A well-preserved Palaeolithic site in northern China reveals a new and previously unidentified set of cultural innovations.
When did populations of Homo sapiens first arrive in China and what happened when they encountered the Denisovans or Neanderthals who lived there? A new study by an international team of researchers opens a window into hunter-gatherer lifestyles 40,000 years ago. Archaeological excavations at the site of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin of northern China have revealed the presence of innovative behaviors and unique toolkits.

The discovery of a new culture suggests processes of innovation and cultural diversification occurring in Eastern Asia during a period of genetic and cultural hybridization. Although previous studies have established that Homo sapiens arrived in northern Asia by about 40,000 years ago, much about the lives and cultural adaptations of these early peoples, and their possible interactions with archaic groups, remains unknown. In the search for answers, the Nihewan Basin in northern China, with a wealth of archaeological sites ranging in age from 2 million to 10,000 years ago, provides one of the best opportunities for understanding the evolution of cultural behavior in northeastern Asia.

A new study describes a unique 40,000-year-old culture at the site of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin. With the earliest known evidence of ochre processing in Eastern Asia and a set of distinct blade-like stone tools, Xiamabei contains cultural expressions and features that are unique or exceedingly rare in northeastern Asia. Through the collaboration of an international team of scholars, analysis of the finds offers important new insights into cultural innovation during the expansion of Homo sapiens populations.

"Xiamabei stands apart from any other known archaeological site in China, as it possesses a novel set of cultural characteristics at an early date," says Fa-Gang Wang of the Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, whose team first excavated the site.

Tiny marine algae lingered in his bones.

Human bones dating to the Stone Age found in what is now northern Chile are the remains of a fisherman who died by drowning, scientists have discovered.

The man lived about 5,000 years ago, and he was around 35 to 45 years old when he died. Scientists found the skeleton in a mass burial in the coastal region of Copaca near the Atacama Desert, and the grave held four individuals: three adults (two males and one female) and one child.

In a new study published by the University of Vienna in collaboration with Vienna's Natural History Museum, researchers applied high-resolution tomography, suggesting that the Venus originates from a region in northern Italy.

Anthropologist Gerhard Weber from the University of Vienna used micro-computer tomography to analyse the Venus up to a resolution of up to 11.5 micrometres. Together with Alexander Lukeneder and Mathias Harzhauser from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, the team procured comparative samples from Austria and Europe for comparison to geologically determine the origin.

The study found that the tomography data from Venus had sediments deposited in the rocks in different densities and sizes. In between there were always small remnants of shells and six very dense, larger grains, so-called limonite. The latter explains the previously mysterious hemispherical indentations on the surface of Venus with the same diameter: "The hard limonites probably broke out when the creator of Venus was carving," explains Weber: "In the case of the Venus navel, he then apparently made a virtue out of necessity."

Months after Ukraine oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and his partners abandoned an Ohio steel plant and left scores of workers without jobs, financial crime experts at Deutsche Bank shot up a troubling alert.

Millions of dollars were flowing into its U.S. headquarters for a business owned by the oligarch, but something wasn't right. Detecting signs of suspicious money — large round numbers from high-risk jurisdictions — the bank could have refused the transfers or even dropped the client.

But it didn't do either.

Despite warnings from its own workers, Deutsche allowed the money to keep pouring into its coffers six years ago while the oligarch and his partners secretly amassed a steel fortune in the United States.

A group of more than 40 human rights activists have filed a petition with the High Court of Justice, demanding the cessation of Israeli arms exports to Ukraine. They argue that these weapons serve forces that openly espouse a neo-Nazi ideology and cite evidence that the right-wing Azov militia, whose members are part of Ukraine's armed forces, and are supported by the country's ministry of internal affairs, is using these weapons.

An earlier appeal to the Defense Ministry was met with no response.

The ministry's considerations in granting export licenses for armaments are not disclosed to the public, but it appears that the appearance of Israeli weapons in the hands of avowed neo-Nazis should be a consideration used in opposing the granting of such a license.

Nevertheless, this is not the first time in which the defense establishment is arming forces that embrace a national socialist ideology.

• Fingerprinted, jailed and deported 'like criminals': Israel is turning away tourists from the former Soviet Union
• Ukraine Holocaust monument vandalized with swastikas
• Ukrainian nationalists strive to shake off allegations of anti-Semitism

In the past, Israel has armed anti-Semitic regimes, such as the generals' regime in Argentina, which murdered thousands of Jews in camps while its soldiers stood in watchtowers guarding the abducted prisoners with their Uzi submachine guns.

