Apparently belonging to a temple of columns and marble pedestals were found at Drilling excavations in the Amasra district of Bartın. It is estimated that the temple may belong to the temple of Queen Amastris, who gave the district its name.

Archeologists have discovered ancient pillars and pillar bases believed to be from the sanctuary of Princess Amastris in Turkey's northern Bartın province.

The pillars were found during drilling launched by Amasra Museum Directorate in the Amasra district in the port town.

A Pictish skeleton thought to be around 1,400-years-old has been found in the Highlands with the archaeologist who found the human remains speaking of his "eureka moment".

The bones were found at the site of what is believed to be a Pictish-era cemetery near Muir of Ord on the Black Isle.

Archaeologists did not expect to find any human remains given the acidic properties of the soil at the site.

But Steven Birch, who led the excavation on behalf of the North of Scotland Archaeological Society (NOSAS) made the discovery on the final day of the dig.

The excavation of a Stone Age community center in Ukraine is helping explain why large groups of tens of thousands of people flourished and then fell more than 5,000 years ago.

The "megastructure" excavated in Ukraine was large compared with the houses around it, though not particularly huge by modern standards. At 2,045 square feet (190 square meters), the structure was the size of a modest American home. However, some Eastern European megastructures were up to 18,000 square feet (1,680 square m) in size. Archaeologists have puzzled over these buildings, many of which have been discovered through methods that use magnetic anomalies in the soil to detect ancient structures. Now, the actual excavation of this one megastructure at a site called Maidanetske reveals that these buildings were used for everyday activities, like food preparation, storage and meals.

"It is similar to activities performed in normal houses," said Robert Hofmann, an archaeologist at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, who led the new research. "Somehow the intensity of these activities between normal houses and these megastructures is completely different."

Did 'the Anglo-Saxon migrations' take place, and were Romano-British leaders replaced by those of Germanic descent? Susan Oosthuizen's new book, The Emergence of the English, is a call to rethink our interpretations of the 5th and 6th centuries AD, reflecting on whether many of the assumptions we make about the period are actually supported by evidence. Interpretations that cannot be upheld should be discarded, she says, and all viable alternative interpretations should be explored for the strongest arguments to be identified. Chris Catling reports.

In the early 1970s, cherished ideas about the character of Roman Britain were systematically challenged by a generation of archaeologists who rejected the simple story they had inherited of armed conquest, rule from Rome, and the conversion of primitive Celts - dressed in nothing but woad and a torque - into Latin-speaking, bath-addicted, villa-dwelling Roman citizens who dined off Samian platters, drank watered-down wine, and ate food flavoured with fish sauce. Instead, they insisted that Romanisation began long before the Claudian invasion of AD 43, that it had many regional variations, and that it took many different forms over the 350-year period of Roman occupation. But they also argued that much of Britain lay outside the main sphere of Roman influence, and that life for many people in Roman Britain changed little from what they had known before - and, yes, they continued to drink beer.

Mums from prehistoric times appear to have used specially fashioned pottery vessels to wean their babies with milk from domesticated ruminants, a study published in the journal Nature has found.

The clay bottles or bowls, sometimes adorned with mythical animals, had small spouts through which liquid could be poured or suckled. The earliest known vessels were found in prehistoric settlements across Europe from the Neolithic (around 5000 BC), becoming more common in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

They were previously suspected to be infant feeding vessels, says lead author Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol in the UK, but could have equally been used for feeding sick people, and in any event, it wasn't clear what they contained.

To explore this, Dunne and colleagues searched for vessels in child graves to be sure they were baby bottles. "In archaeology, context is all," she explains. They analysed three small, spouted vessels found in Bronze and Iron Age graves of infants in a Bavarian cemetery in Germany.

Because of the vessels' precious nature and often small openings, sampling for organic residues was "extremely challenging", says Dunne, so they had to modify their usual sampling method which involves grinding up potsherds.

From the time of the Babylonian Exile, Jews have been spread far and wide, carrying with us mementos of our ancient past in our blood, spit and the microscopic double helix of our DNA. Among the best tools the Chosen People have for finding a link to antiquity is bleeding-edge technology that analyzes our genes - and while that tech is new, it's largely confirmed a familiar story of shared roots in the Middle East.

Through advancements in mapping the human genome and the study of traditionally diseases like Tay-Sachs, scientists and historians are closer than ever before to learning where the Jewish people originated, and where we ended up.

The science involved in genetic study of Jews has advanced immensely since its early days, when physical anthropologists Joseph Jacobs and Maurice Fishberg studied outward markers like stature, head size and pigmentation, said Harry Ostrer, the director of Genetic and Genomic Testing at Montefiore Medical Center and the author of "Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People" (2012). Working in the late 19th and early 20th Century, when Fishberg published "The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment" (1911), his and Jacob's primitive research - which had a troubling analogue in the measurements used by Nazi race science — was surpassed by a new effort that emerged, fittingly, in Mandatory Palestine.

Tehran - A team of archaeologists has found traces of early humans and their basic handmade tools near the village of Bangelayan, southern Hormozgan province.

