An ancient pyramid decorated for a 'cult of the horse' was unearthed in Kazakhstan

A large Bronze Age pyramid has been discovered in Kazakhstan, the country's Ministry of Science and Higher Education reports.

The structure — which dates back to the 2^nd millennium BC — is unlike anything that has been found in the Eurasian steppes before — and may have been linked to an ancient horse cult.

"This is a very complex construction," Ulan Umitkaliyev, Head of the Eurasian National University's Archaeology and Ethnology Department, said in a press release. "The steppe pyramid was built with great precision, it is hexagonal.

"There are thirteen meters and eight rows of stones between each face. It is a very sophisticated complex structure with several circles in the middle."

Metal detectorists have discovered a treasure trove of gold coins strewn across an open field in Anglesey, an island in Wales, marking the first time that Iron Age currency has been found in the country.

The 15 well-preserved coins, which were minted sometime between 60 B.C. and 20 B.C., are known as staters and were common currency in ancient Greece. The highly stylized coins were derived from Macedonian gold coins of Philip II, who served as the king of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, and feature the bust of the Greek god Apollo wearing a wreath on the coins' heads side and a two-horse chariot and rider on the coins' tails side, according to a statement.

They were likely used by the Corieltavi tribe, who inhabited the area during the Iron Age.

Let's not allow ourself to be hypnotized by shiny objects as they pen our children into 15-minute ghettos.
On 20th January 1936, king George V, grandson of Queen Victoria and son of king Edward VII, died peacefully at his residence Sandringham House in Norfolk. George V had been ill with a respiratory infection for a few days and his death was widely expected in Britain. The king was watched over by his personal doctor, Dr. Bertrand Dawson (BD), the First Viscount of Penn, and his Irish nurse, Catherine Black.

George V's son Edward, playboy prince of Wales became king, Edward VIII. Apart from the press generated during the short, scandal-ridden reign of Nazi enthusiast Edward VIII, that was that. New era, new king, modernity, communist threat from the USSR, economic depression and the rise of herr Hitler in Germany were the main news generators of the day. But the story got a massive new twist in 1986, 50 years after the king's death, with the release of Dr. Bertrand Dawson's diaries.

The quiet regicide

As it turned out, George V did not just peacefully die of his illness. He was put to sleep by his doctor who wrote in his diary: "At about 11 o'clock I decided to determine the end and injected 3/4 grain of morphia and shortly afterwards 1 grain of cocaine into the king's distended jugular vein..." DB gave three reasons for his regicide: (1) king deserved to die in a "dignified manner"; (2) His family deserved this over the uncertainty of an anguished and prolonged death, and (3) if the king did not die before midnight, it wouldn't have been in time; his death would have missed The Times headline and would be reported first in "less appropriate evening journals."

The king's "dignified" last words

DB claimed that he made the decision himself, but noted that "the family" wanted him to act "without unnecessarily prolonging the king's life..." Thus, the good doctor magnanimously granted the monarch a dignified death, cheated the "anguished and prolonged" death, and made it all in time for the morning Times, lest some inappropriate publication tarnish the king's name by announcing the news first. How utterly dignified and selfless of the hero doctor.

The king himself was aware. His dignified last words, spoken to nurse Black as she administered the sedative were, "God damn you." The public's expectation of the king's death was the product of the narrative generated by Britain's media and Dr. DB was their source. On the morning of the day when the king died, DB issued a statement to the media that, "The king's life is moving peacefully towards its close." After putting down the king, Dawson then falsified the death certificate, attributing the king's death to his lung disease.

Dawson of Penn killed many men...

But even as the "reputable sources" dutifully contrived the requisite narrative, a small part of the British public - those with the nose to smell a rat weren't buying it. They were the proverbial nutty conspiracy theorists who adopted a rhyme, "Dawson of Penn killed many men; That's why we sing, 'God save the king.' " At that time, nobody could smugly demand "link to source?" but per standard practice, the conspiracists were dismissed with scorn, and neither the king's death nor Dr. Dawson's role were ever investigated. In fact, Dawson's star continued to rise throughout his life. It would take 50 years to prove the nutty conspiracy theorists right.

New paleoclimate evidence shows that around 1.1 million years ago, the southern European climate cooled significantly and caused an extinction of archaic humans on the continent.

Margari et al. discovered the occurrence of previously unknown extreme glacial conditions around 1.1 million years ago in Europe.

Around 1.1 million years ago, the glacial cooling pushed the European climate to levels beyond what archaic humans could tolerate, emptying the continent of human populations.

The oldest known human remains in Europe have previously been recovered from Iberia and suggest that early humans had arrived from southwest Αsia by about 1.4 million years ago.

Before getting onto Homer and Hesiod and then to the philosophers, I'm going to include a couple of interesting individuals, similar to Orpheus, who can't be dated because of the legendary accretions surrounding them. There really isn't much to go on so the short entries on Wikipedia will suffice.

Melampus^[1]

A legendary soothsayer and healer, originally of Pylos, who ruled at Argos. He introduced the worship of Dionysus, according to Herodotus, who asserted that his powers as a seer were derived from the Egyptians^[2] and that he could understand the language of animals. A number of pseudepigraphal works of divination were circulated in Classical and Hellenistic times under the name Melampus. According to Herodotus and Pausanias (vi.17.6), on the authority of Hesiod, his father was Amythaon, whose name implies the "ineffable" or "unspeakably great";^[3] thus Melampus and his heirs were Amythaides of the "House of Amythaon".

