The demise of the dinosaurs, some 66 million years ago, represents the ultimate "Cold Case" - no eye witnesses, ancient physical evidence that's partial at best, and a pod of PI's bent on solving the mystery.

Armed with data from an additional decade of fossil discoveries - a new species is unearthed about once a week - and new analytical tools, an international team of paleontologists is pointing the finger at a now-familiar suspect: an asteroid or comet, which triggered the geologically sudden disappearance of dinosaurs.

But, the researchers add, the impactor had accomplices: changing climate and sea levels and a series of eruptions in which magma flooded the surface of a nascent Indian subcontinent as the motion of crustal plates carried it north across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual collision with Eurasia.

Scientific evidence refuting the theory of modern humanity's African genesis is common knowledge among those familiar with the most recent scientific papers on the human Genome, Mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes. Regrettably, within mainstream press and academia circles, there seems to be a conspicuous - and dare we say it - deliberate vacuum when it comes to reporting news of these recent studies and their obvious implications.

Australian historian Greg Jefferys explains that, "The whole 'Out of Africa' myth has its roots in the mainstream academic campaign in the 1990′s to remove the concept of Race. When I did my degree they all spent a lot of time on the 'Out of Africa' thing but it's been completely disproved by genetics. Mainstream still hold on to it."

It did begin the early 90's. And the academics most responsible for cementing both the Out-of Africa theory and the complementary common ancestral African mother - given the name of "Eve" - in the public arena and nearly every curriculum, were Professors Alan C. Wilson and Rebecca L. Cann.

In their defense, the authors of this paper were fully aware that genealogy is not in any way linked to geography, and that their placement of Eve in Africa was an assumption, never an assertion.

Excavations at an archaeological site at Kathu in the Northern Cape province of South Africa have produced tens of thousands of Earlier Stone Age artifacts, including hand axes and other tools. These discoveries were made by archaeologists from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa and the University of Toronto (U of T), in collaboration with the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa.

The archaeologists' research on the Kathu Townlands site, one of the richest early prehistoric archaeological sites in South Africa, was published in the journal, PLOS ONE, on 24 July 2014. It is estimated that the site is between 700,000 and one million years old.

Steven James Walker from the Department of Archaeology at UCT, lead author of the journal paper, says: "The site is amazing and it is threatened. We've been working well with developers as well as the South African Heritage Resources Agency to preserve it, but the town of Kathu is rapidly expanding around the site. It might get cut off on all sides by development and this would be regrettable."

Animals might have survived if impact happened a few million years earlier or later.

Just before a large asteroid slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago, the diversity of plant-eating dinosaur species declined slightly, a new study suggests. That minor shift may have been enough to doom all dinosaurs when the space rock hit.

The scarcity of plant-eaters would have left them more vulnerable to starvation and population collapse after the impact, with consequences that rippled all the way up the food chain.

"The asteroid hit at a particularly bad time," says Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. "If it had hit a few million years earlier or later, dinosaurs probably would have been much better equipped to survive."

Brusatte and his colleagues describe this nuanced view of the famous extinction in Biological Reviews.

Palaeontologists have argued for decades about whether dinosaurs were doing well when the asteroid hit, or whether they were experiencing a worldwide drop in the number of species. To explore this question, the study pulled information from a database on global dinosaur diversity, including hundreds of fossils found in the past decade.

The seafaring empire of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean once spanned more than a thousand miles, serving as the hub through which distant settlements exchanged artifacts and ideas, researchers say.

This finding could help explain the rise of monumental structures throughout the Pacific starting about 700 years ago, scientists added.

Tonga is an archipelago of about 160 Polynesian islands, with the core of the kingdom covering an area of about 195,000 square miles (500,000 square kilometers). The islands, located about two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand, were first settled about 2,800 years ago by the Lapita people.

Beginning about 800 years ago, a powerful chiefdom arose in Tonga, unique in Oceania - that is, the islands of the South Pacific - in how it successfully united an entire archipelago of islands. However, much remained unknown about how far Tonga's influence actually reached.

"How much voyaging and interaction occurred in the prehistoric Pacific has been debated for centuries," said lead study author Geoffrey Clark, an archaeologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Flipping through an illustrated manuscript from the 13th century, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Jesus loved a good fart joke. That's because the margins of these handmade devotional books were filled with imagery depicting everything from scatological humor to mythical beasts to sexually explicit satire. Though we may still get a kick out of poop jokes, we aren't used to seeing them visualized in such lurid detail, and certainly not in holy books. But in medieval Europe, before books were mass-produced and reading became a pastime for plebes, these lavish manuscripts were all the rage - if you could afford them. The educated elite hired artisans to craft these exquisitely detailed religious texts surrounded by all manner of illustrated commentary, known today as marginalia.

