world war.

Police investigation should be reopened due to evidence of foul play.Colby made many enemies inside the Agency by revealing the "Family Jewels." His "spooky" death 26 years ago today bore similarities to that of CIA veteran John Arthur Paisley, who disappeared on a boat off the Chesapeake Bay 18 years earlier.

[This article is part of CAM's series on political assassinations. — Editors]

Workers upgrading water supplies in southern Spain have come across an "unprecedented" and well-preserved necropolis of subterranean limestone vaults where the Phoenicians who lived on the Iberian peninsula 2,500 years ago laid their dead.

Archaeologists exploring the site - which was discovered amid the Roman ruins in the town of Osuna, 55 miles (90km) east of Seville - say the Phoenician-Carthaginian cemetery dates back to the fourth or fifth century BC and is highly unusual as such sites are normally found in coastal areas rather than so far inland.

Although the local ruins of the Roman city of Urso are well known, the discovery of the Phoenician necropolis has stunned archaeologists and locals. The only similar finds have been made around the coast of Cádiz, which was founded by the Phoenicians in 1100BC and which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe.

The Picts were an Iron Age people who lived in the northern and eastern parts of what is now Scotland, flourishing from approximately the fourth century A.D. to the ninth century. Originally, the Picts were tribal peoples organized into loose confederations, but they later created two politically and militarily powerful kingdoms and dominated a large part of Scotland.

"Picti is a Latin term that literally means 'painted people,"' said Alex Woolf, a medieval historian at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The term is likely a reference to the prevalent Pictish custom of body painting or tattooing. "At first Picti is a pejorative term used by Romans," Woolf told Live Science. "But when you get to the 'Dark Ages,' perhaps around 600 or 700, it's clear that something has happened, and those tribes have now come to self-identify as Picti."

Analysis of Bronze Age daggers has shown that they were used for processing animal carcasses and not as non-functional symbols of identity and status, as previously thought.

First appearing in the early 4^th millennium BCE, copper-alloy daggers were widespread in Bronze Age Europe including Britain and Ireland. Yet archaeologists have long debated what these objects were used for.

As daggers are often found in weapon-rich male burials, or "warrior graves," many researchers speculated that they were primarily ceremonial objects used in prehistoric funerals to mark out the identity and status of the deceased. Others suggested that they may have been used as weapons or tools for crafts.

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It turns out it was a very cold case.

It took a decade of tests and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday.

"Believing they were looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, known as INAH, said in a statement.

The role of the Rockefellers

Vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates recently spoke at the TED2022 platform calling the anti-Vax movement a bunch of crazy people, here is what he said, "So it's somewhat ironic to have somebody turn around and say we're using vaccines to kill people or to make money or we started the pandemic" he continued "Does this turn into something where there's constantly crazy people showing up? Who knows?" Since the old days when the medical establishment expanded the use of vaccines to supposedly cure everything under the sun, they claim that they have saved countless lives, yet it seems that many people whether they are in the medical field or not, accept the notion that vaccines are the only answer that can cure a disease or help people stay healthy. I want to mention that there have been vaccines that were successful, but not all of them, these days its sort of playing Russian roulette with your life, so let's take a step back and look at some of those vaccines that has caused injuries and deaths' in its historical context.

During World War I, a major pandemic known as the Spanish Flu of 1918 shaped the way we view the use of vaccines. It was a conspiracy that was astounding once you dive into what was behind the worldwide pandemic at the time. It was estimated that the Spanish Flu had killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. It is important to clarify that the Spanish Flu was not at all Spanish, it was American, and it began at an army base in Fort Riley, Kansas where the first case of the flu was discovered.

The Federal Security Service has published top secret testimony from Nazi leader's pilot.

Russia's Federal Security Service (the successor of the KGB) has declassified documents from the case file of Adolf Hitler's personal pilot on Friday, revealing details of the final hours of the Nazi dictator. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, just days before Soviet troops captured Berlin, effectively ending World War II in Europe. His body had been doused with gasoline and burned.

Lieutenant General Hans Baur who worked for Hitler for more than a decade, was captured by Soviet soldiers on May 2, 1945, and faced trial in Moscow. Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) published previously classified documents from Baur's file. The papers from the FSB's Novgorod region branch include Baur's handwritten autobiography and its translation from German, as well as his testimony.