A genomic analysis of dozens of ancient Korean skeletons revealed a special "sacrificial caste" of people.
About 1,500 years ago, entire families were sacrificed to honor local royalty in what is now South Korea, a new genetic study finds. The analysis also reveals a dense kinship system focused on women and their descendants.

In a study published Wednesday (April 8) in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers investigated 78 skeletons from the Imdang-Joyeong burial complex in Gyeongsan, located in the southeast region of the Korean Peninsula. The tombs in this cemetery were constructed between the fourth and sixth centuries, during the Three Kingdoms period (circa 57 B.C. to A.D. 668). Historical records suggest that, in the Silla kingdom, people practiced "sunjang," a form of human sacrifice in which servants, or "retainers," were killed and buried with the local elite, and that the society favored "consanguineous" marriage between related individuals.

By analyzing the DNA of 78 skeletons found in the Imdang-Joyeong burial complex, the researchers discovered 11 pairs of people who were first-degree relatives (such as parent and offspring, or siblings) and 23 pairs of people who were second-degree relatives (such as grandparent and grandchild or aunt and niece), suggesting that the Silla society preferred to bury closely related people together.

But the researchers also found five individuals — both royal and nonroyal — whose parents were closely related, including one first-cousin pairing, proving that both the Silla royal elites and the Silla people who were sacrificed to them practiced consanguineous marriage.

The identity of a mysterious artefact found in Devon almost 160 years ago has finally been revealed.

New research has identified it as a pendant made from the tooth of a grey seal, which would have been worn by an ancient human more than 15,000 years ago.

An "exceptionally rare" seal tooth pendant has been unearthed among the finds of a famed Victorian dig.

William Pengelly's excavations at Kents Cavern in Torquay, UK, between 1865 and 1880 set the standard for how archaeology should be carried out. His team were among the first to keep careful notes of where artefacts were found and the layers of sediment they were in, meaning that their discoveries are still scientifically useful more than a century later.

Renewed interest in the finds made in Kents Cavern has uncovered a tooth artefact that had previously been overlooked. Initially thought to come from a badger, a wolf or a beaver, a new study has found that the tooth actually came from a seal.

As the cave was over 100 kilometres from the coast when the pendant was made 15,000 years ago, it suggests that ancient humans were travelling long distances, perhaps as they followed migrating animals. They also seem to have been trading widely across Britain and possibly to wider European societies as well.

Dr Silvia Bello, one of our human evolution experts who co-authored the study, says that the "unique" pendant gives us an insight into the creativity of Britain's ancient inhabitants.

"This pendant dates to a time when there was a flourishing of engraving and other artistic behaviour in Europe," Silvia says. "Upper Palaeolithic humans seem to be creating objects not just for practical purposes, but aesthetic ones as well."

"It's just speculation, but I think this seal tooth pendant might have had some formal purpose - perhaps to show the social identity of the pendant's owner. It could be an indication that the person, or group they were part of, was familiar with the sea and maybe used to live near the coast."

"We'll never know for sure, but it provides a fascinating glimpse into the past."

The findings of the study were published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

A Chinese-Uzbek archaeological team has discovered a remarkable 3,000-year-old city along the Silk Road that is rich with artifacts, providing new insights into urban development during the early Iron Age in Central Asia.

Originally discovered in 1969, the expansive Bandikhan II site, covering 107,639 square feet, is located in the Bandikhan oasis. The Surxondaryo region in southern Uzbekistan is known as an archaeological treasure trove, containing multiple ancient settlement mounds. It was only recently, in 2023, that a team began excavations at Bandikhan II, which served as a crucial hub on the legendary Silk Road.

During the excavation, archaeologists uncovered remnants of an eastern wall, numerous structures, and interconnected rooms, along with a wealth of artifacts. These findings enabled researchers to identify the city as belonging to the Yaz culture, further enhancing our understanding of their role within ancient Bactria, according to TV Brics.

