Ancient people who lived in in Northern America about 5,000 years ago have living descendants today, new research suggests.

Researchers reached that conclusion after comparing DNA from both fossil remains found on the northern coast of British Columbia, Canada, and from living people who belong to several First Nations tribes in the area.

The new results, published today (July 3) in the journal PLOS ONE, are consistent with nearby archaeological evidence suggesting a fairly continuous occupation of the region for the last 5,000 years.

"We're finding links that tie maternal lineages from as far back as the mid-Holocene 5,000 years ago to living descendants living today in Native American communities," said study co-author Ripan Malhi, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Newly declassified French military documents have revealed that nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll were far more deadly than has previously been admitted with plutonium fallout at much higher levels and over wider areas.

The documents cover the 46 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at Mururoa and Fangataufa in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1974 and reveal that warships near the tests were hit by higher levels of radioactivity than known.

A New Zealand Labour Government in 1974 sent two warships, HMNZS Canterbury and HMNZS Otago, to monitor the Mururoa tests. It was not believed, at the time, that they may have received nuclear dusting but these new documents reveal there were much higher levels of radiation than were known.

A 1974 test, code named Centaur, dumped 500 times the maximum allowed level of plutonium fallout on Tahiti, 1250 kilometres away, the documents show.

There were also 140 more incidents of nuclear fallout above the 209 incidents already known. Tahiti, home to around 178,000 people, was hit 37 times by fallout.

Radiation levels frequently rose in New Zealand 4700 kilometres away following each test. Opposition to the testing was a key political issue in New Zealand, not only prompting the despatching of warships, but also a successful International Court of Justice case against France.

In 1985 French secret agents sank a Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, as it was preparing to leave Auckland for Mururoa. One man was killed.

Today in French Polynesia the 47th anniversary of the first nuclear test at Mururoa (a plutonium fission bomb code-named Aldebaran) is being marked.

The centuries-old skull of a white man found in Australia is raising questions about whether Captain James Cook really was the first European to land on the country's east coast.

The skull was found in northern New South Wales in late 2011, and police initially prepared themselves for a gruesome murder investigation.

But scientific testing revealed that not only was it much older than expected, but possibly belonged to a white man born around 1650, well before Englishman Cook reached the eastern seaboard on the Endeavour in 1770.

"The DNA determined the skull was a male," Detective Sergeant John Williamson told The Daily Telegraph.

"And the anthropologist report states the skull is that of a Caucasoid aged anywhere from 28 to 65."

Australian National University expert Stewart Fallon, who carbon-dated the skull, pulling some collagen from the bone as well as the enamel on a tooth, said he was at first shocked at the age of the relic.

"We didn't know how old this one was, we assumed at first that it was going to be a very young sample," he told AFP.

Aztalan State Park is deceptively bucolic. On a sunny day, it's a field of green grass on sculpted mounds of earth. The sweltering silence carries whispers of wind and the nearby Crawfish River. Occasionally, a cry of a peacock from a nearby farm pierces the air.

But 1,000 years ago, Aztalan was a hub of activity, a northern outpost of the Mississippian culture that spanned what's now the American Midwest. It was likely a vibrant, thriving community, full of people and children, scented with the smoke of cooking fires, noisy with the sounds of its inhabitants going about their daily work.

And while Aztalan left a physical mark on the landscape of Wisconsin, it was abandoned long enough ago that there is little to no cultural memory or oral tradition about the site among any of Wisconsin's American Indian groups.

Instead, archaeologists such as University of Wisconsin-Madison's Sissel Schroeder and Michigan State University's Lynne Goldstein must look to buried clues to reconstruct a picture of the society that once flourished at Aztalan. That's why they, along with the University of Northern Iowa's Donald Gaff, spent the last five weeks leading an archaeological dig at the site.

Evidence shows that Aztalan's inhabitants "seriously altered, modified and created the landscape that they needed," said Goldstein, who is now a professor at Michigan State but spent the first 21 years of her career at UW-Milwaukee.

The question is, why? And what do these manipulations of the land tell us about how the land was used?

Goldstein, Schroeder and Gaff's dig, which ended Saturday, focused on two areas, referred to as the palisade extension and the gravel knoll.

Hollywood is not widely thought of as providing much support to Hitler's regime, instead producing a wealth of anti-Nazi films during the Second World War, ranging from Casablanca to The Great Dictator.

But now a young historian says that in the years before the war, Tinseltown was marching to a very different tune. Ben Urwand, 35 has written a book, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler, in which he cites documents that prove, he says, US studios acquiesced to Nazi censorship of their films actively cooperated with the regime's world propaganda effort.

"Hollywood is not just collaborating with Nazi Germany," Urwand told the New York Times. "It's also collaborating with Adolf Hitler, the person and human being."

