A mural excavated at the Neolithic Çatalhöyük site (Central Anatolia, Turkey) has been interpreted as the oldest known map. Dating to 6600 BCE, it putatively depicts an explosive summit eruption of the Hasan Dağı twin-peaks volcano located 130 km northeast of Çatalhöyük, with a birds-eye view of a town plan in the foreground.

This interpretation has always been controversial, not least because independent evidence for a contemporaneous explosive volcanic eruption of Hasan Dağı has been lacking. However, recent volcanic rock dating suggests the painting of the Çatalhöyük mural may have overlapped with an eruption, according to results published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Axel Schmitt from the University of California Los Angeles and colleagues from other institutions.

Analysed volcanic rock samples

Scientists analysed rocks from the nearby Hasan Dağı volcano in order to determine whether it was the volcano depicted in the mural. To determine if Hasan Dağı was active during that time, scientists collected and analysed volcanic rock samples from the summit and flanks of the Hasan Dağı volcano using (U-Th)/He zircon geochronology. These ages were then compared to the archaeological date of the mural.

China's earliest mathematical document dating back more than 2,200 years ago has been discovered by archeologists and experts, they announced Tuesday.

The document consists of a mathematical formula inscribed on bamboo slips from the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), according to Li Xueqin, head of the Research and Conservation Center for Excavated Texts of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The unearthed document provides a formula for the multiplication of any two whole numbers under 100 and certain fractions, said Li, a well-known historian.

The document is the earliest of its kind discovered so far and has filled in a historical blank for mathematical documents prior to the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE), according to Guo Shuchun, director of the Chinese Society of the History of Mathematics.

It is older and had greater calculating functions than other ancient multiplication tables discovered, said Guo.

"It was very advanced for the world at that time and is an important discovery in the mathematical history of China and even the world."

In July 2008, Tsinghua University acquired a rare collection of 2,500 slip bamboo items belonging to the late Warring States period, which had been smuggled out of China.

Source: Xinhua

They were never going to be able to contain themselves. For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Tory right's standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all wars". The killing fields of Gallipoli and the Somme had been drenched in blood for a "noble cause", declared Michael Gove. The slaughter unleashed in 1914 had been a "just war" for freedom.

Hostility to the war, the education secretary complained, had been fostered by leftwingers and comedians who denigrated patriotism and painted the conflict as a "misbegotten shambles". Gove was backed by the prime minister, as talk of international reconciliation was left to junior ministerial ranks.

Boris Johnson went further. The war was the fault of German expansionism and aggression, London's mayor pronounced, and called for Labour's shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt to be sacked forthwith if he doubted it. The Conservative grandees were backed up by a retinue of more-or-less loyal historians. Max Hastings reckoned it had been fought in defence of "international law" and small nations, while Antony Beevor took aim at "anti-militarists".
This is all preposterous nonsense. Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.

Tourists entering English Heritage's new £27 million visitor centre at Stonehenge will quickly confront its most spectacular exhibit - a man who was born 500 years before the earliest stone monument appeared at the site.

He may have a touch of Hollywood about him, but this "Stonehenge Man" was once real. His face has been reconstructed from a 5500-year-old skeleton found in the area. Local protest groups continue to press for him to be reburied, but forensic analysis has allowed scientists to create the most lifelike model yet of an individual from British prehistory. Their work reveals how he lived and ate, and may even shed light on the origins of Stonehenge itself.

The well-preserved skeleton was discovered in an elaborate tomb in the 1860s, providing a rare example of the anatomy of Neolithic people. His face has been brought to life by Swedish sculptor Oscar Nilsson, using information from bone and tooth analyses. The length of the man's bones, the skeleton's weight and his age - estimated at between 25 and 40 years old - were used to determine the thickness of the skin on his face and muscle definition.

A newly translated Hebrew text claims to reveal where treasures from King Solomon's temple were hidden and discusses the fate of the Ark of the Covenant itself.

But unlike the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, the text leaves the exact location of the Ark unclear and states that it, and the other treasures, "shall not be revealed until the day of the coming of the Messiah son of David ..." putting it out of reach of any would-be treasure seeker.

King Solomon's Temple, also called the First Temple, was plundered and torched by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C., according to the Hebrew Bible. The Ark of the Covenant is a chest that, when originally built, was said to have held tablets containing the 10 commandments. It was housed in Solomon's Temple, a place that contained many different treasures.

The newly translated text, called "Treatise of the Vessels" (Massekhet Kelim in Hebrew), says the "treasures were concealed by a number of Levites and prophets," writes James Davila, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, in an article in the book Old Testament Pseudepigrapha More Noncanonical Scriptures Volume 1 (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013).

Newly released genome sequences from almost a dozen early human inhabitants of Europe suggest that the continent was once a melting pot in which brown-eyed farmers encountered blue-eyed hunter-gatherers.

Present-day Europeans, the latest work shows, trace their ancestry to three groups in various combinations: hunter-gatherers, some of them blue-eyed, who arrived from Africa more than 40,000 years ago; Middle Eastern farmers who migrated west much more recently; and a novel, more mysterious population whose range probably spanned northern Europe and Siberia.