"Every century has its Abou Dharr. Islam is waiting for its own." (Ali Shariati, Islam and the Social Question, 1972)

"The wretched of the earth no longer wait. They act." (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961)

"The human being is not a product of his environment but a project in the making." (Malek Bennabi, The Problem of Ideas in the Muslim World, 1970)

Author's Note: This article is published in three parts.

Part I [this article] traces the life, thought, and intellectual legacy of Ali Shariati.

Part II explores Shariati's intellectual dialogue with Frantz Fanon and the decolonization of consciousness, his revolutionary distinction between Alavid (Red) and Safavid (Black) Shiism, his debt to Malek Bennabi's concept of colonizability, the figure of Abou Dharr as the archetype of Islamic social justice, and the forces that closed in on him until his mysterious death in Southampton in 1977.

Part III draws the bridge between Shariati's unfinished revolution and the world burning today: the 2026 war on Iran and the geotheological framing that legitimizes it, the Shah's son calling foreign bombs upon his own country, and the civilizational endurance of a people that has decided to live standing upright.

"We need to go win a million dollars." Lester Mackey was just a senior computer science major at Princeton when a friend burst into his dorm room in a hysterical fit of excitement. "We need to do this."

In October 2006, Netflix, then a service peddling discs of every movie and TV show under the sun, announced "The Netflix Prize," a competition that lured Mackey and his contemporaries for the computer programmer equivalent of the Cannonball Run. The mission: Make the company's recommendation engine 10% more accurate -- or die coding. Word of the competition immediately spread like a virus through comp-sci circles, tech blogs, research communities, and even the mainstream media. ("And if You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely" read the New York Times headline.) And while a million dollars created attention, it was the data set -- over 100 million ratings of 17,770 movies from 480,189 customers -- that had number-crunching nuts salivating. There was nothing like it at the time. There hasn't been anything quite like it since.

Why the hell would a tech giant even do that? While it's common for successful corporations to protect their data like pirates guarding treasure, at the time CEO Reed Hastings was looking for a way to increase the efficiency of Cinematch, the software the company rolled out in 2000 to recommend movies you might enjoy. (If you liked The 40-Year-Old Virgin, check out Superbad.) Over the years he'd recruited brilliant minds to tinker with the magic formula, but they'd hit a wall. He needed results. Fresh ideas. Innovation.

A new Colorado State University study presents evidence that the earliest known dice in human history were made and used by Native American hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago - at the end of the last Ice Age and long before the earliest known dice from Bronze Age societies in the Old World.

Published in American Antiquity, research by author and Ph.D. student Robert J. Madden indicates that dice, games of chance and gambling have been a persistent feature of Native American culture for at least the last 12,000 years, with the earliest examples appearing at Late Pleistocene Folsom-period archaeological sites in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. These artifacts predate the earliest known Old World dice by more than 6,000 years.

"Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations," Madden said. "What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes and using those outcomes in structured games thousands of years earlier than previously recognized."

To determine the artifacts as dice, Madden developed a checklist of physical features previously identified as dice by more recent historical analysis and applying this method to reclassify older artifacts that previously had been overlooked or misidentified.

Rewriting the deep history of probability

Historians of mathematics widely regard dice games as humanity's earliest structured engagement with randomness, an intellectual precursor to probability theory, statistics and later scientific thinking. Until now, the origins of these practices were thought to lie exclusively in Old World complex societies beginning around 5,500 years ago.

This study suggests a much deeper and broader history.

"These findings don't claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory," Madden said. "But they were intentionally creating, observing and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers. That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking."

A two-thousand-year-old papyrus fragment, discovered in the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, reveals thirty previously unpublished verses by Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher of the 5th century BCE. This discovery offers researchers direct access to a body of thought previously known only through quotations from later authors. The very first edition, translation and commentary on these verses are published in the book L'Empédocle du Caire, edited by Nathan Carlig, Alain Martin and Olivier Primavesi.