Urwand, reportedly a folk musician from Australia who has become a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, said his interest was first aroused as a student in California when he read an interview with the screenwriter Budd Schulberg referring to meetings between the MGM boss Louis Mayer and a representative of the Nazi regime to discuss cuts to his studio's films.

Moscow - Ever heard about the curse of the pharaohs? Well, how about the curse of a 2,500-year-old chief of a nomadic Scythian tribe that brings about floods, droughts, livestock decimation and high atmospheric pressure?

Though the curse of the pharaohs has repeatedly been debunked as myth, the Scythian curse is very real, say locals in a remote area of eastern Kazakhstan where the chieftain's remains were discovered - and where they will be reinterred this weekend to appease his spirit, to the chagrin of archeologists.

In 2003, an archeological expedition dug up a burial mound in the Shiliktinskaya Valley to find a Golden Man - a presumed leader of the Saka tribe, a branch of the Scythian nomads that populated Central Asia and southern Siberia in the 1st millennium BC.

The pagan Saka fought the ancient Persians and Indians, and grew rich through trading across the great steppes of Central Asia. Some of their wealth ended up in the tombs of their chieftains, who were buried wearing jewelry and gold-plated armor - like the man in the Shiliktinskaya mound, the third such find in Kazakhstan since 1970.

It's easy to spot the newborn girls from the newborn boys in any hospital nursery - the pink and blue blankets are a dead giveaway. But it wasn't until rather recently that those two colors were relegated to the sexes.

Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland, has studied the meaning of children's clothing for 30 years. Later this year she will release her latest study of children's clothing, a book called Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America.

In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Paoletti says: 'It's really a story of what happened to neutral clothing.'

It was only in the 1940s when children's clothing began to change, and become specific to gender. Gender-neutral clothing had always been the norm with boys wearing the same crisp white dresses as girls until age 6 or 7.

'What was once a matter of practicality - you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached - became a matter of "Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they'll grow perverted,"' Paoletti says.

While pink and blue and other pastel colors were introduced as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, it wasn't until just before World War I that they had any gender specificity. And not until much later that they were set in stone like today. Paoletti, says that it easily could have gone the other way - with pink being for boys, and blue for girls.

© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBAdolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem.

Attempt to prove West Germany knew the senior Nazi was in Argentina in the 1950s frustrated by ruling.

Germany's foreign intelligence agency can keep secret some of its records on Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi known as the architect of the Holocaust, a court ruled on Thursday.

The federal administrative court ruled that the intelligence agency was within its rights to black out passages from the files sought by a journalist attempting to shed light on whether West German authorities knew in the 1950s where Eichmann had fled after the second world war.

Thursday's ruling followed a decision last year in which the court said the Federal Intelligence Service had to release some files it had previously kept secret.

Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. Eichmann, who helped organise the extermination of Europe's Jews as the head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, was found guilty of war crimes, sentenced to death and hanged in 1962.

The mass-circulation Bild daily, whose reporter sued for the files' full release, has reported that West German intelligence knew as early as 1952 that he was in Argentina.

Some of the oldest art in the United States maps humanity's place in the cosmos, as aligned with an ancient religion.

A team of scientists has uncovered a series of engravings and drawings strategically placed in open air and within caves by prehistoric groups of Native American settlers that depict their cosmological understanding of the world around them.

"The subject matter of this artwork, what they were drawing pictures of, we knew all along was mythological, cosmological," Jan Simek, an archaeologist at the University of Tennessee said. "They draw pictures of bird men that are important characters in their origin stories and in their hero legends, and so we knew it was a religious thing and because of that, we knew that it potentially referred to this multitiered universe that was the foundation of their cosmology."

Simek and his team studied art from 44 open-air locations and 50 cave sites. The earliest depiction of this kind of cosmological stratification dates to around 6,000 years ago, but most of the art is more recent, from around the 11th to 17th centuries.

The researchers noticed that certain kinds of drawings and engravings only appear in specific areas of the plateau. For instance, open-air spots in high elevations touched by the sun feature "upper world" artistic renderings that include depictions of weather forces, heavenly bodies and characters that can exert influence on humans.

A rare, undisturbed royal tomb has been unearthed in Peru, revealing the graves of three Wari queens buried alongside gold and silver riches and possible human sacrifices.

Though the surrounding site has been looted many times, this mausoleum has managed to evade grave robbers for hundreds of years, archaeologists say.

Long before the Inca built Machu Picchu, the Wari empire flourished between A.D. 700 and 1000 throughout much of present-day Peru. At a time when Paris had just 25,000 residents, the Wari capital Huari was home to 40,000 people at its height, according to National Geographic, which reported the find.

Despite their reach, the Wari have remained somewhat mysterious, and it is rare for archaeologists to find burials that have not been ravaged by grave robbers. In hauling away treasures, looters destroy archaeological context and information, leaving researchers grasping for answers about how ancient people lived.

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