"There can be no alliance between Russia and the West, either for the sake of interests or for the sake of principles. There is not a single interest, not a single trend in the West which does not conspire against Russia, especially her future, and does not try to harm her. Therefore Russia's only natural policy towards the West must be to seek not an alliance with the Western powers but their disunion and division. Only then will they not be hostile to us, not of course out of conviction, but out of impotence."

These words, which sound like something Russia's President Vladimir Putin might have said recently, were actually penned in 1864 by the Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev. The notion of perpetual Western antipathy runs in strong currents throughout Russian thought over the past two centuries. Indeed this is a well from which Putin has drawn deeply in recent speeches to mobilize the Russian populace and to justify the Kremlin's policies in Ukraine and elsewhere. The West, according to this account, is both envious of Russia's dynamism and moral superiority and eager to profit territorially at Russia's expense. Putin has repeatedly alleged that the West has maintained a containment policy toward Russia since the 18th century; the Western reaction to events in Ukraine is merely the present manifestation of this policy. Indeed, so deep and consistent is the animosity toward the mighty Eurasian colossus that, even without Ukraine, Westerners would have seized on some other pretext, however flimsy, to try to keep Russia on its knees.

It is freezing in the foothills of the Greater Caucasus range. Rufat Gojayev, my Azerbaijani walking guide, leans into the cold sunlight. He directs his tireless steps towards Kiş.

What is Kiş?

Kiş is a remote mountain village that has preserved what may be the oldest Christian church in Azerbaijan, and perhaps in the whole region: a temple founded, according to local legend, in the first century A.D. Its walls are built of pale weathered stone. Its crypts hold nameless dead. Its garden shines with persimmons that hang like fiery tree ornaments from winter-bare branches. The church features a large bronze bust outside its walls: a grinning Thor Heyerdahl, the fabled Norwegian adventurer. This artifact is puzzling.

"Thor Heyerdahl was a great man," Khatiza Abdulrahman, a local government guide, tells us. "He discovered that Azerbaijanis and Norwegians are related."

And so: The global walk stumbles once again into a bizarre and forgotten back eddy of time and place—into another of the world's obscure mysteries.

Heyerdahl, who is mostly famous for sailing a balsa raft called the Kon-Tiki across the South Pacific in 1947, enjoys something of a cult following in Azerbaijan. Why? The dashing Norseman who bobbed across the world's oceans in antique boats during the latter half of the 20th century, always hoping to demonstrate how ancient civilizations may have contacted each other by sea, developed his final theory of cultural diffusion at Kiş. He believed the blond and ginger-haired Vikings of Scandinavia—his own ancestors—originated from somewhere in or near this nation of Turkic speaking peoples at the edge of Persia.

His proof?

An 800-year-old Icelandic saga mentions that Odin, the Norse god and a mythic ancestor of the Vikings, migrated to Scandinavia from an eastern land called "As-hov" or Aser." Thus: Azer-baijan. Add local petroglyphs that depict ships similar to the longboats used by Norse sea raiders to terrorize Europe during the Middle Ages. (Unfortunately, these rock engravings happen to be immensely older than the Vikings, dating back to the Neolithic.) Throw in some vague affinities between Azerbaijani and Norwegian folk music. Mix in a few scraps of allegedly "runic" script unearthed in both nations. And voila: Vikings came from what is today a secular Muslim oil state that, in 2012, scored its own raid against Europe by snatching the Eurovision Song Contest away from three-time host Sweden.

A team of researchers has sequenced the first ancient human genomes from Ireland, shedding light on the origins of Celtic people and their culture.

For their study, geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast studied the genomes of a 5,200-year-old female farmer from the Neolithic period and three 4,000-year-old males from the Bronze Age. Their analysis revealed early Irish farmers were quite similar to southern Europeans, according to a news release.

"There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island," Dan Bradley, study leader and professor of Population Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, explained in the release. "And this degree of genetic change invites the possibility of other associated changes, perhaps even the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues."

It is often debated whether the great transitions in the British Isles, from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture and later from stone to metal use, were due to local adoption of new ways by indigenous people or from the introduction of new people. These ancient Irish genomes confirm the later, suggesting there was a massive migration.

France's archives revealing details of collaboration with Nazi Germany have been declassified.

From Monday, the public can access the police and legal documents from the Vichy regime's collaboration with the German invasion from 1940-44.

A culture of secrecy surrounds this period in France's history, when the government worked with the Nazis in France to round up and deport Jews.

The archives had been sealed until today. Documents relating to the period from September 1939 to May 1945 can be accessed. More than 200,000 documents have been made public.

When Germany invaded France in 1940, the two countries signed an armistice. The German army occupied northern and western France, while the French collaborationist Vichy government ruled the rest of the country. The Vichy regime worked with the Germans and introduced anti-Jewish laws, banning Jews from public life and restricting the jobs they could have.

The wreck of a ship, thought to date back to either the 12th or 13th century, has been found off the coast of Salento.

