Scientists in China have discovered a rare fossil fragment of an "armored" fish, which may prove that the so-called Fish Age happened much earlier in Earth's evolutionary history than previously thought.

A partial fossil of the Sparalepis tingi, a 20cm-long fish, found in China's Yunnan province could turn the paleontological world on its head. Named after the Sparabara infantry of the Persian Empire, the fish's scales resemble the wicker shields the warriors carried into battle.

For decades, the fossil evidence has led the scientific community to believe the surge in global vertebrate, jawed fish populations began during the Devonian Period (419.2 million to 358.9 million years ago).

Hidden in the mountains of California, Nevada, and Utah, lurk some of the oldest known long-living species of the Great Basin bristlecone pine, or Pinus longaeva. One member of this species, noted to be 5066 years old, is considered the oldest known living organism on Earth. The ancient tree can be found in the White Mountains in California, but its exact location is kept secret. The tree was cored by specialist Edmund Shulman, dedicated researcher and explorer of long-lived trees, and its age was determined by Tom Harlan.

The age of the tree means that it was alive while Stonehenge was under construction and around the time when the first writing system was invented in Sumeria.

Dating from the Bronze Age, the Great Basin bristlecone pine belongs to a species that does not grow taller than 15 meters, and its trunk does not extend in diameter more than 3.6 meters. These ancient trees have knotted and gnarled appearance, especially those growing at higher altitudes. They also have reddish-brown bark with deep fissures.

The Great Basin bristlecone pine differentiates from the Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine in its needles; the first always have a pair of unceasing resin canals, and so lack the emblematic small white resin flecks of the second. Unique too are its cones that are more rounded compared to the more pointed ones of the other species.

In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called The Handmaid's Tale. I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I'd rented.

The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German Air Force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain — Czechoslovakia, East Germany — I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. "This used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared." I heard such stories many times.

Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. "It can't happen here" could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.

The death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was one of the most momentous occasions in Russia's history, but previously only official reels had been available. Now, 64 years later, a new film captured by a US diplomat later expelled for spying, has been published.

Army Major Martin Manhoff was assigned to the USSR in 1952, with the Cold War in the ascendant, and over the next two years took hundreds of pictures, and filmed hours of 16 mm color footage, for reasons that may have been personal, professional or both.

On March 5, 1953, it was announced that 73-year-old Josef Stalin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The exact details of his last days as he lay paralyzed and helpless, while none of his subordinates intervened, remain a source of historical controversy.

Remains of an ancient Egyptian statue believed to depict Pharaoh Ramses II have been found hidden in an area of flooded wasteland in Cairo.

The statue's head and broken torso were recovered from a pit of earth and water by a team of German and Egyptian archaeologists in Cairo's Matareya district on Thursday, reports Almasry Alyoum.

Modern day Matareya is where the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis once stood and archaeologists suspect the newly discovered eight-meter-tall effigy could be a tribute to a pharaoh who ruled Egypt between 1279-1213 BCE.

Archaeologists from Egypt and Germany have found a massive eight-meter statue submerged in ground water in a Cairo slum that they say probably depicts revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

The discovery, hailed by the Antiquities Ministry as one of the most important ever, was made near the ruins of Ramses II's temple in the ancient city of Heliopolis, located in the eastern part of modern-day Cairo.

"Last Tuesday they called me to announce the big discovery of a colossus of a king, most probably Ramses II, made out of quartzite," Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani told Reuters on Thursday at the site of the statue's unveiling.

Ancient DNA found in the dental plaque of Neandertals - our nearest extinct relative - has provided remarkable new insights into their behaviour, diet and evolutionary history, including their use of plant-based medicine to treat pain and illness.

Published today in the journal Nature, an international team led by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and Dental School, with the University of Liverpool in the UK, revealed the complexity of Neandertal behaviour, including dietary differences between Neandertal groups and knowledge of medication.

