Archaeologists have made two extraordinary discoveries in the Italian town of Agrigento on Sicily's southwest coast. During excavations undertaken in March 2025, an international team of researchers led by Professor Monika Trümper and Dr. Thomas Lappi from Freie Universität Berlin uncovered an ancient auditorium that offers unique insight into the education of young citizens of the ancient city.

This auditorium, which forms part of an impressive gymnasium, illustrates the importance attached to both intellectual and athletic training during this period. The second significant discovery was two inscribed blocks that reveal details about ancient social life. The ensemble uncovered by the researchers is the only known example of its kind in the western Mediterranean.

The gymnasium was a site in ancient Greek cities where young men would receive physical and scholarly instruction that would prepare them for their future duties as citizens - a sort of a cross between a fitness center and school in modern terms. From the fourth century BCE onward these cities built massive complexes with racetracks, bathing facilities, and spaces where young men could train and study. The city of Agrigento, which was founded around 580 BCE as the largest Greek colony on Sicily, was also home to a gymnasium. This construction had already been acknowledged in previous research to be remarkably vast, as it is currently the only known example of a complex in the western Mediterranean offering 200-meter long racetracks and a large swimming pool.

Discovery described as 'significant archaeological breakthrough'.

AMMAN — A hieroglyphic inscription bearing the royal cartouche of Pharaoh Ramses III (1186-1155 BC) has been discovered in the Wadi Rum Reserve in southern Jordan, marking what officials described as a significant archaeological breakthrough.

Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Lina Annab announced the discovery during a press briefing attended by renowned Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass. "The inscription is the first of its kind to be found in Jordan and provides rare, tangible evidence of Pharaonic Egypt's historical presence in the region," she said in a ministry's statement.

"This is a landmark discovery that enhances our understanding of ancient connections between Egypt, Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula," Annab said, adding, "It affirms Jordan's role not only as a crossroads of civilizations but as a cradle of them."

The first human figurine of the Mesolithic era was discovered in the Damjili cave in Gazakh, the head of the Azerbaijani-Japanese Damjili international archaeological expedition of the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), PhD in history Yagub Mammadov, told Report.

He noted that similar human figurines have not yet been found in the known Mesolithic sites on the Kura River and its environs, as well as in the Caucasus as a whole.

According to Mammadov, the human figurine discovered in 2023 during joint Azerbaijani-Japanese archaeological research in the Damjili cave was studied in the Japanese museum using various modern laboratory technologies.

Lorena Paiz, the lead archaeologist behind the discovery, said the altar was likely used in sacrifice rituals, "especially of children."

Archaeologists working in Guatemala have found a Teotihuacan altar buried inside a dwelling at Tikal National Park — once the core of Mayan civilization. Lorena Paiz, the lead archaeologist behind the discovery, said the altar was likely used in sacrifice rituals, "especially of children."

The announcement came this week from Guatemala's Culture and Sports Ministry. Tikal, a powerful Mayan city-state known for its towering jungle temples, had long battled with the Kaanul dynasty for control of the region, says CBS News. But this new find shows Tikal also had cultural ties with Teotihuacan, a massive city from central Mexico located outside today's Mexico City.

The declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera.

The CIA programs spanned some four decades. Starting as a paramilitary operation that provided funding and equipment for such anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR); its affiliates, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), all Nazi Banderists. The CIA also provided support to a relatively anti-Bandera faction of the UHVR, the ZP-UHVR, a foreign-based virtual branch of the CIA and British MI-6 intelligence services. The early CIA operation to destabilize Ukraine, using exile Ukrainian agents in the West who were infiltrated into Soviet Ukraine, was codenamed Project AERODYNAMIC.

A formerly TOP SECRET CIA document dated July 13, 1953, provides a description of AERODYNAMIC:

"The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as the OUN/B will be utilized."

The CIA admitted in a 1970 formerly SECRET document that it had been in contact with the ZPUHVR since 1950.

Mediterranean Hunter Gatherers Navigated Long-Distance Sea Journeys Well Before the First Farmers.
Small, remote islands were long thought to have been the last frontiers of pristine natural systems. Humans are not thought to have been able to reach or inhabit these environments prior to the dawn of agriculture, and the technological shift that accompanied this transition.

In a paper published in Nature this week, new evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were crossing at least 100 kilometers (km) of open water to reach the Mediterranean island of Malta 8,500 years ago, a thousand years before the arrival of the first farmers. This report documents the oldest true long-distance seafaring in the Mediterranean, before the invention of boats with sails - an astonishing feat for hunter-gatherers likely using simple dugout canoes.