The sunken ship, made almost entirely of wood and measuring 18 metres by 4.5 metres, has lain for years untouched near the coastline of Salento, in the southern tip of the Puglia region, La Stampa reported.

The wreck was found in the Porto Cesareo Marine Protected Area, where human activity is restricted in order to conserve the area's natural resources.

Pasquale De Braco, a fisherman and adviser to the protected area, notified local authorities of its presence, and divers were sent to investigate.

Six rock cut statues have been discovered within 18th Dynasty shrines in Egypt, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty announced.

The 3,400-year-old statues were found at Gebel el Sisila, a site north of Aswan known for its stone quarries on both sides of the Nile. Blocks used in building almost all of ancient Egypt's great temples were cut from there.

The statues were carved within two of the 32 shrines erected by the officials who were in charge of quarrying the stone.

The two shrines are located about half a mile south of Gebel el Sisila's most famous monument, the rock-cut temple known as the Speos of Horemheb. In antiquity they suffered some fracturing due to earthquakes, and erosion due to their submersion by the Nile during the flood season.

"The shrines were described as almost completely destroyed," el-Damaty said.

Vast lava flows may have provided humans with access to heat and fire for cooking their food millions of years ago, one researcher has proposed.

That, in turn, would have enabled the evolution of human intelligence, Michael Medler, a geographer at Western Washington University, said at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union earlier this month.

The new theory would also help solve a chicken-and-egg puzzle, he added. If cooked food provided the extra calories that allowed people to evolve big brains, and big brains are required to start fires, then how did hominins, with their teensy brains and relatively meager smarts, produce fire in the first place?

"Making fire is very tricky," Medler told Live Science. "I'd argue it requires very high cognitive ability to make fire."

By contrast, sticking food on a pile of hot rocks or setting a twig afire by dipping it into lava requires much less intelligence, he said.

An ancient marble altar showing a nude warrior battling a serpent monster has been discovered by villagers near the Akçay River in Turkey.

Archaeologists said the altar likely dates to the second century A.D., a time when the Roman Empire controlled the area.

The carved scene on the altar is difficult to interpret, archaeologists said. They think it may show a son of Hercules, named Bargasos, fighting a monster in a battle that would bring forth a beneficial river god named Harpasos, to whom the altar is dedicated. At the time of the altar's creation, the Akçay River was known as the Harpasos River.

"According to [a command in] a dream, Flavius Ouliades set this up to the [river] god Harpasos," the Greek inscription at the top of the altar reads. The altar is 2 feet (0.61 meters) high and 1.5 feet (0.45 m) wide, and is now in the Aydin Museum in Turkey.

The dedication suggests that Flavius Ouliades, the person who created the altar, had a strong belief in the river god, the archaeologists said. "As a result of a communication with the river god Harpasos in a dream, Flavius Ouliades was requested to dedicate an altar," wrote Hasan Malay, a professor at Ege University in Turkey, and Funda Ertugrul, an archaeologist with the Aydin Museum, in an article published recently in the journal Epigraphica Anatolica.

Ouliades may have promised to set up the altar if the river god answered the man's prayers "for a good harvest or protection (for himself or his animals) from flooding or falling down the steep slopes or cure from its healing waters," wrote Malay and Ertugrul.

Completely flattening the cities of Messina in Sicily and Reggio di Calabria on the Italian mainland, the most devastating earthquake in recorded European history struck on 28th December, 1908.

The horrifying earthquake started at around 5am in the Straits of Messina. It is estimated that the earthquake and ensuing Tsunami killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people. Along with the two cities devastated by the quake, dozens of smaller coastal towns were also severely damaged.

Measuring 7.5 on the Richter Scale, the main shock of the earthquake triggered a 40 foot high tsunami which smashed coastal towns on both Sicily and the Italian mainland.

In the days following the 28th December hundreds of smaller tremors exacerbated the situation, causing more damage and severely hampering relief efforts to the worst affected areas.

The capital castle of the Teutonic Order at Malbork, Poland, was famous for being unconquered. Apart from many battles around the castle in Malbork, these old medieval walls also saw the assassination of Grand Master Werner von Orseln, supposedly at the hands of a mad knight, known as Johan von Endorf. However, an examination of the details surrounding the murder raises questions about whether Endorf was really as mad or as guilty as he was purported to be.

The Castle of the Teutonic Order in Malbork, is a classic example of a medieval fortress. On its completion in 1406, it became the world's largest brick castle.

Nowadays, it's Poland's official national Historic Monument as designated in 1994. It also lists and is maintained by the National Heritage Board of Poland and World Heritage Site by UNESCO. After more than 600 years, it is still the largest castle in the world by surface area. Before the Teutonic Knights accomplished construction of the castle, it became the capital of their country. Nearby the castle, they created a town that the Order named Marienburg (Mary's Castle). Poland renamed this place calling it ''Malbork''.

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