At least 35 small pyramids, along with graves, have been discovered clustered closely together at a site called Sedeinga in Sudan.

Discovered between 2009 and 2012, researchers are surprised at how densely the pyramids are concentrated. In one field season alone, in 2011, the research team discovered 13 pyramids packed into roughly 5,381 square feet (500 square meters), or slightly larger than an NBA basketball court.

They date back around 2,000 years to a time when a kingdom named Kush flourished in Sudan. Kush shared a border with Egypt and, later on, the Roman Empire. The desire of the kingdom's people to build pyramids was apparently influenced by Egyptian funerary architecture.

At Sedeinga, researchers say, pyramid building continued for centuries. "The density of the pyramids is huge," said researcher Vincent Francigny, a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in an interview with LiveScience.

"Because it lasted for hundreds of years they built more, more, more pyramids and after centuries they started to fill all the spaces that were still available in the necropolis."

The line snakes around the block, hundreds of people wrapped up against the early autumn chill. The crowd waits patiently as a sensibly-dressed, middle-aged woman wanders along the queue, handing out flyers and apologizing for the delay.

"He's been waiting hundreds of years," says one woman, gesturing towards the archway up ahead with a smile. "It won't kill us to hang on for half an hour."

"He" is Richard III, one of the most famous kings of England, remembered by school children and Shakespeare aficionados alike as a notorious villain, hunchbacked and hateful, accused of killing his own nephews, the "Princes in the Tower," to usurp the throne, and whose whereabouts were, until recently, a complete mystery.

The history books record that in August 1485, Richard - the last English king to die in battle - rode out from Leicester, in central England, to the Battle of Bosworth Field. There he met his end; his body was returned to the city days later, ignominiously lashed to a packhorse.

While other monarchs might have been granted all the pomp and ceremony of a state funeral, as a defeated warrior, Richard was accorded no such regal treatment. Instead his naked remains were put on display to prove to supporters and opponents alike that he really was dead, before being hastily buried in a nearby church.

When one thinks about the ancient world, the visions that often come to mind are of antiquated people, doing antiquated things, with antiquated contraptions. Building the pyramids with ropes and crude wooden pulleys, or sucking back fumes from a hole in ground in order to consult an oracle. These things seem laughably quaint to us with our computer programmed machines and Science™.

But what if our ancestors had actually progressed along further than we might think? I'm one of a growing number people who believe that we, as the human race, have reached a level of technology comparable to our current level long before now, and several times at least. There are many others who, for some years now, have been not been content with history as it has been reported, and are curious as to whether or not we've not reached even more advanced levels of technology before being "reset", or perhaps damning ourselves to the Stone Age again through bad decisions.

Why would anyone begin to believe such a thing? After all, our history books, our sciences, are infallible, aren't they?

Artifacts

Not clay pottery or stone tools. Strange artifacts, tools we can't quite figure out. Objects made from "future" material, or designed in such a way that they couldn't possibly have belonged to the civilizations we see as so quaint. Some of them we still can't figure out. Artifacts such as these:

He wore the English crown, but he ended up defeated, humiliated and reviled.

Now things are looking up for King Richard III. Scientists announced Monday that they had found the monarch's 500-year-old remains under a parking lot in the city of Leicester - a discovery Richard's fans say will rewrite the history books.

University of Leicester researchers say tests on a battle-scarred skeleton unearthed last year prove "beyond reasonable doubt" that it is the king, who died at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and whose remains have been missing for centuries.

"Richard III, the last Plantaganet King of England, has been found," said the university's deputy registrar, Richard Taylor.

The Aztecs who conquered the city of Xaltocan in ancient Mexico around 1435 may have fundamentally changed the genetic makeup of the people who lived there, new research suggests.

The study, published in the December issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, showed that maternal DNA from 25 residents of Xaltocan prior to the conquest did not match that found after.

The findings may help shed light on a long-standing debate over whether the original Otomi people who lived in Xaltocan before the conquest either abandoned the site or were assimilated into Aztec life.

"We're telling a story that's more complicated and nuanced," said study author Lisa Overholtzer, an archaeologist at Wichita State University in Kansas.