Why have teachers' unions been pushing ed-tech that is driving schools into the 4IR? Look no further than Education International, a global federation tied to UNESCO & the WEF that dominates most teachers' unions in the US and beyond.

For nearly a hundred years, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) - the two largest teachers' unions in the United States - have cozied up to corporate foundations, such as the Rockefeller philanthropies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with multinational technology companies, including IBM and Microsoft. After almost a century of cutting side deals with Robber Barons and Tech Barons alike, the AFT and the NEA are now parroting the Gates Foundation's "Reimagine Education" campaign, which is being buoyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Altogether, the AFT, the NEA, the WEF, and UNESCO are all "reimagining" a new post-human education system as they simultaneously push for ed-tech overhauls. As documented in my investigative series, "Teachnocracy," these overhauls seek to privatize public schools through partnerships with Big Tech corporations that facilitate online "distance learning" to accommodate indefinite classroom health restrictions in a post-COVID world.

As Russia actually do launch an invasion or "special operation" in Ukraine, we thought now was a good time to recap on how we got here.

The historical, political and ethnic divisions in Ukraine go back decades, if not centuries, but we don't have the space for that kind of deep-dive. For now, we'll be keeping it to three simple parts: The fall of Viktor Yanukovych, the Crimean referendum, and the ensuing civil war which puts the region in a direct path to the events of today.

Much like our 30 Facts on Covid, this piece is intended as a quick reference guide to help get friends and family up to speed on the recent history of Ukraine, a handy index of contemporary sources, or a refresher course for those who've forgotten the details.

Anyway, let's get to it.

Today, a new coordinated psychological operation has been sprung to convince every living patriot across the Five Eyes sphere of influence that the enemy of the free world who lurks behind every conspiracy to overthrow governments, and western values are Russia and China.

Over the past months, slanderous, and often conjectural stories of Chinese and Russian subversion has repeatedly been fed to a gullible western audience desperate for an enemy image to attach to their realization that an obvious long-term conspiracy has been unleashed to destroy their lives. While the left has been fed with propaganda designed to convince them that this enemy has taken the form of the Kremlin, the conservative consumers of media have been fed with the narrative that the enemy is China.

The reality is that both Russia and China together have a bond of principled survival upon which the entire multipolar order is based. It is this alliance which the actual controllers of today's empire wish to both destroy and ensure no western nation joins...especially not the USA.

Some 5,300 years ago, humans in what is now northern Spain cut into an elderly woman's skull, likely in an effort to relieve her ear pain. Now, reports Judith Sudilovsky for the Jerusalem Post, archaeologists say the woman's skull represents the earliest known evidence of ear surgery.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study centers on a skull discovered in 2018 among the remains of around 100 people in a large, single-chamber tomb called the Dolmen of El Pendón. The tomb — made up of two upright stones supporting a flat, horizontal stone — is located in Reinoso, a town in the Spanish province of Burgos, and remained in use between roughly 3800 and 3000 B.C.E., notes Vishwam Sankaran for the Independent.

A team of French and Jordanian archaeologists made an exciting discovery on Tuesday when they unearthed a ritual hunting site that is roughly 9,000 years old. The team found over 250 artifacts that have led them to believe neolithic humans' hunting strategies were much more advanced than previously thought.

"This is a unique site where large quantities of gazelles were hunted in complex rituals. It has no rival in the world from the Stone Age," said Wael Abu-Azizeh, the co-director of the South Eastern Badia Archaeological Project (SEBAP). The crew has been working on the site since 2013.The archeologists found traps made for hunting gazelles, made up of long converging stone walls meant to trap the gazelles so that they could be killed more easily.

These structures are referred to as "desert kites", or mass traps, and though there are many found throughout deserts in the Middle East and southwest Asia. Archaeologists say these are the oldest, largest, and best preserved.

"The site is unique, first because of its preservation state," said Abu-Azizeh. "It's 9,000 years old and everything was almost intact."

Also found on the site were two carved standing stones both with images of human-like figures. One of which is accompanied by the neolithic hunters' interpretation of their desert kite, as well as an altar, hearth, and marine shells.