70 years ago, the Georgian strongman's death brought an end to persecution of the religious minority and the infamous "Doctor's Case"
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's "purges," targeted at groups of his perceived rivals, are a unique historical and psychological phenomenon as well as the subject of considerable research. In the 1920s, the Georgian indiscriminately eliminated political competitors from opposing parties and classes, former White Army officers, and workers of the tsarist military-industrial complex. In the 1930s, he went after internal party opponents, the entire leadership of the Red Army, and the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB). Fortunately, the terror was briefly halted during World War Two.

By the end of the conflict, the search for internal enemies guilty of "impeding the construction of communism" resumed. The new enemy of the Stalinist regime was presented in the image of a cosmopolitan and... a Jew. The so-called 'Doctors' Case' was to become the highlight of this new anti-Semitic purge, but the legal process was abruptly closed immediately after Stalin's death.

Archaeologists representing Spain's National Research Council (CSIS) excavating at the site of Casas del Turunuelo have uncovered the first human representations of the ancient Tartessos people.

The incredible results of an excavation that shed light on a mysterious and ancient civilization that flourished in southern Spain several centuries before Christ have been presented by Spain's National Research Council.

The Tartessians, who are thought to have lived in southern Iberia (modern-day Andalusia and Extremadura), are regarded as one of the earliest Western European civilizations, and possibly the first to thrive in the Iberian Peninsula.

In the southwest of Spain's Iberian Peninsula, the Tartessos culture first appeared in the Late Bronze Age. The culture is distinguished by a blend of local Paleo-Hispanic and Phoenician traits, as well as the use of a now-extinct language known as Tartessian. The Tartessos people were skilled in metallurgy and metal working, creating ornate objects and decorative items.

Archaeologists from Spain's National Research Council (CSIS) on Tuesday presented the amazing results of excavation at the Casas de Turuuelo dig in Badajoz, in southwest Spain, as well as the results of the excavation.

Five busts, damaged but two of which maintain a great degree of detail, are the first human and facial representations of the Tartessian people that the modern world has ever seen.

The Xiongnu dominated the Eurasian steppes two millennia ago and foreshadowed the rise of the Mongol Empire.
The Xiongnu, contemporaries of Rome and Egypt, built their nomadic empire on the Mongolian steppe 2,000 years ago, emerging as Imperial China's greatest rival and even inspiring the construction of China's Great Wall. In a new study researchers find that the Xiongnu were a multiethnic empire, with high genetic diversity found across the empire and even within individual extended elite families. At the fringes of the empire, women held the highest positions of power, and the highest genetic diversity was found among low-status male servants, giving clues to the process of empire building that gave rise to Asia's first nomadic imperial power.

Long obscured in the shadows of history, the world's first nomadic empire - the Xiongnu - is at last coming into view thanks to painstaking archaeological excavations and new ancient DNA evidence. Arising on the Mongolian steppe 1,500 years before the Mongols, the Xiongnu empire grew to be one of Iron Age Asia's most powerful political forces - ultimately stretching its reach and influence from Egypt to Rome to Imperial China. Economically grounded in animal husbandry and dairying, the Xiongnu were famously nomadic, building their empire on the backs of horses. Their proficiency at mounted warfare made them swift and formidable foes, and their legendary conflicts with Imperial China ultimately led to the construction of the Great Wall.

However, unlike their neighbors, the Xiongnu never developed a writing system, and consequently historical records about the Xiongnu have been almost entirely written and passed down by their rivals and enemies. Such accounts, largely recorded by Han Dynasty chroniclers, provide little useful information on the origins of the Xiongnu, their political rise, or their social organization. Although recent archaeogenetics studies have now traced the origins of the Xiongnu as a political entity to a sudden migration and mixing of disparate nomadic groups in northern Mongolia ca. 200 BCE, such findings have raised more questions than answers.

To better understand the inner workings of the seemingly enigmatic Xiongnu empire, an international team of researchers at the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and Geoanthropology, Seoul National University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University conducted an in-depth genetic investigation of two imperial elite Xiongnu cemeteries along the western frontier of the empire: an aristocratic elite cemetery at Takhiltyn Khotgor and a local elite cemetery at Shombuuzyn Belchir. "We knew that the Xiongnu had a high degree of genetic diversity, but due to a lack of community-scale genomic data it remained unclear whether this diversity emerged from a heterogeneous patchwork of locally homogenous communities or whether local communities were themselves genetically diverse," explains Juhyeon Lee, first author of the study and PhD student at Seoul National University. "We wanted to know how such genetic diversity was structured at different social and political scales, as well as in relation to power, wealth, and gender."

Vikings occupied Greenland from roughly 985 to 1450, farming and building communities before abandoning their settlements and mysteriously vanishing. Why they disappeared has long been a puzzle, but a new paper from the Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) determines that one factor — rising sea level — likely played a major role.

"There are many theories as to what exactly happened," to drive the Vikings from their settlements in Greenland, said Marisa J. Borreggine, lead author of the "Sea-Level Rise in Southwest Greenland as a Contributor to Viking Abandonment," which published this week [April 17] in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"There's been a shift in the narrative away from the idea that the Vikings completely failed to adapt to the environment and toward arguments that they were faced with a myriad of challenges, ranging from social unrest, economic turmoil, political issues, and environmental change," said Borreggine, a doctoral candidate in the Harvard Griffin GSAS in EPS.

