• The sharing of genes is mainly seen in Europeans and may have given an advantage to individuals with Neanderthal variants
• Scientists at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology don't understand the function of the variants
• But one expert thinks that fatty acids genes were of benefit to Neanderthals and then helped modern Europeans adapt to colder climates
• The same findings were not seen in Asian people though

Neanderthals might have been extinct for 30,000 years but their genomes live on in modern humans.

And now scientists believe that modern Europeans share a number of genes involved in the build-up of certain types of fat with Neanderthals. The same genes were not seen in people from Asia and Africa, however.

It is though that ancient genes might have helped Europeans adapt better to colder climates, giving them an evolutionary advantage.
'Legacy' genes from Neanderthals may be to blame for modern diseases

Neanderthals and modern humans are thought to have co-existed for thousands of years and interbred, meaning Europeans now have roughly 2 per cent Neanderthal DNA.

These 'legacy' genes have been linked to an increased risk from cancer and diabetes by new studies looking at our evolutionary history.

However, it is not all bad news, as other genes we inherited from our species' early life could have improved our immunity to diseases which were common at the time, helping us to survive.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler might have married a woman of Jewish descent, according to DNA analysis conducted for a TV documentary.

The Channel 4 programme will claim that Eva Braun, the lover whom the anti-Semitic fuhrer married shortly before they both killed themselves in 1945, was possibly of Jewish ancestry.

The Dead Famous DNA film - to be screened on Wednesday - tested hair samples which are said to have come from a hairbrush used by Braun and discovered at Hitler's mountain retreat.

The German leader, behind the mass extermination of Jews during the Second World War, was 23 years older than his lover - who fell in love with him when she was a teenager - and worried the relationship would affect his image, he kept her largely hidden away at his Alpine residence, the Berghof.

A team of scientists examined the hair - which was sourced by presenter Mark Evans - and they found a particular sequence within the DNA, which had been passed down the maternal line - the haplogroup N1b1 - which the channel said was "strongly associated" with Ashkenazi Jews, who make up around 80% of the global Jewish population. Many Ashkenazi Jews in Germany converted to Catholicism in the 19th century.

Evans said: "This is a thought-provoking outcome - I never dreamt that I would find such a potentially extraordinary and profound result."

Fragments of an oak trackway suggesting human habitation have been found within the 7,500-year-old "drowned forest" on the north Galway shoreline.

The track could be between 3,500 and 4,500 years old, and may have been built when the sea level was rising and was gradually enveloping the forest that pre-dated Galway Bay.

NUI Galway (NUIG) geologist Prof Mike Williams, who has researched the "drowned forest", comprising a layer of peat and tree stumps uncovered by the winter storms, examined the trackway or "togher" this week.

He was alerted to it by a Spiddal resident, Alan Keogh, who discovered it when walking on the south-east Connemara shore.

Mr Keogh said that he had heard about the drowned forest, recently reported in this newspaper, and recognised the significance of what appeared to be a "symmetrical structure" below a line of peat, about 1.5m by 1m.

"Together with the Bearna canoe, this is the first evidence of human habitation within these forests and lagoons in this area," said Prof Williams.

"It could have been built during the late Neolithic or early Bronze age era, and may have been ceremonial or may have been built across wetland which was decaying forest, forming into bog."

If you thought weather prediction was a recent phenomenon, you would be in for a surprise if told that weather prediction was done in ancient Egypt some 3,500 years ago!

A new translation of a 40-line inscription on a six-foot-tall 3,500-year-old calcite block from Egypt - called the Tempest Stela - describes rain, darkness and "the sky being in storm without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses".

The inscription could provide new evidence about the chronology of events in the ancient Middle East.

Two scholars at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute - Nadine Moeller and Robert Ritner - believe the unusual weather patterns described on the slab were the result of a massive volcano explosion at Thera - the present-day island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea.

"This is important to scholars of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, generally because the chronology that archaeologists use is based on the lists of Egyptian pharaohs, and this new information could adjust those dates," explained Moeller, an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at the Oriental Institute.

A volcano avalanche in Sicily 8,000 years ago triggered a devastating tsunami taller than a 10-story building that spread across the entire Mediterranean Sea, slamming into the shores of three continents in only a few hours.

A new computer simulation of the ancient event reveals for the first time the enormity of the catastrophe and its far-reaching effects .

The Mt. Etna avalanche sent 6 cubic miles of rock and sediment tumbling into the water - enough material to cover the entire island of Manhattan in a layer of debris thicker than the Empire State Building is tall.

The mountain of rubble crashed into the water at more than 200 mph. It pummeled the sea bed, transformed thick layers of soft marine sediment into jelly and triggered an underwater mudslide that flowed for hundreds of miles.

A new translation of a 40-line inscription on a 3,500-year-old stone block from Egypt called the Tempest Stela describes rain, darkness and the 'sky being in storm without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses.'
The Tempest Stela dates back to the reign of the pharaoh Ahmose, the first pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. His rule marked the beginning of the New Kingdom, a time when Egypt's power reached its height.