It was at the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo (IFAO) that Nathan Carlig, a papyrologist at the University of Liège, identified papyrus P.Fouad inv. 218 as an unknown fragment of the Physica, the great poem by the philosopher Empedocles of Agrigentum. "Until now, our knowledge of Empedocles' work relied exclusively on indirect sources such as fragmentary quotations, summaries or allusions scattered throughout the works of authors such as Plato, Aristotle or Plutarch. Papyrus P.Fouad inv. 218 allows us to read the philosopher in his original text, without the intermediary of often partial or biased sources. It is also the only known copy of the Physica, fragments of other parts of which from the same scroll are preserved in Strasbourg."

Allow me, for once, not to offer you an analysis of the geopolitical situation, but a testimony and a reflection.

The "Axis of Resistance" is an Iranian defense concept based on the mobilization of Shiite minorities in the Middle East. Initially, it aimed to capitalize on the appeal of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution by arming and organizing Shiite minorities. This revolution was a liberation from Anglo-Saxon colonialism. Protecting Iran was a necessity for all those fighting against colonialism. Imam Khomeini's interpretation of Islam transformed Shiite suffering into a force: Imam Ali had fought for justice. His example paved the way for all to reach paradise.

However, this system of proxies violated the sovereignty of the states where these minorities formed militias. It became intolerable to all states in 2011 with the uprising of the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the subsequent attempt to overthrow the ruling Sunni family, the Al Khalifa.

This was the moment when Qassem Soleimani was appointed major general. He then transformed the Axis of Resistance by offering each of its members the opportunity to become independent and lead, wherever they were, the anti-imperialist revolution of Imam Khomeini. Within a few years, Iran no longer had proxies, but rather allied foreign militias. Christians and Sunnis joined the historical fighters of the Shiite base. The fear that each of them inspired in the powers that be continued to grow. With Iran and Syria, Hezbollah and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), Ansar Allah, and many others, the "Axis of Resistance" became the most significant armed force in the Middle East.

Gaza did not become a laboratory of expulsion overnight. It was turned into one by planners, brokers, generals, travel agents, and politicians who looked at a trapped Palestinian population and saw not families rooted in a homeland, but a demographic obstacle to be thinned, rerouted, and erased. The history is not marginal to the zionist project. It sits inside Israel's bureaucratic memory, its migration networks, and its long habit of dressing forced removal in the language of administration and opportunity.

At the centre of that machinery stood Ada Sereni, later mythologised in Israeli memory as the Lady in the Black Dress, a wealthy Roman Jewish Zionist operative who helped organise clandestine Jewish migration to Palestine and later became entangled in efforts to push Palestinians out of Gaza. Most readers have never heard of her, which is part of what makes the story so revealing, because Sereni sits precisely where sanctified Zionist legend merges with the practical logistics of Palestinian removal.

Recent reporting by +972 Magazine and the investigative podcast Palestinians in Paraguay reopened this buried chapter by reconstructing the Paraguay scheme through deportee testimony and archival evidence. This article builds on that work by widening the lens beyond Paraguay itself, tracing the Italian political network around Sereni, the failed Libya and Uruguay routes, and the bureaucratic continuity that runs from the post-1967 occupation into today's language of "voluntary emigration."

Officials say 13-room structure was used for hospitality and teaching

Egyptian archaeologists recently unearthed the remnants of a Christian monastic site from the 5th century, some 400 years after the time of Jesus Christ.

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities wrote in a translated statement March 23 that a building was recently found in the Qallaya area in Egypt's Beheira Governorate.

The structure, likely a guesthouse used to host visitors, is a remnant of the "early beginnings of Coptic monasticism," the release said.

Previous buildings have also been found at the site, and the newly discovered structure had 13 multipurpose rooms used for "hospitality and teaching ... in addition to service facilities such as a kitchen and storage areas," officials said.