The nation is currently engulfed in a debate about critical race theory, a social science that emerged in the mid-1970s that analyzes how racism has been used as a system to disempower people of color. The view has been popularized by people like Ibrahim X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, whose books How to Be an Antiracist and White Fragility mainstreamed the idea that racism is systemic and must be combatted constantly and vigorously, at every level of society. More recently, there's been some pushback, too: Republicans across the nation have been making attempts to ban this theory from public schools, pointing out that its practical application has led to the demonization of white students.

The problem with critical race theory is much deeper than that, though. It stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the complexities of our social and political realities, reducing them to a single factor: racism. But when it comes to how race and power intersect, black history is far, far richer than critical race theorists allow.

Many in the critical race theory camp view black people as uniquely disempowered by America's history of racism. Racism "has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military service," write several critical race theory scholars, including Kimberle Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda in Words that Wound. "Our history calls for this presumption."

But our history actually tells a different story, too, one of empowerment through struggle. In the racist Jim Crow South, segregation forced African Americans to form their own businesses, universities, legal funds and other civil society institutions. "The more cut off black communities became from white communities and the more that white businessmen refused to cater to black customers, the more possible it became for enterprising black entrepreneurs to create viable businesses of their own," The Henry Ford Foundation's Donna Braden writes.

Italian archaeologists have uncovered the fossilized remains of nine Neanderthals in a cave near Rome, shedding new light on how the Italian peninsula was populated and under what environmental conditions.

The Italian Culture Ministry announced the discovery Saturday, saying it confirmed that the Guattari Cave in San Felice Circeo was "one of the most significant places in the world for the history of Neanderthals." A Neanderthal skull was discovered in the cave in 1939.

The fossilized bones include skulls, skull fragments, two teeth and other bone fragments. The oldest remains date from between 100,000 and 90,000 years ago, while the other eight Neanderthals are believed to date from 50,000-68,000 years ago, the Culture Ministry said in a statement.

The Grianan of Aileach, also called Greenan Ely or Greenan Fort, is a stone ringfort located on the summit of Greenan Mountain in County Donegal, Ireland.

The fort is believed to have been constructed by the Cenél nEógain, a branch of the Northern Uí Néill dynasties during the 8th or 9th century, serving as the principal seat of the Kings of Ailech which ruled the medieval Irish province of Ailech, otherwise known as the Kingdom of Ailech.

According to Irish mythology, the fort's construction is attributed to the Dagda (meaning "the good god" or "the great god"), a deity and the celebrated king of the Tuatha Dé Danann who was associated with fertility, agriculture, manliness, strength, as well as magic, Druidry and wisdom.

In the Great Book of Lecan, a medieval Irish manuscript from the 14th or 15th century AD, it describes in verse 38 Ordnance Memoir of the parish of Templemore how the fort was erected around the grave of Dagda's son Aedh, who was killed by the Connacht chieftain Corrgenn.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the fort is situated on the remains of an earlier Iron Age hillfort that dates from around 1000 BC, with evidence of earlier occupation in the Early Bronze Age and possibly the Neolithic period.

John Ghazvinian's superb new book appears at exactly the right time. As the Biden administration gingerly starts to revive the Iran nuclear deal, the mainstream U.S. media will continue its shameful tradition of distorting the truth, partly in response to the Israel lobby's attempt to sabotage America's return to the agreement. Ghazvinian's magisterial, fascinating survey is a calm, persuasive response to the dishonesty, indispensable to anyone concerned about what is still one of the greatest flashpoints in the world.

Ghazvinian is of Iranian descent — his parents left the country with him 46 years ago when he was a year old — and he has used his language skills to work in Iran's archives after getting limited permission. He was a journalist before he joined the academy — the author of a valuable 2007 book on the oil industry in Africa — and his impressive writing ability shines through, making this 667-page book a smooth read.

What stands out about U.S. policy toward Iran over the past 7 decades or so is the lethal combination of arrogance and stupidity. American policymakers fundamentally misunderstood that, as Ghazvinian puts it: . . . Iran is one of the world's oldest, proudest, and most enduring civilizations. . . Iran has had three thousand years of (mostly) continuous nationhood. . . It is also one of only seven or eight nations that were never colonized by European powers. . . Ghazvinian's account makes clear that Iranians will continue to resist U.S. efforts to impose "regime change" on them, whatever their view of their present government. What's tragic is that his thoroughly-researched account shows that hostility between the two nations is not eternal. In the early years of American independence, in fact, there was a distant but mutual respect. Iran was instead worried about its expansionist northern neighbor, Russia, and then, later, about Great Britain.

A new study featured on the 6 May cover of Nature by an international team of researchers details the earliest modern human burial in Africa. The remains of a 2.5 to 3 year-old child were found in a flexed position, deliberately buried in a shallow grave directly under the sheltered overhang of the cave. The interment at Panga ya Saidi joins increasing evidence of early complex social behaviours in Homo sapiens.
Despite being home to the earliest signs of modern human behaviour, early evidence of burials in Africa are scarce and often ambiguous. Therefore, little is known about the origin and development of mortuary practices in the continent of our species' birth. A child buried at the mouth of the Panga ya Saidi cave site 78,000 years ago is changing that, revealing how Middle Stone Age populations interacted with the dead.

Panga ya Saidi has been an important site for human origins research since excavations began in 2010 as part of a long-term partnership between archaeologists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany) and the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi).

"As soon as we first visited Panga ya Saidi, we knew that it was special," says Professor Nicole Boivin, principal investigator of the original project and director of the Department of Archaeology at the MPI for the Science of Human History. "The site is truly one of a kind. Repeated seasons of excavation at Panga ya Saidi have now helped to establish it as a key type site for the East African coast, with an extraordinary 78,000-year record of early human cultural, technological and symbolic activities."

The Wonderwerk Cave site in South Africa is one of very few places on Earth where human activity can be traced back continuously across millennia, and scientists just established the oldest evidence of archaic human habitation in the cave: some 1.8 million years ago.

That's based on an analysis of sedimentary layers containing animal bones, the remnants of burning fires, and Oldowan stone tools: Objects made from simple rocks with flakes chipped off to sharpen them, representing what was once a significant step forward in tool technology.

While tool artifacts at other sites have been backdated as far as 3.3 million years ago, the new findings are now thought to be the earliest sign of continuous prehistoric human living inside a cave - with the use of fire and tools in one fixed location indoors.

On May 9, 2001, Steven M. Greer took the lectern at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., in pursuit of the truth about unidentified flying objects. Greer, an emergency-room physician in Virginia and an outspoken ufologist, believed that the government had long withheld from the American people its familiarity with alien visitations. He had founded the Disclosure Project in 1993 in an attempt to penetrate the sanctums of conspiracy. Greer's reckoning that day featured some twenty speakers. He provided, in support of his claims, a four-hundred-and-ninety-two-page dossier called the "Disclosure Project Briefing Document." For public officials too busy to absorb such a vast tract of suppressed knowledge, Greer had prepared a ninety-five-page "Executive Summary of the Disclosure Project Briefing Document." After some throat-clearing, the "Executive Summary" began with "A Brief Summary," which included a series of bullet points outlining what amounted to the greatest secret in human history.

Over several decades, according to Greer, untold numbers of alien craft had been observed in our planet's airspace; they were able to reach extreme velocities with no visible means of lift or propulsion, and to perform stunning maneuvers at g-forces that would turn a human pilot to soup. Some of these extraterrestrial spaceships had been "downed, retrieved and studied since at least the 1940s and possibly as early as the 1930s." Efforts to reverse engineer such extraordinary machines had led to "significant technological breakthroughs in energy generation." These operations had mostly been classified as "cosmic top secret," a tier of clearance "thirty-eight levels" above that typically granted to the Commander-in-Chief. Why, Greer asked, had such transformative technologies been hidden for so long? This was obvious. The "social, economic and geo-political order of the world" was at stake.

CT scanning used to uncover remnants of malignancy hidden inside medieval bones provides new insight into cancer prevalence in a pre-industrial world.

The first study to use x-rays and CT scans to detect evidence of cancer among the skeletal remains of a pre-industrial population suggests that between 9-14% of adults in medieval Britain had the disease at the time of their death.

This puts cancer prevalence in a time before exposure to tumour-inducing chemicals from industry and tobacco at around ten times higher than previously thought, according to researchers.

The world's first identified pregnant ancient Egyptian mummy has been revealed in Warsaw after anthropologists spotted a 'tiny foot' in the woman's womb.

Scientists from the Warsaw Mummy Project were carrying out research on the mummified body, which was initially thought to have been an Egyptian priest named Hor-Djehuty until the team revealed it was a woman.

Marzena Ożarek-Szilke, anthropologist and archaeologist from the Faculty of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw told PAP: "We were already at the stage of summarizing the project and sending the publication to print. With my husband Stanisław, an archaeologist of Egypt, we had the last look at the images and noticed a familiar image for parents three children in the deceased woman's abdomen a tiny foot."

Carrying out detailed analyses of images from a tomograph and X-rays, the researchers were eventually able to see the whole foetus which revealed that the woman had been 26-28 weeks pregnant.

Dr. Wojciech Ejsmond from the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures PAS said: "For unknown reasons, the foetus had not been removed from the abdomen during the mummification.

"For this reason, the mummy is really unique. Our mummy is the only one identified so far in the world with a foetus in the womb."

So far, the team has been unable to identify the baby's gender nor the reasons for it remaining in the womb.

As President Biden wrapped up a 65-minute joint address to Congress to mark his administration's first 100 days, what was shared in the lead-up to his speech sowed discord over the entire affair:


Sure enough, the President delivered on this. Opening his address, Biden stated, "I took the oath of office — lifted my hand off our family Bible — and inherited a nation in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War."

Yes, the January 6th siege on the U.S. Capitol building, often alluded to as an "insurrection," was an embarrassing day for our country. But to suggest that it was "the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War" is disingenuous at best. At worst, it's a malicious attempt to whitewash the history of attacks carried out both by and on the government that have had much more catastrophic results.

Apart from the September 11th terrorist attacks that targeted the country's financial system, Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the defenders of our democracy when a hijacked American Airlines flight 77 flew into the Pentagon. Were it not for the heroes who resisted against the hijackers of United flight 93, Al Qaeda's attempt to fly a commercial airline into the White House or U.S. Capitol building would have come to fruition. Despite being a horrific tragedy, 9/11 has been dismissed by some as being explicitly a "foreign attack," not one from within.