Using state-of-the-art computer models, an amateur historian and a professional astronomer have found evidence that many important societal events recorded in Mayan hieroglyphic inscriptions may coincide with outbursts of meteor showers related to Halley's Comet.

In newly published research, the two-person research team has found more than a dozen instances of hieroglyphic records from the Mayan Classic Period (250-909 CE) indicating that important events occurred within just a few days of an outburst of Eta Aquariid meteor showers, one of the celestial displays tied to the comet.

No Mayan astronomical records from that period survived the Spanish invasion, and the four surviving Mayan codices from later eras do not mention meteor showers. However, the researchers suspect that many significant historical events that coincided with meteor showers, like a ruler's assumption of power or a declaration of war recorded in the codices and carved in stone monuments, are not chance overlaps.

Instead, the Maya most likely predicted meteor showers, the researchers argue in a paper, already available online, that will be published in the 15 September issue of Planetary and Space Science. What's more, the ancient civilization might have purposefully timed significant occasions to coincide with portentous celestial events.

If this new research is validated by further computational tests, it would help address a longstanding puzzle, said David Asher, an astronomy research fellow at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland: How did the ancient Maya, a civilization that meticulously recorded astronomical information about Venus, eclipses, and seasonal patterns, fail to note meteor showers in their astronomical studies? They likely did record meteor showers, assert Asher and his colleague Hutch Kinsman, who has been an independent scholar of Mayan history and hieroglyphics for nearly 25 years, but the records were lost to us.

The remains of a 10th century Viking warrior buried in Birka, Sweden have proven to be those of a woman, thanks to DNA evidence.

The warrior was discovered in the late 19th century by Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe and the remains were assumed to be those of a man as they were buried with weapons, horses, and other military paraphernalia.

"It's actually a woman, somewhere over the age of 30 and fairly tall too, measuring around 170 centimeters," Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, an archeologist at Uppsala University, told The Local.

The findings were uncovered by researchers at the Uppsala University and Stockholm University and published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology on Friday.

Israeli archaeologists on Wednesday unveiled a 1,500-year-old portion of mosaic floor bearing the names of Byzantine Emperor Justinian and a senior Orthodox priest.

David Gellman, director of the excavation in east Jerusalem's walled Old City, said that while the area was rich in archaeological finds, few such inscriptions had been found.

"Direct text and letters from people back then are relatively rare," he told AFP.

The Greek inscription, dated at 550 or 551 AD, commemorates the founding of a building thought to be a hostel for pilgrims near the city's Damascus Gate.

Constantine, the Orthodox priest who founded it, was abbot of the Nea Church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the largest church in Jerusalem when it was built in 543 AD.

Underground rooms from Greenwich Palace, King Henry VIII's birthplace and a center of courtly life, were discovered earlier this year by a team working on a conservation project at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England.

In Greenwich Palace, Henry VIII's entourage experienced raucous good times. There was a banquet hall for extravagant feasts, stables for the king's many horses, kennels for the dogs, tennis courts and even places for cockfighting, a bloody sport particularly beloved by Henry VIII's daughter Elizabeth I.

"When the monarch was in residence, there would have been hundreds of courtiers, servants, soldiers, poets, playwrights, diplomats, foreign dignitaries (and spies), clerics, religious zealots and court hangers-on!," Jane Sidell, inspector of ancient monuments for London at Historic England, a public organization that cares for England's historic places, who is part of the team working on the discovery, told Live Science in an email. "The pomp and ceremony, feasts, intrigues, flirtations, courtships of queens, masques, jousting, and pageantry would have been superb."

A recent article in the journal Antiquity suggests that prehistoric people were hunting giant sloths in eastern Brazil about 23,000 years ago. This adds to an ever-growing body of research questioning the textbook presentation of when and how the Americas were populated.

According to Science News, numerous stone artifacts and bones of giant sloths were found at the rock shelter site of Santa Elina between 1984 to 2004. It is believed the small, bony sloth skin plates were perforated and notched to become ornaments for humans living in the area. Apart from the sloth remains and stone artifacts, remnants of hearths were also found in the sediment layers.

Archaeologists have come across a vast network of underwater ruins making up the ancient Roman city once known as Neapolis, which was largely washed away by a powerful tsunami around 1,700 years ago.

The dramatic deep sea find includes streets, monuments, and around a hundred tanks used to produce garum - a fermented fish sauce that was a popular condiment in ancient Rome and Greece and is likely to have been a significant factor in the Neapolis economy.