Kaitlin Manning, an associate at B & L Rootenberg Rare Books and Manuscripts, says part of the reason why modern viewers are so captivated by marginalia is because we expect this era to be so conservative. For example, few Monty Python fans realize that the comedy group's silly animations are direct references to artwork in illuminated manuscripts. (Illuminated simply means decorated with gold or silver foil.) "I think it's such a shock when you have this idea in your head of what medieval society was like," says Manning, "and then you see these bizarre images that make you question your assumptions." The wild mixture of illustrations is a challenge to our contemporary desire to compartmentalize topics like sex, religion, humor, and mythology.

Manning was first drawn to marginalia while studying at the Courtauld Institute in London, where she was able to work with some of the most significant illuminated-manuscript collections in the world, including those at the British Library. "I loved the idea that marginalia was such an overlooked part of the medieval experience," says Manning, "so much that up until 20 or 30 years ago, scholars were completely uninterested and wrote it off as trivial or not meaning anything."

There's a weekly trial on the Internet about who may be stealing culture from whom. Earlier this week, the defendants were Iggy Azalea and white gay men. A while back, it was Macklemore and the Harlem Shakers.

Now, we have come across a story from the Jim Crow era about cultural mimicry between people of color.

In mid-20th century America, the turban was a tool that people of color used for "confounding the color lines," writes Manan Desai, board member of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. In some places, if you could pass yourself off as something other than black, you could circumvent some amount of discrimination. People of color - both foreigners and African-Americans - employed this to their advantage. Some did it just to get by in a racist society, some to make a political statement, and others - performers and businessmen - to gain access to fame and money they wouldn't have otherwise had.

A set of mysterious, 5,000-year-old rock carvings could see the light of day again, after being buried 50 years ago to protect them from vandals.

The Cochno Stone in West Dunbartonshire bears what is considered to be the finest example of Bronze Age "cup and ring" carvings in Europe.

The stone, which measures 42ft by 26ft, was discovered by the Rev James Harvey in 1887 on farmland near what is now the Faifley housing estate on the edge of Clydebank.

It is covered in about 90 carved indentations, or "cups", and grooved spirals, along with a ringed cross and a pair of four-toed feet.

Because of the array of markings on it, the Cochno Stone has been recognised as being of national importance and designated as a scheduled monument.

"The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees." ~ T.H. White

Let me assure you - I do believe in God. I believe in the Divine, with a big 'D.' I believe in a vastness, which has created this Universe and others, which our human minds can hardly digest. What I don't believe in anymore is science, or religion.

Religion is nothing more than a human construct to try to explain the unexplainable. In the process it becomes political. Oh. So. Political.

Our religions institutions are now (and have been) used by the crumbling powers-that-be to divide us. We separate ourselves not just as fundamentalists, but also as 'believers' in dogma of every flavor.

Then - there's science. Truly a 'religion' in its protectionist fervor, and hell-bent on upholding the discordant, outdated, simply false projections that are supported by institutionalized information parsing. It is upheld with tactics no less pernicious than organized religious institutions.

Questioning is the most important aspect of science, and that is a direct threat to authority, and ironically scientists and the science institutions have become authorities and churches. They have become our priests of the modern era. Whatever the priest with the biology hat says must be true about life. Whatever the priest with the physics hat says must be taught as facts. . . Science is no longer serving the purpose of discovering truth. It has become the main method of control. Governments have always kept people in line by collaborating with certain institutions. It used to be organized religion, where there basically was no difference between state and religion. Now, there is no difference between science and state. Why? Because of where the funding comes from.

This 'scientific' paradigm is not meant to heal humanity, it is meant to keep it sick. It is meant to keep us as consumers - of drugs, of petro-guzzling cars, of toxic products that none of us needs. An old survey from the EPA estimates that 7.6 billion tons of industrial wastes from 60,000 businesses are generated. Most of these wastes are in the form of waste waters (97%), but they fill our air, our soil, and everything from shampoo to crayons.

* Archaeologists have Clovis arrowheads mingled with the bones of two gomphotheres in northwestern Mexico

* Gomphotheres were about the same size as modern elephants

An ancestor of the elephant once believed to have disappeared from North America before humans ever arrived there roamed the continent longer than previously thought - and was hunted by early man.

Archaeologists have discovered artifacts of the prehistoric Clovis culture mingled with the bones of two gomphotheres - an ancient ancestor of the elephant - at an archaeological site in northwestern Mexico.

The discovery suggests that the Clovis - the earliest widespread group of hunter-gatherers to inhabit North America - likely hunted and ate gomphotheres.