Any follower of Catastrophism the last few years has seen extraordinary confirmations of ancient cataclysm and novel contributions to our way of thinking. To the Tusk, three revelations have characterized the period: The discovery of an extraordinarily youthful late Pleistocene crater in Greenland; a series of popular, comprehensive and unrefuted major journal articles which exquisitely defined hard evidence for the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe; and the singular contribution of Dr. Martin Sweatman, as made in his fabulous book, Prehistory Decoded.

Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world's very earliest and most mysterious art.

Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman's initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world's first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.

Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth's precession.

(Don't you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)

It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).

Some of those who witnessed the Bovedy meteorite which crashed in Northern Ireland 50 years ago have been remembering the event at the Armagh Planetarium.

The meteorite is named after the townland near Kilrea where it fell on 25 April 1969.

It had been seen passing over the South East of England and over Wales before it crashed - and was described as looking like a shooting star or fireball as it fragmented coming into land.

It was found three days later and had broken into two traceable pieces, one which had fallen through the roof of a shop in Lisburn and the other on a farm in Bovedy.

Former director of the planetarium Terence Murtagh is one of those who saw the shooting star and helped locate it after it fell to Earth.

People living at least 2,000 years ago near the Pacific Coast of what's now Guatemala crafted massive human sculptures with magnetized foreheads, cheeks and navels. New research provides the first detailed look at how these sculpted body parts were intentionally placed within magnetic fields on large rocks.

Lightning strikes probably magnetized sections of boulders that were later carved into stylized, rotund figures - known as potbellies - at the Guatemalan site of Monte Alto, say Harvard University geoscientist Roger Fu and his colleagues. Artisans may have held naturally magnetized mineral chunks near iron-rich, basalt boulders to find areas in the rock where magnetic forces pushed back, the scientists say in the June Journal of Archaeological Science. Predesignated parts of potbelly figures - which can stand more than 2 meters tall and weigh 10,000 kilograms or more - were then carved at those spots.

This viper fang, likely from a rattlesnake or copperhead, was preserved in a prehistoric coprolite.

Photograph courtesy Elanor Sonderman Culture & History 1,500 years ago, someone ate a venomous snake whole. Why? Is the puzzling find evidence of an ancient ritual, or just a prehistoric dare gone wrong?

Analyzing coprolites-the preserved poop of people-is dirty, stinky work. But every once in a while, it reveals something truly surprising.

In the case of a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science, that startling something was the fang of a venomous snake, digested by a person and left in a rock shelter in what is now Texas about 1,500 years ago.

Archaeologist Elanor Sonderman, who found the fang as part of her graduate work at Texas A&M University, wasn't looking for that particular needle in a haystack of prehistoric feces. Rather, she wanted to learn more about the indigenous people who used the Conejo Shelter, a cave in the Lower Pecos canyonlands of Texas, as a latrine. The shelter became an archaeological dig in the 1960s before a dam project inundated the area with water.

In November 2016, a swastika was painted on an elementary school in my Denver, Colorado, neighborhood of Stapleton. As an archaeologist who specializes in identifying the remains of animals hunted by early humans, my work doesn't often involve symbols. But after this event, I started to pay attention to the symbols around me. I began to wonder about the creation of symbols-and society's investment in them-and what these phenomena say about our culture, both old and new.

Archaeology is often assumed to be limited to the realm of the ancients. However, the point of archaeology is not to dig up static moments in time from long ago but to use material items to track the ebbs and flows of human culture: to show how things change, how values change. We build statues, then later deface or demolish them. We create symbols, then alter their meanings. Some argue vehemently that monuments, such as Confederate statues, should be left in place-that their part in history should not be "erased." But change is not an erasure of history; it is a part of it.

The swastika is a case in point. In the late 1800s, the life's ambition of German businessman and self-appointed archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was to prove that cities named in Homer's The Iliad were real-that the kings, princes, places, and battles of the Greek poem were more than just stories. In his excavations, using methods that would be considered destructive plundering by today's standards, Schliemann excavated a site on the coast of Turkey that he identified as the ancient city of Troy. He discovered over a thousand variations of crosses with arms that extended to right angles, or swirls. He named them after the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning well-being.

Schliemann's famed expeditions propelled the symbol into Western pop culture. In the early 1900s, the Coca-Cola company used the swastika on their products as a sign of well-being, housing developments sprang up with names like Swastika Acres (a name that until recently existed on housing deeds in a subdivision of Cherry Hills Village in the Denver metro area), and the Boston Braves baseball team wore it on their hats for good luck in a 1914 game against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the Russian military has been training "psychic" special forces to use in combat to "defeat the enemy with non-contact methods," according to the official magazine of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Armeysky Sbornik (Army Digest).

"Fighters can see right through the enemy soldier: what kind of person they are, what their weak and strong sides are and whether they can be recruited [as a spy]," read the magazine.

"By force of thought, it is possible to shut down computer programmes, burn crystals in generators, listen in on conversations and disrupt radio and telecommunications," the article continues.

These 'goat-staring' specialists in "parapsychological" warfare are said to have honed their skills during combat in Chechnya, using their purported abilities for applications ranging from managing the amount of pain felt by a wounded soldier, to locating caches of enemy weapons

Russia's chief skeptic, Yevgeny Aleksandrov who chairs the Russian Academy of Science's committee for combating "false science" called claims of psychological warfare capabilities "complete rubbish," according to Sky.com

Declassified documents held by the investigative agency reveal the FBI received rumours of Hitler's survival just five months after his death on April 30, 1945.

US spooks received information claiming the Nazi leader had fled Germany via U-boat in the dying days of the war as the allies pressed on Berlin.

It is said Argentine officials welcomed Hitler and he remained hiding out in the foothills of the Andes.

The construction of a metro network beneath the Greek city of Thessaloniki has unearthed an extraordinary treasure trove of ancient artefacts, from gold wreaths and rings to statues of the goddess Aphrodite.

The progress of the metro system has been delayed because of the sheer number of items that have been found beneath the streets of Greece's second city.

Archeologists have dug up more than 300,000 artefacts, from coins and jewellery to marble statues, amphorae, oil lamps and perfume vases.

They were found in what would have been the thriving commercial centre of the ancient city, which was the second most important conurbation in the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople.

Operation Condor itself was a largely Western invention that was imposed on Latin America through a series of military coups, which again were backed by Western governments.

A recently declassified CIA document has revealed that members of the intelligence agencies of France, the United Kingdom and West Germany discussed how to establish "an anti-subversive organization similar to [the CIA's Operation] Condor" in their own countries. Described by the CIA as "a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion," Operation Condor was a campaign of state terrorism originally planned by the CIA that targeted leftists, suspected leftists and their "sympathizers" and resulted in the forced disappearances, torture and brutal murders of an estimated 60,000 people, as well as the political imprisonment of around half a million people. Around half of the estimated murders occurred in Argentina.

The document, released last Friday as part of a release of newly declassified U.S. government documents related to the U.S.-backed military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, states that:

Crusader armies were made up of people from remarkably genetically diverse backgrounds, hailing not just from western Europe but also much further east, according to a new study that gives unprecedented insight into the fighters' lives.

The Crusades to the Holy Land were spread over two centuries, with many Europeans heading east to fight, and others turning up to trade.

While experts say it is well known that high-ranking crusaders entered into marriages with Armenians to shore up political allegiances, the study adds to evidence that footsoldiers were also striking up relationships as they headed east.

"Those were the regular normal people who are also mixing together, and their sons were joining the fight later on," said Dr Marc Haber, author of the research from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge.