Ancient people of the Pueblo culture of Chaco Canyon, in what is now New Mexico, decorated their houses with six-digit handprints and footprints.

Although it is not really known why these images were depicted in homes, researchers suggest that having an extra finger or toe made the person more important and respected in this society.

According to National Geographic, researchers were aware of the examples of polydactyly ('many fingers') among the Pueblo culture for many years.

Several skeletal remains showing extremities with extra toes and fingers have also been found. One of the discovered remains had an ornate anklet around its six-toed foot but carried no such offering on its five-toed foot.

A diary of high-ranking Nazi Heinrich Himmler discovered in a Russian military archive is being published in Germany by Bild. The 1,000-page document sheds light on the routinely evil everyday activities of the head of the SS and Holocaust supervisor. Bild daily launched the publication of selected excerpts from Himmler's diary on Tuesday.

The diary, arranged in the form of a calendar, bears dates and contains information about meetings and military decisions made by and in the presence of the SS chief. The diary covers two different periods, pre-war 1938 and the crucial war years of 1943 and 1944.

Over the last 70 years the document remained unnoticed in Russia, before finally being discovered at the Military Archive in Podolsk, a city near Moscow. The authenticity of the diaries has been verified by experts of the German Historical Institute, a state institution in Moscow, which thoroughly analyzed the records and compared them with Himmler's other documents and known facts.

"The importance of these documents is that we get a better structural understanding of the last phase of the war," the Times quotes the institute's director Nikolaus Katzer as saying. The information presented in the diary is "rather dry and not very meaningful," yet provides numerous new details significantly expanding the big picture. "It is therefore a very important and significant testimony," Katzer said.

Damian Imoehl, the journalist who helped Bild get the diaries, says the scariest thing about Himmler is his bureaucratic ordinariness. In an eerily human way, Himmler regularly contacted with his wife and daughter, and could spend an evening watching a film or playing cards. "One day he starts with breakfast and a massage from his personal doctor, then he rings up his wife and daughter in the south of Germany and after that he decides to have 10 men killed or visits a concentration camp," Imoehl said.

A discovery has been made in Greece that might chill you to the bone. At least 80 skeletons were unearthed at an ancient cemetery, their wrists bound by iron shackles, with the remains believed to be those of the victims of a mass execution.

Some of the skeletons in the Falyron Delta necropolis cemetery are lying in a neat row, while others are piled on top of each other, their jaws hanging open.

And although the bones were initially found earlier this year, few people have been allowed to have a look at the skeletons - until now.

Establishment political corruption and election rigging have become so commonplace, the stunning collusion and fraud perpetrated by the Democratic National Committee this year — revealed in several document leaks — seemed virtually inconsequential to vast swaths of the voting public.

To some, however, the coordinated plot to install Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee constituted an unforgivable breach of faith, if not outright criminality — particularly since none of those involved will be held accountable. Despite this outrage, a parallel feeling of helplessness also settled in — after all, the disillusioned lamented, what could really be done to thwart such a blatant power-grab?

To those who believe such malfeasance is beyond resolve, perhaps a revisit to the Battle of Athens on its 70th anniversary will offer some perspective.

In 1946, war-weary GIs began to return from World War II battlefronts in Europe and Japan, ready to resume life in their sleepy Tennessee town. What they found, instead, infuriated them to the core. A power-hungry Democrat and his associates had since usurped local government and law enforcement, and had imposed a maniacal chokehold on the McMinn County town through extortive fines, excess laws, and arrests of anyone who opposed them.

While the soldiers were away fighting power-hungry foreign enemies in 1936, Paul Cantrell, a Democrat from a wealthy and prominent family, used that influence to win the position of sheriff. Though many Athens citizens strongly suspected Cantrell hadn't been elected through entirely legal means, there appeared to be no way to challenge the results.

A study published a few days ago in the journal Nature Genetics has found the presence of a third and a new ancestor to humans — a sibling of the Neanderthal and the Denisovan. The study compared the complete DNA sequences of the Jarawas and the Onges living in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal with the DNA sequences of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and they found some notable differences in the DNA sequences.

"In this study we have found in the DNA sequence of modern humans, specially in the Jarawa and Onge populations, fragments of DNA that belong neither to the Neanderthal nor the Denisovan nor even to most of the contemporary human groups," says Partha P. Majumder, one of the corresponding authors of the paper and Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani, West Bengal.

"Further statistical analysis of the DNA segments showed that the best explanation of the origin of these DNA fragments is that they belong to an unknown third human ancestor that is already extinct. The unknown human ancestor is like an evolutionary sibling of the Neanderthal and the Denisovan."

A small proportion of DNA from the unknown extinct hominin is found only in the population from South and Southeast Asia while it is absent from Europeans and East Asians. "That there is an ancestor of modern humans that was not discovered earlier is a major finding of our work," he says.

A number of cave paintings dating back some 8,000 years have been found in Baltalıın and İnkaya caves in the Marmara province of Balıkesir during a field study conducted by Associate Prof. Dr. Derya Yalçıklı from Çanakkale University, the Arkeofili website has reported.

The paintings, which date back to the Late Neolithic era, were located in two caves five kilometers apart and were said to be 8,000 years old, marking one of the most important archaeological discoveries made in Anatolia in recent years.

When the two caves were analyzed separately, it was revealed they were used for different functions, as the paintings in one of them depicted hunting figures, while the other depicted figures of beliefs.

The floor and northern wall of the İnkaya Cave was greatly damaged by past treasure hunters using dynamite, however, despite this damage, the cave continues to reflect important information about the Neolithic era.

A deer hunt is depicted on the eastern wall of the Baltalıın cave.

The death of King Albert I of Belgium in 1934 -- officially a climbing accident -- still fuels speculation. Forensic geneticist Maarten Larmuseau and his colleagues at KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium), have now compared DNA from blood found on the scene in 1934 to that of two distant relatives. Their analysis confirms that the blood really is that of Albert I. This conclusion is at odds with several conspiracy theories about the king's death.

On 17 February 1934, King Albert I -- the third King of the Belgians -- died after a fall from the rocks in Marche-les-Dames, in the Ardennes region of Belgium near Namur. Albert I was popular and world famous due to his role during the First World War. The fact that there were no witnesses to his death soon fuelled speculations about the king's 'real' cause of death.

Conspiracy theories are circulating to this very day, ranging from a political murder to a crime of passion: the king is said to have been murdered elsewhere, his dead body allegedly never was in Marche-les-Dames, or his fall is believed to have been staged only later. Evidence for these theories, however, has never been found.

After the death of Albert I, Marche-les-Dames virtually became a place of pilgrimage, and relics turned up with the king's trails of blood, said to have been collected during the night of 17 to 18 February by people living in the neighbourhood.

VTM journalist Reinout Goddyn, who works for the Flemish television programme Royalty, bought one of these relics: blood-stained tree leaves. He wanted to know if this could really be the blood of Albert I, given the conspiracy theories. In 2014, UGent Professor Dieter Deforce had already confirmed that the blood was definitely human.

Conducting the first large-scale, genome-wide analyses of ancient human remains from the Near East, an international team led by Harvard Medical School has illuminated the genetic identities and population dynamics of the world's first farmers.

The study reveals three genetically distinct farming populations living in the Near East at the dawn of agriculture 12,000 to 8,000 years ago: two newly described groups in Iran and the Levant and a previously reported group in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

The findings, published in Nature, also suggest that agriculture spread in the Near East at least in part because existing groups invented or adopted farming technologies, rather than because one population replaced another.

"Some of the earliest farming was practiced in the Levant, including Israel and Jordan, and in the Zagros mountains of Iran--two edges of the Fertile Crescent," said Ron Pinhasi, associate professor of archaeology at University College Dublin and co-senior author of the study.

"We wanted to find out whether these early farmers were genetically similar to one another or to the hunter-gatherers who lived there before so we could learn more about how the world's first agricultural transition occurred."

The team's analyses alter what is known about the genetic heritage of present-day people in western Eurasia. They now appear to have descended from four major groups: hunter-gatherers in what is now western Europe, hunter-gatherers in eastern Europe and the Russian steppe, the Iran farming group and the Levant farming group.

"We found that the relatively homogeneous population seen across western Eurasia today, including Europe and the Near East, used to be a highly substructured collection of people who were as different from one another as present-day Europeans are from East Asians," said David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-senior author of the study.

"Near East populations mixed with one another over time and migrated into surrounding regions to mix with the people living there until those initially quite diverse groups became genetically very similar," added Iosif Lazaridis, HMS research fellow in genetics and first author of the study.

In a time when mathematics was "a man's work," Ada Lovelace was trained in aristocratic graces but pursued her passion for what later became computer science.

Many girls growing up in the aristocracy of Victorian-era London fantasized about dancing in elaborate ballrooms and marrying a favorable match. Ada Lovelace dreamed of building a flying machine.

She scoured periodicals for designs of new inventions, considering how a steam engine might power such a device, and studied the anatomy of birds to determine the proper proportion of wing length to body size to enable flight. Her design preceded Henson and Stringfellow's patent for the aerial steam carriage by some 15 years.

She was only 12 at the time, but it was already clear that Lovelace would not stick to convention, eschewing science and mathematics, as women of her time were expected to do.

The daughter of philandering poet Lord George Gordon Byron and aristocratic Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke Byron, Lovelace did not follow in her father's footsteps, as her mother feared she might. Instead, she found a language of her own and wrote the world's first computer program, long before the advent of the first computer.

"Lovelace is a fascinating figure, not least because she made a huge leap when she foresaw the potential of a general purpose computing machine to create music or art," said Suw Charman-Anderson, social technologist and founder of the annual international Ada Lovelace Day.

"She was so far ahead of her time that it seems none of her peers understood her vision."

Archaeologists in Texas have found a set of 16,700-year-old tools which are among the oldest discovered in the West. Until now, it was believed that the culture that represented the continent's first inhabitants was the Clovis culture. However, the discovery of the ancient tools now challenges that theory, providing evidence that human occupation precedes the arrival of the Clovis people by thousands of years.

According to the Western Digs , archeologists discovered the tools about half an hour north of Austin in Texas, at the site called Gault. They were located a meter deep in water-logged silty clay. The site contained more than 90 stone tools and some human remains including fragments of teeth.

The discovery changes everything people have been taught about the history of North America - that is, that the Clovis culture represented the first inhabitants of the continent. The results of the research were presented at the meeting of the Plains Anthropological Conference in 2015. According to Dr. D. Clark Wernecke, director of the Gault School of Archaeological Research:

"The most important takeaway is that people were in the New World much earlier than we used to believe. We were all taught [North America was first populated] 13,500 years ago, and it appears that people arrived 15,000 to 20,000 years ago."

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