"We don't think there was a population replacement but we do think there was a demographic shift associated with the Aztec conquest."

Archaeologists say they have turned up about 150 skulls of human sacrifice victims in a field in central Mexico, one of the first times that such a large accumulation of severed heads has been found outside of a major pyramid or temple complex in Mexico.

Experts are puzzled by the unexpected find of such a large number of skulls at what appears to have been a small, unremarkable shrine. The heads were carefully deposited in rows or in small mounds, mostly facing east toward the rising sun, sometime between 660 and 860 A.D., a period when the nearby city-state of Teotihuacan had already declined but the Aztec empire, founded in 1325, was still centuries in the future.

Georgia State University archaeologist Christopher Morehart, who found the skulls last year in Xaltocan, a farming village just north of Mexico City, said that between 150 and 200 adult skulls or their equivalent in bone parts have been excavated so far from fields that stand on a former lake bed.

Experts weren't expecting to find anything of this kind in the flat, undistinguished pasture land and corn fields. The site is near, but not immediately adjacent to, Teotihuacan, one of the biggest pre-Hispanic cities. It reached its height between 100 B.C. and A.D. 750 and was abandoned by the time the Aztecs arrived in the area in the 1300s.

Bridgewater - Petter Amundsen looks upon the beautiful fresh snow that has blanketed the world around the Evangelical Lutheran chapel, where he plays the organ.

It's an incongruous setting, given the conversation in which he is engrossed.

Amundsen is in Norway, where his day job as chapel organist means he has played for King Harald V and Queen Sonja. But he's talking about what has gripped his heart for the last 10 years - uncovering the secrets of Oak Island in Mahone Bay.

His efforts culminated in a film released in Norway last year that will be shown in London this spring, but the amateur cryptologist is making plans to show it beforehand in Nova Scotia.

The film will debut in 40 theatres in England beginning April 23, though Amundsen would like a screening in Chester on April 13, a year to the day after its release in Norway.

Amundsen has made three trips to film on Oak Island since 2003, the most recent in 2011. He believes the movie will generate interest in Oak Island and boost tourism in the region.

Crop circles dating back to 1945 are proof the phenomenon is no modern hoax, a Tasmanian historian claims.

The mystery of the increasingly intricate patterns was supposedly solved after several high-profile cases were revealed to be the work of artists and mischief-makers armed with barrels, planks of wood and plenty of spare time.

Credit for the hoaxes has been laid largely at the feet of pranksters Dave Chorley and Doug Bower, who in 1991 announced they had been pulling the wool over people's eyes since 1978.

(FYI, crop circles have also been blamed on unusual weather patterns, top secret military experiments and, er, stoned wallabies.)

Full spectrum dominance: The Nazi-American race to control space

Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II (1939/45). It was executed by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), and in the context of the burgeoning SovietAmerican Cold War (1945/91) one purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific knowledge and expertise to the USSR.

Although the JIOAs recruitment of German scientists began after the European Allied victory (8 May 1945), US President Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August 1945. Truman's order expressly excluded anyone found to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism. Said restriction would have rendered ineligible most of the scientists the JIOA had identified for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, and the physician Hubertus Strughold, each earlier classified as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces.

To circumvent President Trumans anti-Nazi order, and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also expunged from the public record the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and régime affiliations. Once bleached of their Nazism, the US Government granted the scientists security clearance to work in the United States. Paperclip, the projects operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists new political personæ to their US Government Scientist JIOA personnel files.

Scientists have unearthed and dated some of the oldest stone hand axes on Earth. The ancient tools, unearthed in Ethiopia in the last two decades, date to 1.75 million years ago.

The tools roughly coincided with the emergence of an ancient human ancestor called Homo erectus, and fossilized H. erectus remains were also found at the same site, said study author Yonas Beyene, an archaeologist at the Association for Research and Conservation of Culture in Ethiopia.

Collectively, the finding suggests an ancient tool-making technique may have arisen with the evolution of the new species.

"This discovery shows that the technology began with the appearance of Homo erectus," Beyene told LiveScience. "We think it might be related to the change of species."

The findings were described today (Jan. 28) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.