The Altamira Cave in northern Spain and its well-preserved paintings will again be open to the public from Thursday, albeit to very small groups because of the spread of micro-organisms due to human visitors.

The cave located at Santillana del Mar, in the Cantabria region, was closed in 2002 after damages had been reported to its polychrome prehistoric paintings from the carbon dioxide in the breath of the large number of visitors.

In January the foundation which manages the cave, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, said it could reopen but only to groups of five people a week, and for 37 minutes, until August when the impact of the visits on the paintings would be reassessed.

The culture ministry in Madrid said that on Thursday a first group would be allowed into the cave and selected at random among visitors to the nearby museum.

Ancient Rome's gladiators lived and trained in fortress prisons, according to an international team of archaeologists who mapped a school for the famed fighters.

Discovered at the site of Carnuntum outside Vienna, Austria, the gladiatorial school, orludus gladiatorius, is the first one discovered outside the city of Rome. Now hidden beneath a pasture, the gladiator school was entirely mapped with noninvasive earth-sensing technologies. (See "Gladiator Training Camp.")

The discovery, reported Tuesday evening by the journal Antiquity, makes clear what sort of lives these famous ancient warriors led during the second century A.D. in the Roman Empire.

"It was a prison; they were prisoners," says University of Vienna archaeologist Wolfgang Neubauer, who led the study team. "They lived in cells, in a fortress with only one gate out."

The discovery shows that even outside Rome gladiators were "big business," Neubauer says. At least 80 gladiators, likely more, lived in the large, two-story facility equipped with a practice arena in its central courtyard. The site also included heated floors for winter training, baths, infirmaries, plumbing, and a nearby graveyard.

Sultan Moulay Ismaïl of Morocco, "The Bloodthirsty," reputedly sired hundreds of children and perhaps more than a 1,000. Now computer simulations suggest this could have been possible if the ruler had sex about once a day for 32 years.

Ismaïl, who reigned from 1672 to 1727, was the first great sultan of the Moroccan Alaouite dynasty, the current royal house of the kingdom. He was Sharifian - that is, he claimed descent from Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

Ismaïl's rule was the longest in Moroccan history, and toward its end he controlled the country with an army of more than 150,000 men. Ismaïl was infamously ruthless - his reign is said to have begun with the display of 400 heads at the city of Fez, most of them from enemy chiefs, and over the next 55 years it is estimated he killed more than 30,000 people, not including those in battle.

Any suspicion of adultery against Ismaïl was severely punished. The women were either strangled by the sultan himself, or their breasts were cut off, or their teeth torn out. Men who merely looked at one of his wives or concubines were punished by death.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Ismaïl fathered 888 children, the greatest number of progeny for anyone throughout history that can be verified.

Based on reports by Dominique Busnot, a French diplomat who frequently traveled to Morocco, the sultan may actually have had 1,171 children from four wives and 500 concubines by 1704. At that time, Ismaïl was 57 and had ruled for 32 years.

Some researchers claimed it was unlikely Ismaïl could have fathered that many offspring, noting that women are only fertile for a small window each month, that sperm usually do not fertilize eggs, and that infertility often afflicts women, especially in the developing world. However, other scientists argued women are more fertile than those doubting Ismaïl had said.

Earthenware jug containing five complete earrings and ingots from the late Bronze Age discovered near Israel's border with Lebanon

Archaeologists digging in northern Israel found a silver treasure trove at a site associated with the biblical city of Abel Beth Maacah, located just south of the modern border with Lebanon.

Sitting at the headwaters of the Jordan on a tell overlooking the Hula Valley, Abel Beth Maacah was an Iron Age town on the northern marches of the Israelite kingdom. The Book of Kings chronicles its conquest by Ben-hadad I of Damascus in the early 9th century BCE and by Neo-Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III in 733 BCE.

During excavations in the summer of 2013, a team of archaeologists from Azusa Pacific University and Hebrew University found a massive stone structure, "possibly a tower that was part of a fortification" overlooking the Hula Valley, according to a article recently published in the journal Strata.