Expeditions to find Neapolis, involving researchers from the Tunisian National Heritage Institute and the University of Sassari in Italy, have been running since 2010, but the breakthrough came recently thanks to favorable weather conditions.

"It's a major discovery," the head of the team, Mounir Fantar, told AFP. "This discovery has allowed us to establish with certainty that Neapolis was a major center for the manufacture of garum and salt fish, probably the largest center in the Roman world."

Of the many stories written about Hurricane Katrina in autumn 2005, and its devastating consequences, one crucial element is virtually overlooked. During the all-important hours after the tropical cyclone laid waste to sections of south-eastern United States, the Bush administration ignored the aid of its Cuban neighbour.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro offered to ship over 1,600 doctors and dozens of tons of medical supplies to the US's affected areas. Considering the decades-long terrorist attacks perpetrated against Cuba by US governments, in addition to a crippling embargo, it was a noble gesture by the Castro government.

A gesture largely erased from the record too - it wouldn't do for the powers-that-be to raise Cuba's profile while questioning the leader of the free world. Castro's remarkable offer was not altogether surprising if one looks at the record.

Five nights a week, at least $100 million in crisp new $100 bills is flown from JFK nonstop to Moscow, where it is used to finance the Russian mob's vast and growing international crime syndicate. State and Federal officials believe it is part of a multi-billion-dollar money-laundering operation. The Republic National Bank and the Federal Reserve prefer not to think so.

It's a darkening afternoon. The usual assortment of passengers mills about Gate 14 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, waiting to board Delta Flight 30 nonstop to Moscow: American businessmen prospecting the new Russian capitalism, Russian entrepreneurs returning from investor hunting, expatriates going home to visit family, tourists. One passenger, though, is there only for the nine-hour flight and knows something none of the other passengers knows: that the plane will be carrying 1 million fresh hundred-dollar bills in its belly.

The red, white, and blue Boeing 767 is on the tarmac when, at about 5pm, a cream-colored armored truck drives up. While Delta workers casually go about tossing luggage into the hold, two armed guards begin placing large white canvas bags on a conveyor belt. In the bags are stacks of uncirculated new $100 bills, all still in their Federal Reserve wrappers, dozens to a bag. And there are dozens of bags.

A few minutes later, another armored truck rolls up and unloads another series of even larger bags. In total, this flight will carry about 2,300 pounds of $100 bills, or $100 million.

Human-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.

They shouldn't be there.

Testing puts the rock's age at 5.7 million years.

That's a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.

And they lived in Africa.

But a study into the Trachilos, western Crete, prints determines them to feature prominent human features and an upright stance.

And that's significant as the human foot has a unique shape. It combines a long sole, five short toes, no claws - and a big toe.

In comparison, the foot of a Great Ape look much more like a human hand.

And that step in evolution wasn't believed to have taken place until some 4 million years ago.

"Some crazy person just compared President Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. Yes, this just happened on CNN and Brooke Baldwin's reaction was perfect."

So scribbled one Ricky Davila on Social Media (Twitter).

Indeed, an elderly Southern gentleman had ventured that President Lincoln, not General Lee, murdered civilians, a point even a Court historian and a Lincoln idolater like Doris Kearns Goodwin would concede.

While the Argument From Hitler is seldom a good one; Ms. Baldwin's response was way worse. Were she an honest purveyor of news and knowledge; anchor-activist Baldwin would have sought the facts. Instead, she pulled faces, so the viewer knew she not only looked like an angel, but was on the side of the angels.

Pretty, but not terribly bright, Ms. Baldwin would be shocked to hear that the civics test administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recognizes as correct the following answers to questions about the "Civil War":

If asked to "Name one problem that led to the Civil War," you may legitimately reply: "States' right."

If asked to "Name the war between the North and the South," you may call it, "the War between the States."

Brook would wince, but, again, your reply would be perfectly proper if you chose to name "economic reasons" as one of the problems that led to the Civil War.

Not even the government-the USCIS, in this case-will risk denying that the 1861 Morrill tariff was one cause of the War of Northern Aggression. Lincoln, a protectionist, was expected to enforce the tariff with calamitous consequences to the "the import-dependent South, which was paying [at the time] as much as 80 percent of the tariff."

It's fair to assume that the civics naturalization test (I took it) was not written by pro-South historians. Yet even they did not conceal some immutable truths about the War of Northern Aggression-truths banished from Brooke Baldwin's network.