Broken pieces of the stela were found in the third pylon of the temple of Karnak at Thebes, modern Luxor, between 1947 and 1951 by French archaeologists.

There is no such thing as an objective map. This was true of cave paintings, Roman tapestries, and colonialists' charts of Africa. It is also true of Google Maps.

About halfway through Jonathan Swift's boisterously witty epic poem On Poetry: A Rhapsody, the 18th century English satirist briefly turns his attention to maps of Africa, writing:

So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.

In Swift's time, European explorers had only skirted around the coastal edges of Africa and its interior remained, to all intents and purposes, a mystery. But as the poet pointed out, rather than just leave the middle of the continent blank, mapmakers would instead "fill their gaps" with things they thought might reside in such exotic corners of the world, such as strange monkeys, roaming lions, and "elephants for want of towns."

Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. It doesn't make it any less wrong, but certain scientists with questionable ethics have gotten away with a lot in the name of, well, science. The more (in)famous examples of wayward science include eugenics sterilization, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, and the CIA program MKULTRA. But the government sponsored Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a program that ran for forty years in Macon County, Alabama during the mid-20th century, is one of the more appalling and deceitful of the bunch.

In 1932, the medical community still did not know a whole lot about treating syphilis. This was the case despite documentation of the disease dating all the way back to just after Columbus made his famous jaunt across the big blue.

According to the Oxford Journal, syphilis was a "cultural embarrassment" and had many different names that exemplified prejudices of different nationalities. The German and English called it the "French Pox." The Russians referred to it as the "Polish sickness" and the Poles as the "German sickness." The Japanese called it the "Chinese ulcer."

In the 16th century, Europe experienced a syphilis epidemic likely caused by the abundance of sailors traveling from sea port to sea port and doing what sailors do when they come into port. In fact, there is some evidence that points to Columbus and his crew being the ones who brought syphilis back from the new world. Either way, despite the disease being around for at least 450 years (and some evidence points to longer than that), there was no one, true, successful treatment for it. One popular remedy for several centuries was the use of mercury, which is quite poisonous in it's own right, either by ingestion or rubbing it on the skin. This led to the popular saying "a night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury."

In 1908, Japanese scientist Sahachiro Hata (working in Germany) discovered the drug Salvarsan was somewhat effective as a treatment for syphilis. It was also quite toxic, as it came from the arsenic family. There were instances of patients losing limbs after taking the drug. Eventually, in 1912, Hata and Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehlric developed a easier-to-administer, but still toxic, drug called Neosalvarsan - which became the standard treatment for syphilis until the late 1940s.

The architects of the First World War are put on trial in the Hague and deserting soldiers celebrated in a graphic novel produced by Britain's leading comic artists designed to undermine "jingoistic" commemorations of the conflict's centenary.

To End All Wars, which includes 27 short stories based on real incidents, many told from a soldier's perspective, is intended as a corrective to Education Secretary Michael Gove's insistence that the conflict should be taught as a "just war" fought to halt German expansionism.

The anthology, illustrated in classic "war comic" style, includes The Coward's War, the story of Thomas Highgate, the first British soldier to be executed for desertion during the First World War. It concludes with the posthumous pardon awarded in 2006.

"Mud, Lice and Vice" depicts the devastation in the ranks caused by sexually transmitted diseases picked up by young British soldiers taking advantage of French brothels.

In "The Iron Dice," Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of war, is placed on trial at the International Criminal Court in the Hague at a hearing which undermines the claim that war was "inevitable".

A tomb newly excavated at an ancient cemetery in Egypt would have boasted a pyramid 7 meters (23 feet) high at its entrance, archaeologists say.
The tomb, found at the site of Abydos, dates back around 3,300 years. Within one of its vaulted burial chambers, a team of archaeologists found a finely crafted sandstone sarcophagus, painted red, which was created for a scribe named Horemheb. The sarcophagus has images of several Egyptian gods on it and hieroglyphic inscriptions recording spells from the Book of the Dead that helped one enter the afterlife.

There is no mummy in the sarcophagus, and the tomb was ransacked at least twice in antiquity. Human remains survived the ransacking, however. Archaeologists found disarticulated skeletal remains from three to four men, 10 to 12 women and at least two children in the tomb.

Newly discovered pyramid

The chambers that the archaeologists uncovered would have originally resided beneath the surface, leaving only the steep-sided pyramid visible.

"Originally, all you probably would have seen would have been the pyramid and maybe a little wall around the structure just to enclose everything," said Kevin Cahail, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, who led excavations at the tomb.

The pyramid itself "probably would have had a small mortuary chapel inside of it that may have held a statue or a stela giving the names and titles of the individuals buried underneath," Cahail told Live Science. Today, all that remains of the pyramid are the thick walls of the tomb entranceway that would have formed the base of the pyramid. The other parts of the pyramid either haven't survived or have not yet been found.