"Dental plaque traps microorganisms that lived in the mouth and pathogens found in the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract, as well as bits of food stuck in the teeth - preserving the DNA for thousands of years," says lead author Dr Laura Weyrich, ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow with ACAD.

"Genetic analysis of that DNA 'locked-up' in plaque, represents a unique window into Neandertal lifestyle - revealing new details of what they ate, what their health was like and how the environment impacted their behaviour."

The Haitian Revolution, which ran from 1791-1804, was one of the most important events in modern history. It was the first successful anti-slavery revolution. Not only did Haiti's slaves manage to liberate themselves, they also inflicted crushing defeats on three empires - the Spanish, French, and British. Each suffered catastrophic losses trying, and failing, to take back the island from its heroic defenders.

I dealt with this glorious moment in human history in my "Revolution in Haiti" based on C.L.R James classic "The Black Jacobins." I also dealt with the enormous importance that slavery held in the global economy and its role in fueling the industrial revolution in "Capitalism and Slavery" based on the classic book of the same title by Eric Williams. Next I tackled the role of slavery as the prime motive behind the launching of the so called "American War for Independence" in the "Counter Revolution of 1776," based on Gerald Horne's instant classic of the same title.

Now I will deal with the part the Haitian revolution played in not only ending slavery on the island but throughout the Americas. I will rely on yet another masterpiece from Gerald Horne, "Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, The Haitian Revolution, and The Origins of the Dominican Republic," which is both a sequel to "The Counter-Revolution of 1776" and a companion to his excellent "Negro Comrades of the Crown" which covers the same time period. Negro Comrades of the Crown is about the alliance between American blacks and the British empire, which hoped to use the issue of slavery to destabilize it's former colony - turned imperial rival - the United States.

DNA in hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia in the early to mid-1900s has revealed that populations have been continuously present in the same regions for up to 50,000 years - soon after the peopling of Australia.

Published today in the journal Nature, the findings reinforce Aboriginal communities' strong connection to country and represent the first detailed genetic map of Aboriginal Australia prior to the arrival of Europeans.

These are the first results from the Aboriginal Heritage Project, led by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) in partnership with the South Australian Museum.

Researchers analysed mitochondrial DNA from 111 hair samples that were collected during a series of remarkable anthropological expeditions across Australia from 1928 to the 1970s and are part of the South Australian Museum's unparalleled collection of hair samples.

Mitochondrial DNA allows tracing of maternal ancestry, and the results show that modern Aboriginal Australians are the descendants of a single founding population that arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, while Australia was still connected to New Guinea. Populations then spread rapidly - within 1500-2000 years - around the east and west coasts of Australia, meeting somewhere in South Australia.

"Amazingly, it seems that from around this time the basic population patterns have persisted for the next 50,000 years -showing that communities have remained in discrete geographical regions," says project leader Professor Alan Cooper, Director of ACAD, University of Adelaide.

"This is unlike people anywhere else in the world and provides compelling support for the remarkable Aboriginal cultural connection to country. We're hoping this project leads to a rewriting of Australia's history texts to include detailed Aboriginal history and what it means to have been on their land for 50,000 years - that's around 10 times as long as all of the European history we're commonly taught."

The biggest eruption in Mount Etna's history began on 8th March 1669, causing horrifying devastation to the island of Sicily.

Mount Vesuvius may be Italy's most infamous volcano, thanks in large part to its cataclysmic eruption in 79 CE, yet Etna is the country's most active. Records document eruptions by the massive volcano dating as far back as 1500 BCE. In the last hundred years alone 73 eruptions have been recorded there.

Etna is an ominous sight on the Sicilian skyline, towering above the city of Catania with a peak some 3,300 metres above sea level. The volcano is the result of the meeting of the European and African tectonic plates, stresses of the continents' collision forcing one under the other and causing a subduction zone.

On 8th March 1669 Etna started rumbling. A series of eruptions over the following weeks would see an estimated 20,000 people killed by the volcano.