"The inhabitants of the Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains on the Kwazulu-Natal/eSwatini border were cooking starchy plants 170 thousand years ago," says Professor Lyn Wadley, a scientist from the Wits Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (Wits ESI). "This discovery is much older than earlier reports for cooking similar plants and it provides a fascinating insight into the behavioural practices of early modern humans in southern Africa. It also implies that they shared food and used wooden sticks to extract plants from the ground."

"It is extraordinary that such fragile plant remains have survived for so long," says Dr. Christine Sievers, a scientist from the University of the Witwatersrand, who completed the archaeobotanical work with Wadley. The underground food plants were uncovered during excavations at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains (on the border of KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, and eSwatini [formerly Swaziland]), where the team has been digging since 2015. During the excavation, Wadley and Sievers recognised the small, charred cylinders as rhizomes. All appear to belong to the same species, and 55 charred, whole rhizomes were identified as Hypoxis, commonly called the Yellow Star flower. "The most likely of the species growing in KwaZulu-Natal today is the slender-leafed Hypoxis angustifolia that is favoured as food," adds Sievers. "It has small rhizomes with white flesh that is more palatable than the bitter, orange flesh of rhizomes from the better known medicinal Hypoxis species (incorrectly called African Potato)."

Malta is famous for its ancient megalithic temples, such as Gjantija and Hagar Qim. The orthodox view has always been that they are Bronze Age, or slightly earlier. The most recent attempt to date them involves researchers from Queens University Belfast (QUB), Maltese institutions and other universities in the UK under the 'FRAGSUS' project, an EU multi-million pound research collaboration. For example, see the paper 'Island questions: the chronology of the Brochtorff Circle at Xaghra, Gozo ...' by C. Malone et al. (2019) in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Because they are megalithic structures, for which radiocarbon dating is useless, the conventional approach is to date remains found in situ within and near the temples. Of course, this is simply dating the latest occupations of the temples, not necessarily their construction dates. All of the latest work carried out by the FRAGSUS team simply confirms the conventional view that the earliest settlement on the island began around 5200 BC, with the temples being built over the course of a few thousand years, beginning slightly before 4000 BC.

But now we can provide a zodiacal date that shows at least some of the temples were in use before the 8.2 kiloyear event, around 6300 BC. Presumably, then, the islands were depopulated by the 8.2 kiloyear event, which I suspect was another catastrophic encounter with the Taurid meteor stream, that probably also led to the demise of the culture that built the Great Sphinx of Giza. In effect, I suspect there was a well-developed (early Neolithic) Mediterranean culture involving Malta, Egypt, Turkey, the Levant and possibly several other regions, that was largely destroyed by the 8.2 kiloyear event.

Just how advanced this culture was is not clear. Could they have mapped the world? Who knows. Did they cut the giant Baalbek megaliths? Quite possibly. So how does the zodiacal dating of these Maltese temples work? Zodiacal dating is a disruptive 'technology'. It challenges, and overturns, core archaeological assumptions of 'gradualism' and 'cultural evolution', currently believed wholesale by the bulk of the archaeological academic community, which deny the possibility of a widespread ancient culture that recorded the many destructions of their world in terms of great artworks.

Archaic. Classical. Hellenistic. These terms are often (and quite naturally) conflated together under the generic heading of 'classical', or, at the very least, 'old'. It appears that organizing history into clear, distinct eras can be a tricky business.

This, of course, is more true for the Greeks than for the Romans.

This is because it's relatively easy to get one's head around the fact that the Romans smoothly traversed the ages from Monarchy to Republic to Empire. (Obviously there are many more nuances to the situation than that - but let's save those for a later date).

Twenty-five years ago, D. James Kennedy and I came out with a book called, What if Jesus had Never Been Born? It ended up becoming a best-seller.

The message is very simple: Because Jesus was born, look at all these incredible blessings we have throughout the world.

For instance, the Christian church created the phenomenon of the hospital and has created hospitals all over the world. Christianity has inspired some of the world's greatest music and arts, and has expanded education from the elite to the masses — even creating the entity of the university.

Here are just a few examples of Christianity's influence, fleshed out a bit: Prior to the coming of Christ, human life on this planet was expendable. Even today, in parts of the world where the Gospel of Christ or Christianity has not penetrated, life is exceedingly cheap. Christianity bridged the gap between the Jews — who first received the divine revelation that man was made in God's image — and the pagans, who attributed little value to human life. Meanwhile, as we in the post-Christian West continue to abandon our Judeo-Christian heritage, life is becoming cheap once again.