Located in the Takaichi District of Nara Prefecture, Japan, the village of Asuka is famous for its mysterious stones. The ancient origins of the village date back to the Tumulus period, also known as Kofun Jidai (c. 3rd century-538 C.E.).

Kofun Jidai period (AD 250-552) is characterized by a specific type of earth mound in the shape of a key and surrounded by moats. However, the area is known for its many Buddhist temples, shrines, and statues.

Stone monuments that do not match Buddhist-style sculptures or construction on the hills surrounding Asuka attracts curious visitors and explorers.

Masuda-no-iwafune (literally "Rock Ship of Masuda", 益 田 岩 船 in Japanese), or Rock Ship of Masuda, is the name of the largest of these monuments. Its function is still unknown and it is located atop a hill close to Okadera Station. The largest of the mysterious rock mounds, the rock ship is made of solid granite and measures 11 meters (36 feet) by 8 meters (26 feet), 4.5 meters high (15 feet), and weighs approximately 800 tons as it stands. It's a carved mound, with two holes each about a meter square in the center, going through to the ground.

While investigating at Waskiri, near the Lauca River and the Bolivian-Chilean border, archaeologists found an impressive circular construction on a small hill at the site.

The Waskiri structure, which surprised researchers with its large dimensions and design, is a pre-Hispanic ceremonial center with unknown features in the Andes, according to the researchers.

The study authors say the "surprising" construction is unlike any other ever found in the Andes.

Although Waskiri has never been mentioned in the archaeological record, a priest from Spain named Bartolomé Alvarez, who visited Carangas in the 1580s, does seem to have made a reference to it.

Describing the rituals that took place at the site, Álvarez wrote of attendees in a state of "solemn drunkenness" entering what he called the "house and business of hell.

A place of worship for the Roman god of light, Mithras, was discovered during archaeological excavations in Trier, in southwestern Germany.

The first findings from archaeological excavations started in Trier in February of this year at a site where a new central station for the city fire department was to be built was presented. Scientists discovered the remains of the Mithraeum - the sanctuary of the ancient Roman deity Mithra, which was destroyed and abandoned at the end of the 4th century.

So far, the most significant discovery at the excavation site has been a 1.2-meter limestone bas-relief depicting Cautes, one of Mithras' two torch-bearing companions.

Cautes and Cautopates symbolize sunrise and sunset, summer and winter, and life, and death. Outwardly, they do not differ, but one holds the torch lit and up, the other - extinguished and down.

In October 1990, I gave a lecture at Columbia University. One of those present sarcastically asked: "Don't you think that the bell is ringing for communism?" I told him that John Donne had a poem where there is this line, Hemingway used it as an epigraph: "Never ask for whom the bell tolls. The bell is ringing for you!" I mean that the destruction of the Soviet system is the beginning of the end of your system, in 10-15 years. The audience laughed... But in 2008 the crisis really came. The crisis that was predicted in the West in the early 80s.

And now the question arises, in fact, for whom does the bell toll? He is calling the existing world system. And if Russia remains mentally, economically, socially in such a lax form a part of this world, then the bell will ring for her too. Another thing is that if Russia were not part of this world, but was, say, a socialist system in itself, everything would be different...as expected in the American forecasts of the early 80s.

In the early 1980s, Reagan ordered forecasts from three groups of economists for the next 15 years. And they came to absolutely identical conclusions, and then together they summed up the overall result. The forecast was as follows: ahead of the "two-humped" crisis - 1987-1992-93. Production in the capitalist segment falls by 20-25%, in the socialist - by 10-12%.

The Benin Bronzes — some roughly 3,000 stunning bronze artworks sculpted by African metalsmiths between the 16th and 19th centuries — were crafted from metal mined from Germany's Rhineland region, a new study finds.

Researchers had long suspected that the masterfully crafted sculptures — created by the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin, now part of modern-day Nigeria — were made from melted-down brass rings used as a currency during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but confirmation proved elusive.

Now, scientists have used these metal rings, called manillas, recovered from five centuries-old Atlantic shipwrecks to trace the artworks' provenance, confirming that their metal came from repurposed bracelets that had been originally used to purchase enslaved people. By tracing the manillas' metal, the researchers found the majority had been mined from western Germany. They published their findings April 5 in the journal PLOS One (opens in new tab).

PROLOGUE

Tibet before 1959 was a feudal serf society. The serfs had no freedom, no land, and were often hungry. The democratic reform abolished serfdom and enabled millions of serfs to master their own life.

The impoverished population in the region dropped from 590,000 in 2015 to 150,000 in 2018. The net annual income of rural residents has reached 10,330 yuan (US$1,540) per person by 2017, a 13.6-percent increase year-on-year. The region's GDP more than doubled in six years to 131 billion yuan (US$19.5 billion) in 2017, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics. The Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) eradicated absolute poverty in 2019. China has lifted all of its citizens out of poverty by 2020.