That conclusion comes from the genomes of 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers - one man from Luxembourg and seven individuals from Sweden - as well as the genome of a 7,500-year-old woman from Germany. The analysis, led by Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen, Germany, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, was posted on the biology preprint website bioRxiv.org on 23 December 2013¹. The results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Volcanoes on the East Coast of North America are more recent than you think - and they may be why the region still suffers relatively large earthquakes

How Mole Hill in Virginia became a mountain is an old story, but not as old as some geologists think. The reason for that has to do with volcanoes - and may help explain why the U.S. East Coast, so long removed from geologic upheaval compared with the West, still suffers from relatively powerful earthquakes like the one that shook Mineral, Va., and much of the East Coast, in 2011.

Five years ago or so, newly minted professor of geology Elizabeth Johnson needed something for her undergraduate students at James Madison University to study on field trips. Locals suggested the unusual geology of Mole Hill, just a few kilometers from campus, where one could find black obsidian (a superhard rock glass formed when magma cools quickly) or rocks that when cracked open looked as pure white as newfallen snow thanks to the carbonate minerals inside.

When Johnson and her students started to poke around through the dense vegetation swathing Mole Hill, the very texture of the volcanic rock appeared unusual. The igneous rock was fine-grained with small crystals of various kinds, except every once in a while where a relative giant crystal - 1 centimeter or more across - intruded. Intrigued, Johnson studied up on the local geology, finding that this is not the first time these interesting igneous rocks had been spotted. As far back as 1899, such obsidian and minerals had been reported in this area. Most other geologists simply assumed they were much older.

History never repeats itself, but it sure does rhyme, it has been said. Now an internationally respected historian is warning that today's world bears a number of striking similarities with the build-up to the First World War.

The newly mechanised armies of the early 20th century produced unprecedented slaughter on the battlefields of the "war to end all wars" after a spark lit in the Balkans with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Professor Margaret MacMillan, of the University of Cambridge, argues that the Middle East could be viewed as the modern-day equivalent of this turbulent region. A nuclear arms race that would be likely to start if Iran developed a bomb "would make for a very dangerous world indeed, which could lead to a recreation of the kind of tinderbox that exploded in the Balkans 100 years ago - only this time with mushroom clouds," she writes in an essay for the Brookings Institution, a leading US think-tank.

"While history does not repeat itself precisely, the Middle East today bears a worrying resemblance to the Balkans then," she says. "A similar mix of toxic nationalisms threatens to draw in outside powers as the US, Turkey, Russia, and Iran look to protect their interests and clients."

Professor MacMillan highlights a string of other parallels between today and a century ago. Modern-day Islamist terrorists mirror the revolutionary communists and anarchists who carried out a string of assassinations in the name of a philosophy that sanctioned murder to achieve their vision of a better world. And in 1914, Germany was a rising force that sought to challenge the pre-eminent power of the time, the UK. Today, the growing power of China is perceived as a threat by some in the US.

Authorities in the southwestern French town of Montignac are investigating the extraordinary possibility that, just 4km from the famous Lascaux caves, there may exist another set of prehistoric paintings hidden away in a separate underground cavern.

A group of teenagers in the south west of France in 1940 stumble across what turns out to be a complex network of Paleolithic caves with a series of astonishing 17,000-year-old frescos, which becomes known as the "Sistine Chapel of the Prehistoric era."

You might assume this type of thing only happens once in the same region, but authorities in the town of Montignac, Dordogne are probing the possibility of the existence of a second Lascaux cave.

The rumours of a second cave covered in pre-historic artwork have been circulating for years, but it appears local authorities are now ready to take them seriously after one local family shared an extraordinary secret they had kept to themselves for half a century.

According to French media reports this week, preliminary investigations by the town's mayor, as well as authorities in the Dordogne region, have proved promising enough to warrant a more detailed probe into a patch of land 4 km from the site of the Lascaux caves.

"There's no certainty, and we are still quite far from having the necessary evidence to confirm the existence of another decorated cave," Montignac mayor Laurent Mathieu told French daily Le Figaro this week.

Quotes on Democracy vs. Republic

"Democracy is the most vile form of government. ... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as the have been violent in their deaths."
- James Madison (1751-1836) Father of the Constitution, 4th President of the U. S.

"We are a Republic. Real Liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy."
- Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) Lawyer, Secretary of the Treasury & Secretary of State

"A simple democracy is the devil's own government."
- Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) Founding Father& signer of the Declaration of Independence

"Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils and sufferings and blood of their ancestors, and capable, if wisely improved and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to the latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence. The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid, its compartments are beautiful as well as useful, its arrangements are full of wisdom and order, and its defenses are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of men may justly aspire to such a title. It may nevertheless perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, the People. Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall when the wise are banished from the public councils because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded because they flatter the people in order to betray them."
- Joseph Story (1779-1845) Lawyer, Supreme Court Justice & influential commentators on the U.S. Constitution