"Relying on sea surface currents and prevailing winds, as well as the use of landmarks, stars, and other wayfinding practices, a crossing of about 100 km is likely, with a speed of about 4 km per hour. Even on the longest day of the year, these seafarers would have had over several hours of darkness in open water," explains Professor Nicholas Vella of the University of Malta, co-investigator of the study.

A settlement dating back around 3,400 years has been discovered near the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt.
Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered the remains of a "major" 3,400-year-old town dating to the New Kingdom that was possibly built by King Tutankhamun's father and later added to by Ramesses II, a new study finds.

The settlement was found at the site of Kom el-Nugus in northern Egypt, about 27 miles (43 kilometers) west of Alexandria on a rocky ridge between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mariout. Previously, Egyptologists thought the site was not inhabited until later times, when the Greeks founded their own settlement and necropolis there around 332 B.C., during Egypt's Hellenistic period.

Researchers found the older ancient Egyptian settlement while they were studying the Greek one. An unexpected discovery of mudbrick dating to the New Kingdom (circa 1550 to 1070 B.C.) revealed the earliest known Egyptian settlement north of Lake Mariout, according to the study, which was published Jan. 23 in the journal Antiquity.

It's not clear exactly how large the settlement was, "but the quality of the remains, their planned organization around a street, could suggest a fairly large-scale occupation," study author Sylvain Dhennin, an archaeologist with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), told Live Science in an email. The street was designed to drain surface water and protect buildings from water erosion.

CIA documents show agents were on the hunt for Adolf Hitler in South America for 10 years after the world believed he was dead as Argentina prepares to declassify government files on Nazi fugitives who fled to the country at the end of World War II.

As Soviet troops battled their way into the heart of Berlin on April 30, 1945, Hitler and longtime girlfriend Eva Braun, whom he had married the day prior, killed themselves in his underground führerbunker to avoid capture.

Their bodies were partially burned and buried in a shallow bomb crater. Soviet soldiers later exhumed the remains, which the USSR identified through dental records, and held them in East Germany until KGB agents destroyed Hitler's body in April 1970, preserving only a jawbone and skull that were taken to Moscow, according to MI5.

At a newly dated 5,200 years old, the Flagstones monument in southern England is now the oldest known large stone circle in Britain.

Radiocarbon dating of some of the artifacts and remains buried beneath the monument reveals that Flagstones was erected around 3,200 BCE - at least 200 years earlier than previously thought.

This discovery is a small eureka moment, a temporal context that neatly explains the puzzling hybrid features of the monument, and suggests that Flagstones was a precursor to the stone circles that were to follow - including Stonehenge, erected 5,000 years ago.

"Flagstones is an unusual monument; a perfectly circular ditched enclosure, with burials and cremations associated with it," says archaeologist Susan Greaney of the University of Exeter in the UK.

"In some respects, it looks like monuments that come earlier, which we call causewayed enclosures, and in others, it looks a bit like things that come later that we call henges. But we didn't know where it sat between these types of monuments - and the revised chronology places it in an earlier period than we expected."

Flagstones lay hidden beneath the ground in Dorchester for thousands of years. Hints of its presence emerged in the 1890s, when a single "sarsen" - a large block of sandstone - was excavated from the garden of author Thomas Hardy, with bones and ashes buried in a pit beneath it.

The true extent of the monument, however, wasn't revealed until the 1980s, when workers digging up the ground in preparation for a road found more subterranean pits and sarsens, concealed by Earth and time, arranged in a large circle 100 meters (328 feet) in diameter.

Some of the walls of the pits were engraved, and several of the pits also included human remains, some cremated, some buried children. Archaeologists have compared it to similar circular sites, all with pits and cremations, and a marked absence of other artifacts, suggesting at least a partial funerary purpose.

The 6,500-year-old weapons, found in a cave near Marfa, could be among the oldest near-complete set of wood and stone hunting tools found in North America.
The 6,500-year-old hunting kit contained pieces of a spear thrower and a boomerang, as well as wood- and stone-tipped darts. It was found in a cave in West Texas near the remains of a small fire, and a pile of well-preserved human waste — evidence of those who had once sheltered inside.

The weapons, discovered over the past several years near Marfa, a small desert town about 40 miles northwest of the border with Mexico, could be among the oldest near-complete sets of wood and stone hunting tools found in North America, according to archaeologists at Sul Ross State University and the University of Kansas.

The researchers have yet to publish their full findings, but they said that dating suggested that one of the weapons was about 7,000 years old. The artifacts, researchers say, could help shed light on the complex ways in which ancient humans hunted for their prey and fixed their broken belongings.

"We were just stunned, because I've never even seen that stuff," said Bryon Schroeder, the director of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross State University and one of the lead researchers on the project.