In Homer's Odyssey,^[4] a digression concerning the lineage of Theoclymenus, "a prophet, sprung from Melampus' line of seers",^[5] sketches the epic narrative concerning Melampus with such brevity that its details must have been familiar to Homer's audience. With brief hints, a sequence of episodes is alluded to, in which we discern strife in Pylos between Melampus and Neleus, who usurps Melampus's "great high house", forcing him into heroic exile. Melampus spends a year as bondsman in the house of Phylacus, "all for Neleus' daughter Pero". At his extremity, Melampus is visited by "the mad spell a Fury, murderous spirit, cast upon his mind. But the seer worked free of death" and succeeded at last in rustling Phylacus's cattle back to Pylos, where he avenged himself on Neleus and gave Pero in marriage to his brother Bias. But Melampus's own destiny lay in Argos, where he lived and ruled, married and sired a long line, also briefly sketched in Homer's excursus.

A work attributed in antiquity to Hesiod exists (Melampodia) in such fragmentary quotations and chance remarks that its reconstruction, according to Walter Burkert,^[6] is "most uncertain." (Wikipedia)

Again, there isn't much of a factual nature about Orpheus though there is a lot of speculation about Orphism. So, Wikipedia again:

A 3,800-year-old Akkadian cuneiform tablet was found during the archaeological excavations carried out in the Aççana Mound, the old city of Alalakh, in the Reyhanlı district of Hatay city in southern Turkey.

Tell Atchana, Alalakh is the capital of the kingdom of Mukish in the second millennium BC, located in the Amuq Valley of Hatay, near present-day Antakya.

Alalakh was one of the most famous cities in the ancient world; part of the larger Yamhad kingdom in the Middle Bronze Age, vassal to the Mitannian kingdom in the Late Bronze Age, and incorporated into the Hittite Empire at the end of the fourteenth century BC.

The earthquake on February 6, centered in Kahramanmaraş, which caused great destruction in the city, also affected the mound in Reyhanlı district, where Alalah, the capital of the Muşki Kingdom, was located during the Middle and Late Bronze Age periods.

Under the leadership of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, restoration and conservation work has been initiated in the mound, where some parts of the palace walls were damaged after the earthquake.

The head of the excavations and an academic from the Hatay Mustafa Kemal University, Murat Akar told state-run Anadolu Agency, the tablet features a contract on sales of a city, which consists of information about parties, and witnesses, said.

A diver scouring an archaeological site at the bottom of Lake Ohrid in Albania, the site of Europe's oldest stilt village.

Beneath the turquoise waters of Lake Ohrid, the "Pearl of the Balkans", scientists have uncovered what may be one of Europe's earliest sedentary communities, and are trying to solve the mystery of why it sheltered behind a fortress of defensive spikes.

A stretch of the Albanian shore of the lake once hosted a settlement of stilt houses some 8,000 years ago, archaeologists believe, making it the oldest lakeside village in Europe discovered to date.

Radiocarbon dating from the site puts it at between 6000 and 5800 BC.

From the Central and Eastern European Middle Neolithic (first half of the 5th millennium BCE), around 150 so-called circular enclosures are known, circular or elliptical roughly concentric arrangements of ditches and palisades with a diameter between 40 an up to 250 m. Only a few have been comprehensively and systematically examined archaeologically. The function of these large buildings is still discussed intensively. Interpretations such as central places for meetings, cattle enclosures, defensive structures, astronomical observatories or spaces for ritual activities have been proposed.

The recent publication of the research results from the completely excavated circular enclosure of Goseck, Burgenlandkreis, Saxony-Anhalt by Dr. Norma Henkel brings forward new evidence for the interpretation of these still enigmatic constructions. The article is titled "The Middle Neolithic circular ditch complex of Goseck, Burgenlandkreis," from the Publications of the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt — State Museum of Prehistory (German only).

Since 2014, the scientists of the Archaeology and Ethnology Department of the Faculty of History of the Eurasian National University have been conducting archaeological excavations at the Kyrykungir complex monument near Toktamys village in the Abai district of the Abai region. As a result of the research conducted with the participation of ENU students and masters, a large-scale steppe pyramid was discovered of the early second millennium BC, that is, four thousand years ago, the Bronze Age, not found before in the Eurasian steppe.

"The steppe pyramid is built with great precision, it is hexagonal. There are thirteen meters and eight rows of stones between each face. It is a very sophisticated complex structure with several circles in the middle. The exterior walls of the structure of this complex are dominated by images of various animals, especially horses.

The role of culture in human expansions: Large-scale collection of digital data summarizes the results of 150 years of research and can be used by amateurs and scientists alike.

Human history in one click: For the first time, numerous sites relating to the early history of mankind from 3 million to 20,000 years ago can be accessed in a large-scale database. Scientists from the research center ROCEEH ("The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans") have compiled information on 2,400 prehistoric sites and 24,000 assemblages from more than 100 ancient cultures. The digital data collection is available for free to scientists and amateurs and was recently published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The research center is located at the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, sponsored by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and funded in part through the Union of German Academies.

ROAD, the "ROCEEH Out of Africa Database", represents one of the largest digital collections of information about archaeology, anthropology, paleontology and botany based on 150 years of research history, says Dr. Andrew Kandel, University of Tübingen. By joining information about cultural remains, human fossils, animal bones and plants into a unified geographical and chronological framework, the team created a tool that helps analyze the complex aspects of human evolution.