Teenage girl 'Denny', the latest breathtaking discovery from the Denisova cave in Siberia has understandably made headlines around the world this week.

Earlier finds from here have shown how the cave - in mountainous Altai region - was shared in prehistoric times by three groupings, early Homo sapiens, the more advanced (at the time) but extinct Denisovans and the Neanderthals, also long gone.

A tiny fragment of bone now proves that girl of around 13 was the result of an unexpected match between a Denisovan man and a woman from the more primitive Neanderthals, scientists reported in Nature journal.

Here we look inside the remarkable cave which - as this scientific breakthrough was announced - remains a hive of activity with archaeological researchers painstakingly scouring the dirt floor for yet more jaw-dropping discoveries.

Our video and pictures take you into the limestone cave that is a remarkable shrine to the evolution of modern man.

An international team, including researchers at Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has found the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in eastern Africa. The Lothagam North Pillar Site was built 5,000 years ago by early pastoralists living around Lake Turkana, Kenya. This group is believed to have had an egalitarian society, without a stratified social hierarchy. Thus, their construction of such a large public project contradicts longstanding narratives about early complex societies, which suggest that a stratified social structure is necessary to enable the construction of large public buildings or monuments. The study, led by Elisabeth Hildebrand, of Stony Brook University, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Lothagam North Pillar Site was a communal cemetery constructed and used over a period of several centuries between about 5,000 and 4,300 years ago. Early herders built a platform approximately 30 meters in diameter and excavated a large cavity in the center to bury their dead. After the cavity was filled and capped with stones, the builders placed large, megalith pillars, some sourced from as much as a kilometer away, on top. Stone circles and cairns were added nearby. An estimated minimum of 580 individuals were densely buried within the central platform cavity of the site. Men, women and children of different ages, from infants to the elderly, were all buried in the same area, without any particular burials being singled out with special treatment. Additionally, essentially all individuals were buried with personal ornaments and the distribution of ornaments was approximately equal throughout the cemetery. These factors indicate a relatively egalitarian society without strong social stratification.

An enormous ancient Chinese pyramid has been discovered in an 4,300-year-old lost city, which regularly hosted human sacrifices and was once one of the largest settlements in the world.

The astonishing find was documented in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, in which researchers revealed that the newly excavated step pyramid is at least 230-ft high and covers a staggering 24 acres at its base.

The article, written by a team of professors at universities in China and California, says the city, now named "Shimao," flourished for five centuries across a 988-acre region surrounding the pyramid, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

The pyramid is decorated with eye symbols and part-human, part-animal figures which, the researchers say, could have given the pyramid religious power in the eyes of the Shimao citizens of the day. Both the city and pyramid were surrounded by a series of sophisticated defensive stone walls, ramparts and gates, which the team says indicates highly restricted access to the complex. Decapitated human heads were also discovered, suggesting human sacrifice was a popular tradition at the time.

Like any good story of discovery, the journey that led archaeologist Don Blakeslee to uncover one of the largest lost cities in North American history began with a fresh look at centuries-old documents.

In 2013, scholars at UC Berkeley revisited a series of maps and texts written in 1601 by Spanish conquistadors about a failed expedition into the Great Plains region of the United States in search of gold and other treasures. Instead, the explorers detailed the discovery of a massive settlement of nearly 2,000 grass huts with an estimated 20,000 occupants.

Whereas earlier translations muddled the exact site of this city, labelled on the map as Etzanoa, the Berkeley researchers were able to interpret the accounts and accompanying maps with greater accuracy.

The area still has much to reveal
Recent weeks have been some of the most exciting in years for Irish archaeologists studying the area around Newgrange in Co Meath.

You might expect the area - a Unesco World Heritage Site - to be so well documented that everything of note has turned up, but it has yielded yet more fascinating discoveries.

First, drought conditions in the area started to reveal shapes in fields, suggesting the presence of previously unknown enclosures or henges right on the footsteps of Newgrange.

Mythical Ireland's Anthony Murphy and Ken Williams of Shadows & Stone photography found two henges using a drone, located right beside Site P, an already documented site. Murphy described it as a 'mind-blowing'.

The Left's route to promoting their radical agenda around the world is engineering the enactment of a United Nations treaty that contains their distorted "women's rights" policies that can then be used to impose their alien feminist views on third world nations. I know this from my experience of more than 20 years at the UN -- including working as an NGO delegate advising official delegates plus being an official U.S. delegate appointed by President George W. Bush to two sessions, The Children's Summit (2002) and the Commission on the Status of Women (2003). I've learned that whatever the theme of the session and whether it's an official or NGO meeting. And this week, March 13 - March 24, the UN is holding its 61^st annual Commission on the Status of Women.

The remains of the oldest public library in Germany, a building erected almost two millennia ago that may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, have been discovered in the middle of Cologne.

The walls were first uncovered in 2017, during an excavation on the grounds of a Protestant church in the centre of the city. Archaeologists knew they were of Roman origins, with Cologne being one of Germany's oldest cities, founded by the Romans in 50 AD under the name Colonia. But the discovery of niches in the walls, measuring approximately 80cm by 50cm, was, initially, mystifying.

"It took us some time to match up the parallels - we could see the niches were too small to bear statues inside. But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls," said Dr Dirk Schmitz from the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne. "They are very particular to libraries - you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus."

A small piece of bone found in a cave in Siberia has been identified as the remnant of a child whose mother was a Neanderthal and father was a Denisovan, a mysterious human ancestor that lived in the region.

Researchers made the discovery when they examined DNA extracted from the bone and found that it contained chromosomes from a Neanderthal female and a Denisovan male. It is the first time that the offspring of such a coupling has been identified.

"If you had asked me beforehand, I would have said we will never find this, it is like finding a needle in a haystack," said Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "And then we stumbled across it. I was very surprised."

John Gunther Dean, now 92, and a former American ambassador to five countries, has long maintained that Israel was behind his attempted assassination on August 28, 1980, in a suburb of Beirut, which was attributed to a rightwing Lebanese group. Dean and his wife and daughter and son-in-law were in a motorcade and narrowly escaped serious injury.

Dean said that he was targeted because he was doing something regarded as antithetical to Israel's interest: consulting with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its head, Yasser Arafat, at a time when such contacts were the third rail in US politics. He was also outspokenly critical of Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

A new book offers backing to Dean's claim. But while that book has been highly-publicized, the question of whether Israel attacked our ambassador has gotten no attention in the press. That is not a surprise; for Dean has asserted that the case itself was never thoroughly investigated by the U.S. government.

So you don't buy that earthquakes can be man made? This is evidence from 60 years ago! It was detonated at least 6000 feet into the ground (roughly 2000 meters). This footage is from Project Cannikin, which was a proof-test for the 5 megaton warhead to be used on the Spartan missile system. Researchers were fearful of such a large device being detonated underground, so the testing was moved to way out in the middle of nowhere on the Amchitka penninsula in Alaska. The effect on the ground was necessary, and predicted, to see its pulse effect.

Seismic recordings of the test registered a magnitude of 6.8 on the richter scale as a direct result of the detonation. Over 1,000 after shocks with magnitudes as greater than 4.0 on the richter scale were recorded within the first 30 days following the blast.

The energy produced by the detonation caused the surface of the island directly above the device to rise 25 feet. Large portions of the coastline collapsed into the sea for a stretch of two-miles from ground-zero. The beach and ocean floor in the near vicinity, the Cannikin site were permanently raised 5 feet.