Cave art depicting human-animal hybrid figures hunting warty pigs and dwarf buffaloes has been dated to nearly 44,000 years old, making it the earliest known cave art by our species.

The artwork in Indonesia is nearly twice as old as any previous hunting scene and provides unprecedented insights into the earliest storytelling and the emergence of modern human cognition.

Previously, images of this level of sophistication dated to about 20,000 years ago, with the oldest cave paintings believed to be more basic creations such as handprints.

A Roman shipwreck that dates from the time of Jesus Christ has been discovered in Greece, with a cargo of around 6,000 amazingly well-preserved pots used for transporting wine and food.

The 110-foot-long ship and its cargo, discovered off the coast of the Greek island of Kefalonia, could reveal new information about the shipping routes taken by Roman traders across the Mediterranean.

The wreckage was found using sonar equipment and contains thousands of amphorae, elaborate pots used for moving food and wine.

The wreck was found near the fishing port of Fiskardo on the north coast of Kefalonia, dates between 1 BC and AD 1, Greek researchers say.

The cargo is visible on the seafloor and is in a good state of preservation.

Polls suggest that Americans tend to differentiate between our "good war" in Iraq — "Operation Desert Storm," launched by George HW Bush in 1990 — and the "mistake" his son made in 2003.

Across the ideological spectrum, there's broad agreement that the first Gulf War was "worth fighting." The opposite is true of the 2003 invasion, and a big reason for those divergent views was captured in a 2013 CNN poll that found that "a majority of Americans (54%) say that prior to the start of the war the administration of George W. Bush deliberately misled the U.S. public about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction."

But as the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to urge the US to once again commit troops to Iraq, it's important to recall that the first Gulf War was sold to the public on a pack of lies that were just as egregious as those told by the second Bush administration 12 years later.

The Lie of an Expansionist Iraq

Most countries condemned Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the truth — that it was the culmination of a series of tangled economic and historical conflicts between two Arab oil states — wasn't likely to sell the US public on the idea of sending our troops halfway around the world to do something about it.

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

Are killers born or made? Depending on who you ask, you'll get a variety of responses: all humans are good - it's only the 'environment' or 'society' that makes them do bad things; anyone who engages in murder must be a cold-blooded psychopath, born to kill. But simple explanations come from simple minds. It's not a matter of either/or. Some people are born that way, like psychopaths. Some have the strength of character to resist the impulse to conform. But most people are somewhere in between, easily swayed to do the will of whoever is giving the orders.

On today's MindMatters we delve into the hellish depths of World War II and Christopher Browning's excellent but disturbing book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. His research confirms what studies like those of Milgram demonstrated in the lab: normal people show a spectrum of responses to the influence of authority. A small minority are very willing to inflict harm to others. Another small minority refuses. But the vast majority go along, even if it makes them sick to the stomach and traumatized for life.


Running Time: 01:24:17

Download: MP3 — 112 MB

The prehistoric site of Renancourt, in Amiens, has been known for many years and long remained one of the few sites providing evidence for human presence in northern France during the Early Upper Paleolithic (35,000 - 15,000). Discovered in 2011, during an Inrap diagnostic operation, the site of Amiens-Renancourt 1 has been under full excavation since 2014. During the 2019 season, an exceptional Gravettian "Venus," some 23,000-years-old, was discovered.

A Paleolithic hunting camp

Donald Trump has offered to intervene in Mexico, i.e. "to go after the Drug Cartels" following "the brutal killing of an American family in Mexico". The Mexican president has turned down Trump's generous offer.

In a recent interview, President Trump confirmed that his administration is now considering categorizing "drug cartels" as "terrorists", akin to Al Qaeda (with the exception that they are "Catholic terrorists").

They would henceforth be designated by Washington as "foreign terrorist organizations".

What is the intent?

Create a justification for US-led "counterterrorism" (military) operations inside Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America?

Extend the "War on Terrorism" to Latin America? "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P). Go after the "Narco-terrorists".

The unspoken truth is:

1. Al Qaeda and its related terrorist organizations (including ISIS) in the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia are creations of the CIA.