The Amazon warriors of ancient Greek lore were once considered mythical figures. But in recent years, archaeological work and genetic analysis have identified women buried with weapons, horseback riding equipment and other accoutrements traditionally associated with warriors.

Earlier this month, a team led by archaeologist Valerii Guliaev announced the discovery of a 2,500-year-old tomb in which four such women were buried together. The findings were published in the journal of the Akson Russian Science Communication Association this week.

The women belonged to a nomadic group called the Scythians and were found in one of 19 burial mounds studied during a decade-long survey of the western Russian village of Devitsa, reports Ruth Shuster for Haaretz. The youngest individual in the grave was 12 or 13 years old. Two were in their twenties, and the last was between 45 to 50 years old.

Archaeologists working on the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang have announced the discovery of an additional 220 soldiers in the world-famous Terracotta Army after almost a decade of painstaking excavation.

The team has been excavating the tomb since 2009, covering an area of ​​about 500,000 square meters. The site is riddled with a vast array of artifacts including pottery, bronze, jade, a small amount of gold, silver, and iron and the aforementioned Terracotta Warriors.

New evidence of a massive lightning strike at the centre of a hidden stone circle in the Outer Hebrides may help shed light on why these monuments were created thousands of years ago.

The Calanais Virtual Reconstruction Project, a joint venture led by the University of St Andrews with the Urras nan Tursachan and the University of Bradford, with funding from Highlands and Islands Enterprise, has uncovered a potential link between ancient stone circles and the forces of nature.

While studying prehistoric Tursachan Chalanais, the main stone circle at Calanais on the Isle of Lewis, the project team surveyed nearby satellite sites to reveal evidence for lost circles buried beneath the peat.

One rarely-visited site surveyed, known as Site XI or Airigh na Beinne Bige, now consists of a single standing stone on an exposed hillside overlooking the great circle.

French winemakers have claimed the riches of sparkling wine, or Champagne, for centuries - overlooking the fact their success is based on inventions made by l'anglais.

The secondary fermentation process for making 'Sparkling English wine' was invented in Winchcombe, Cotswolds, by a scientist 30 years before Dom Perignon, at the abbey of Hautvilliers, claimed to have the same idea.

And the bottles needed were also made by the English at least 85 years before the French - when the absence of forests due to ship construction forced bottlemakers to switch to coal which was hotter and, as a result, made thicker glass.

I think the boar has finally been decoded, at least in Neolithic and Iron Age Europe. First see the ancient site of Lepinski Vir, a Neolithic site on the Danube in Serbia - part of the Danube Gorges cultural complex.

Lepinski Vir is best known for being a gateway site between Neolithic Anatolia and Mesolithic Europe. Essentially, the 'Anatolian farmers' who migrated or invaded Europe after the 8.2 kiloyear event (around 6200 to 6300 BC) appear to have used this route. It is one of the very first European sites to have adopted agriculture, thereby entering the Neolithic age.

Before the main phase of occupation at Lepinski Vir, from 6200 to 5900 BC, a few small Mesolithic settlements on this site are known over the preceding few thousand years.

However, the main phase of occupation is quite different to these earlier settlements. Apart from adopting agriculture, they built trapezoidal plan, or 'fan' shaped, houses with stone floors in which various animal remains have been found. These are usually interpreted as grave goods, accompanying burials under the floors of houses, like at Catalhoyuk.

The most interesting thing for us are the species used in these graves. According to a paper by Vesna Dimitrijevic in 2008, the most common animal species remains found inside these houses are: boar, deer and dog. Fish remains are also common, but these are harder to quantify. However the other thing Lepinski Vir is known for are its fish sculptures - see image left. So we can presume that the fish was an important symbol, and not just an important food source, for these people.

People transported animals over huge distances for mass gatherings at one of Ireland's most iconic archaeological sites, research concludes.

Dr Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University led the study, which analysed the bones of 35 animals excavated from Navan Fort, the legendary capital of Ulster. Researchers from Queen's University Belfast, Memorial University Newfoundland and the British Geological Survey were also involved in the research.

The site had long been considered a centre for ritual gatherings, as excavations found a huge 40m diameter building and a barbary ape cranium, likely from at least as far as Iberia. Results suggest the pigs, cattle and sheep were brought from across Ireland, perhaps being reared as far afield as Galway, Donegal, Down, Tyrone and Antrim. Evidence suggests some were brought over more than 100 miles.

Dr Madgwick, based in Cardiff University's School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: "Our results provide clear evidence that communities in Iron Age Ireland were very mobile and that livestock were also moved over greater distances than was previously thought.