"Traces of early human presence, which dates over 40,000 years, were discovered in Bandar Abbas [county]," CHTN quoted Hormozgan province's tourism chief as saying on Monday.

"Stone artifacts discovered from this area include parent rock, related components, modest chips, as well as serrated and abrasives tools, which were notably scattered across the area," Reza Borumand added.

Regarding technological and typological features of the stone tools, this area can be attributed to the Middle Paleolithic, which spans [somewhat] from 300,000 to 40,000 years ago, which is coincident with the presence of Neanderthals and possibly Homo sapiens in Iran (the Iranian plateau), the official explained.

The truth is emerging four decades after the fact: the Carter administration knew of a clandestine Israeli nuclear test in the 1970s, but turned a blind eye, Foreign Policy reported this weekend, based on new analysis of declassified government documents.

The report strongly suggests the administration was worried about Carter's reelection should the Israeli test be revealed, and also about negative impact on the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, only a year old at the time. The FP report begins dramatically:

Shortly before sunrise on Sept. 22, 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite known as Vela 6911 recorded an unusual double flash as it orbited the earth above the South Atlantic. At Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, where it was still nighttime on Sept. 21, the staff in charge of monitoring the satellite's transmissions saw the unmistakable pattern produced by a nuclear explosion — something U.S. satellites had detected on dozens of previous occasions in the wake of nuclear tests. The Air Force base issued an alert overnight, and President Jimmy Carter quickly called a meeting in the White House Situation Room the next day.

Carter wrote in his diary of the September 22, 1979 event: "There was an indication of a nuclear explosion in the region of South Africa - either South Africa, Israel using a ship at sea, or nothing," according to the report.

Problem was that under the 1977 Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act, the United States would have to cease all arms assistance to any nation not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty should they conduct a nuclear test.

Moralistic busybodies. They've made a comeback in recent years. It's understandable. They're an American tradition, after all. 'Totalitarian theocracy' is a phrase more commonly associated with Saudi Arabia or ISIS today, but some of the earliest colonies in what eventually became the United States fit the bill. And while they've lost their religion over the centuries, they haven't lost their penchant for sanctimonious posturing and coercive authoritarianism. The spirit of the Puritans of New England lives on.

Back in the 1630s the Puritans settled Massachusetts Bay. Contrary to popular myth, they weren't bastions of religious freedom. Sure, they were fleeing one sort of oppression in England, but they weren't concerned so much about freedom of religion and conscience per se as they were about their own freedom - everyone else be damned. Essentially the Puritans wanted freedom from oppression in order to practice their own form of oppression against everyone else.

To be fair, the Puritans weren't the only ones to contribute to modern American culture. As Colin Woodard argues in his book American Nations, Canada, the United States, and northern Mexico are primarily made up of eleven distinct cultures with roots in their original settlers. In each of these identifiable regions, the mindsets of their respective "founding fathers" live on. From the influence of the Spanish and mestizo culture in northern Mexico and the southern States (El Norte), the feudal French Catholics of New France, the conservative royalists and wannabe aristocracy in Virginia and the Carolinas (Tidewater), the utopian Puritans of New England (Yankeedom), the Dutch corporate traders and merchants of New Netherland (now New York), the Barbadian slave society of the Deep South, the libertarian Quakers of the Midlands, and the clan-based warrior culture of Greater Appalachia, to those that developed more recently in the 19th and 20th centuries: the Yankee-influenced "Left Coast" of individualists, activists, and entrepreneurs; the corporate and semi-dependent "Far West"; and the re-emerging "First Nation" in northern Canada, arguably representing North America's earliest and now latest distinct cultures - they may share and cross borders, but they're noticeably distinct from each other. (Mention must also go to the Polynesian culture of Hawaii and the Spanish Caribbean south Florida.)

I don't usually waste my time taking apart run-of-the-mill anti-Russian stuff: there's too much of it and it usually takes more effort to tear apart than it took the author to write. Fools and wise men, as the saying goes. But we have just had a number of pieces on the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in Western news outlets. For example, the Washington Times, RFE/RL, The Guardian the Globe and Mail and Bloomberg. Governments have issued condemnations. The gist of them is that the pact showed that Hitler and Stalin were soul-mates and conspired to start the war and rip apart their neighbours. In most cases the authors try to tie this to today's Russia: enemy then, enemy now.

Most of these pieces take it for granted Putin has some sort of approval of Stalin. But is it "approval" to call communism a road to a dead end - said earlier but most recently last December? What about his statement at the Butovo execution ground?

Those who were executed, sent to camps, shot and tortured number in the thousands and millions of people. Along with this, as a rule these were people with their own opinions. These were people who were not afraid to speak their mind. They were the most capable people. They are the pride of the nation.

Or about what he said when he unveiled the memorial in the centre of Moscow?

This horrific past must not be stricken from the national memory - let alone justified in any way - by any so-called higher good of the people.

One of Putin's advisory councils speaks against statues to Stalin quoting a government resolution that it's "unacceptable" to "justify the repressions" or deny that they happened. Paul Robinson has demonstrated the falsity of the "Stalin is back" here. It's nonsense.