And from Fox News.

There, you must tolerate progressive Republicans, like John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist, warning about the dangers of identity politics in a majority-white country like the US. (Davidson should try out identity politics in a minority white country like my birthplace, South Africa, where the lives of white farmers are forfeit.) Another Federalist editor seen on Fox is Molly Hemingway. She has vaporized about the merits of "taking down Confederate statues." If memory serves, that was a position the oracular Chucky Krauthammer was willing to dignify.

Back to the white, marginalized gentleman, mocked on CNN.

In all, Lincoln's violent, unconstitutional revolution took the lives of 620,000 individuals, including 50,000 Southern civilians, white and black. It maimed thousands, and brought about "the near destruction of 40 percent of the nation's economy."

While "in the North a few unfortunate exceptions marred the general wartime boom," chronicled historian William Miller, "[t]he south as a whole was impoverished. At the end of the war, the boys in blue went home at government expense with about $235 apiece in their pockets." "[S]ome of Lee's soldiers had to ask for handouts on the road home, with nothing to exchange for bread save the unwelcome news of Appomattox."

Many years hence, Americans look upon the terrible forces unleashed by Lincoln as cathartic, glorious events. However, "The costs of an action cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to morality," noted Mises Institute scholar David Gordon, in Secession, State & Liberty.

At his most savage, General William Tecumseh Sherman waged "total war" on civilians and did not conceal his intent to so do. On commencing his march through Georgia, in September 1864, Sherman had vowed "to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin [were] synonymous terms." To follow was an admission (of sorts) to war crimes: "The amount of plundering, burning, and stealing done by our own army makes me ashamed of it."

"For Sherman's troops sacked and razed entire cities and communities":

"Sherman's troops exhumed graves to loot the corpses. Sherman's troops tore up little girls' dolls and nailed family pets to doors. Sherman's troops left countless civilians - including the slaves they were supposedly liberating - without food or shelter. Sherman ransomed civilians to armies in the area, threatening to execute them or burn their homes if they did not comply. Sherman had a few contemplative moments and was always careful to maintain plausible deniability, but he knew what was happening and let it happen."

Here's the brass tacks (via William Miller, Yankee sympathizer) about Lincoln's brutality and the extent to which the North upended life in the South:

"Confederate losses were overwhelmingly greater, representing a fifth of the productive part of the Confederacy's white male population. Thousands more died of exposure, epidemics, and sheer starvation after the war, while many survivors, aside from the sick and the maimed, bore the scars of wartime and most war malnutrition and exhaustion all the rest of their lives."

The South sustained direct damage as the war was fought, for the most, on its soil.

"Land, buildings, and equipment, especially of slaveless farmers ... lay in ruins. Factories ... were simply forsaken." "Poor white and planter were left little better than ex-slave. ... [A]n every-day sight [was] that of women and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances, begging for bread from door to door. In the destruction of southern life few suffered more than the ex-slaves." By estimations cited in Miller's A New History of the United States, "a third of the Negroes died" in their freemen, informal, "contraband camps," from "the elements, epidemics, and crime."

"The weakening of purpose, morale, and aspiration among the survivors was depressing enough to make many envy the dead," laments White, noting that "rebel losses in youth and talent were much greater than the devastating total of human losses itself."

"The men in blue," said one Southerner late in 1865, "destroyed everything which the most infernal Yankee ingenuity could devise means to destroy: hands, hearts, fire, gunpowder, and behind everything the spirit of hell, were the agencies which they used."

Still, despite having just fought a civil war, there was a greater feeling of fellowship among our countrymen then than there is today.

Struck by how achingly sad the South was, a northern observer, on a visit to New Orleans in 1873, cried out with great anguish: "These faces, these faces, one sees them everywhere; on the streets, at the theater, in the salon, in the cars; and pauses for a moment struck with the expression of entire despair."

Today's America lectures and hectors the world about invading Arab leaders for "killing their own people." What did the sixteenth American president do if not kill his own people?

Yes, "Emerson's 'best civilization' was about to be 'extended over the whole country' with a vengeance."

Of this, Adolf Hitler wholly approved.

CNN's Brooke Baldwin will be shocked-OMG! kind of shocked-to know that in his Mein Kampf, Hitler "expressed both his support for Lincoln's war and his unwavering opposition to the cause of states' rights and political decentralization." (