Near the base of the massive structure, whose purpose is not yet clear, the team found "several basalt ring weights, parts of a collared-rim jar and a complete jug." Most astonishing, however, was "a small jug that contained a silver hoard composed of earrings and ingots." Based on the pottery surrounding the small jug, archaeologists date the tiny trove to the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age - around 3,300 years ago - the period associated with emergence of the Israelites.

From a sheep ranch in Western Australia comes the oldest slice of Earth we know.

Scientists say they have dated an ancient crystal called a zircon to about 4.4 billion years, making it the earliest confirmed piece of the planet's crust. The findings -- the first to describe the zircon -- were published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday.

"This is the oldest and the best dated of all the crystals that have been reported," said John Valley, lead study author and professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This crystal is a translucent red, Valley said, but glows blue when bombarded with electrons. At 400 micrometers long, its biggest dimension is just a tad larger than a house dust mite, or about four human hairs.

The crystal was found in an arid region north of Perth, Australia, in a low range of hills called the Jack Hills, in 2001.

Abby Martin highlights the top five companies that aided Nazi Germany during the height of WWII, calling out companies such as Hugo Boss, IBM and Ford.


Source: RT

An excellent talk by Professor Antony Sutton, who taught economics at California State University, and was a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

In this talk, Prof. Sutton goes into his impeccable research on how a close-knit group of Western financiers and industrialists (centered around Morgan and Rockefeller in the US, and around Milner and the City financiers, in the UK) created and sustained Soviet Russia.

Particularly, he goes into how Wall Street/City of London financiers used their banking institutions and their industrial enterprises to help finance and sustain the Bolshevik Revolution. Build up Soviet industry during Lenin's Five-Year Plans, both through finance, technology/industrial transfers and technical assistance. Continue to build the Soviets throughout the entire Cold War, through the same kinds of deals. This included the Korea and the Vietnam eras, during which American troops were being killed by... Western-made Soviet equipment.

Evidence of a Stone-Age settlement that may have been swallowed whole by the Baltic Sea has resurfaced near Sweden, revealing a collection of well preserved artifacts left by nomads some 11,000 years ago.

Dubbed by the local press "Sweden's Atlantis" after the fabled island which according to Greek philosopher Plato sank around 9600 B.C. in the Atlantic Ocean, the newly discovered site was in fact some sort of a dump in which nomadic Swedes discarded objects, according to a report by the Swedish daily The Local.

Buried 52 feet below the surface at Hanö, a sandy bay off the coast of Skane County in Sweden, the items include wood pieces, flint tools, animal horns, ropes, a harpoon carving made from an animal bone and the bones of an aurochs and an ancient cattle which became extinct in the early 1600s.

Epic winter swells just off of Oahu, Hawaii, have churned up monster waves more than 7 meters high, sent seawater surging around the foundations of beachfront homes, and gnawed away at sandy cliffs along the island's North Shore.

They've also exposed rare petroglyphs that have not been seen in years.

The unusually strong seasonal surf has washed away layers of sand all along Pupukea Beach, just east of the big-surf mecca of Waimea, to reveal dozens of large glyphs carved into the bench of lava rock.

More than 70 carvings have been exposed, mostly depicting human-like figures and dogs, according to the Historic Hawaii Foundation, whose workers are documenting the images.

Read more here

Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism

In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia's last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the house in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Ural mountain region, where they were being held prisoner. The daughters were finished off with bayonets. To prevent a cult for the dead Tsar, the bodies were carted away to the countryside and hastily buried in a secret grave.

Bolshevik authorities at first reported that the Romanov emperor had been shot after the discovery of a plot to liberate him. For some time the deaths of the Empress and the children were kept secret. Soviet historians claimed for many years that local Bolsheviks had acted on their own in carrying out the killings, and that Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, had nothing to do with the crime.

In 1990, Moscow playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky announced the result of his detailed investigation into the murders. He unearthed the reminiscences of Lenin's bodyguard, Alexei Akimov, who recounted how he personally delivered Lenin's execution order to the telegraph office. The telegram was also signed by Soviet government chief Yakov Sverdlov. Akimov had saved the original telegraph tape as a record of the secret order.¹