2. The CIA protects the multibillion dollar global drug trade as well as the Mexican drug cartels. Moreover, it is estimated that 300 billion dollars (annually) worth of drug money is routinely laundered in casinos across America including Las Vegas and Atlantic City... As well as in Macau. Guess who is the World's richest casino owner.

3. Both American and Latin American politicians are known to have ties to the drug trade.

Flash back to the 1990s: George H. W. Bush, the dad of Bush Junior had developed close personal ties with Carlos Salinas de Gortari (former president of Mexico) and his dad Raul Salinas Lozano who, according to the Dallas Morning News (February 27, 1997) was "a leading figure in narcotics dealings that also involved his son, Raul Salinas de Gortari... And Raul was an intimo amigo of Jeb Bush, (former Governor of Florida) and the brother of George W, Bush.

Ostrich eggshell beads are some of the oldest ornaments made by humankind, and they can be found dating back at least 50,000 years in Africa.

Previous research in southern Africa has shown that the beads increase in size about 2,000 years ago, when herding populations first enter the region. In the current study, researchers Jennifer Miller and Elizabeth Sawchuk investigate this idea using increased data and evaluate the hypothesis in a new region where it has never before been tested.

Review of old ideas, analysis of old collections

To conduct their study, the researchers recorded the diameters of 1,200 ostrich eggshell beads unearthed from 30 sites in Africa dating to the last 10,000 years. Many of these bead measurements were taken from decades-old unstudied collections, and so are being reported here for the first time. This new data increases the published bead diameter measurements from less than 100 to over 1,000, and reveals new trends that oppose longstanding beliefs.

The "Habsburg jaw", a facial condition of the Habsburg dynasty of Spanish and Austrian kings and their wives, can be attributed to inbreeding, according to new results published in the Annals of Human Biology.

The new study combined diagnosis of facial deformities using historical portraits with genetic analysis of the degree of relatedness to determine whether there was a direct link. The researchers also investigated the genetic basis of the relationship.

Generations of intermarriage secured the family's influence across a European empire including Spain and Austria for more than 200 years but led to its demise when the final Habsburg monarch was unable to produce an heir. However, until now no studies have confirmed whether the distinct chin known as "Habsburg jaw" was a result of inbreeding.

Today, White Sands National Monument in New Mexico is studded with dune fields, which are constantly being shuffled and sculpted by the wind. Visitors can hike across the soaring, powdery mounds of gypsum, or even barrel down them on a sled. The dunes seem to go on forever: They stretch for hundreds of square miles, and as the sand whips past, it's easy to imagine an infinity of white, rolling humps.

At the end of the last Ice Age, it looked a lot different. Neighboring Lake Otero was beginning to evaporate, leaving behind selenite crystals that eroded into the sands of Alkali Flat. In the waning days of the Pleistocene, a human, a ground sloth, and a mammoth trudged across the eastern side of that disappearing lake. Now, well over 10,000 years later, researchers from Cornell University, Bournemouth University, and the National Park Service are using ground-penetrating radar to study the tracks they left behind.

An animal can only die once, and when it does, there's a vanishingly slim chance that it will become a fossil: Far, far more often than not, an animal's carcass will decay and rot until there's little proof that it ever existed at all. While it's alive, though, a creature can stamp proof of itself all across the landscape. Ichnology is the study of those preserved tracks, burrows, and other "trace fossils" — and it's a way for researchers to visualize an animal's behavior and biomechanics without a body in sight.

Like any other fossils, trace fossils owe their existence to a bit of luck. "You need a surface that is soft enough to deform and leave an imprint, which is true for sand and mud," says Douglas Jerolmack, a geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has worked extensively in White Sands but was not involved in this current research. "To preserve it, you also need the surface to 'lock in' that imprint somehow," he adds. A track might be submerged by other sediment faster than wind or water can obliterate it, for instance, or it may be cemented in place. Jerolmack suspects that's what happened in White Sands. "The upwelling of salt-saturated groundwater in the arid environment there leads to precipitation of salt that builds little bridges among sand grains and binds them together," he says.