Some of Europe's earliest inhabitants mysteriously vanished toward the end of the last ice age and were largely replaced by others, a new genetic analysis finds.

The finds come from an analysis of dozens of ancient fossil remains collected across Europe.

The genetic turnover was likely the result of a rapidly changing climate, which the earlier inhabitants of Europe couldn't adapt to quickly enough, said the study's co-author, Cosimo Posth, an archaeogenetics doctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The temperature change around that time was "enormous compared to the climactic changes that are happening in our century," Posth told Live Science. "You have to imagine that also the environment changed pretty drastically."

A twisted family tree

Europe has a long and tangled genetic legacy. Genetic studies have revealed that the first modern humans who poured out of Africa, somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago, soon got busy mating with local Neanderthals. At the beginning of the agricultural revolution, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, farmers from the Middle East swept across Europe, gradually replacing the native hunter-gatherers. Around 5,000 years ago, nomadic horsemen called the Yamnaya emerged from the steppes of Ukraine and intermingled with the native population. In addition, another lost group of ancient Europeans mysteriously vanished about 4,500 years ago, a 2013 study in the journal Nature Communications found.

But relatively little was known about human occupation of Europe between the first out-of-Africa event and the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago. During some of that time, the vast Weichselian Ice Sheet covered much of northern Europe, while glaciers in the Pyrenees and the Alps blocked east-west passage across the continent.

Odd how the truth comes out. Thanks to triangulation, the regime opposition power struggle, and possibly one between 'towers of the Kremlin', the other side of the story regarding Zbigniew Brzezinski's and other Washingtonians' Chechen 'freedom fighters' accidentally emerges from the liberal opposition in Moscow.

Translated excerpt (original Russian text is at the bottom of this page) from Ilya Yashin's much-touted report on the threat to Russia's national security posed by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov:

This period (the 1990s - Gordon Hahn) in the country is associated with a sharp increase in crime. In addition, the new Chechen authorities began to pursue a policy of displacement of people from other ethnic groups, which is accompanied by killings, looting, and ethnic cleansing. Journalist Paul Klebnikov called these events a genocide of ethnic Russians, which was carried out in Chechnya before the combat operations that began in 1994. 'It was a bloody war against the civilian ethnic Russian population of Chechnya - so-called forced chechenization,' he wrote. Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000 described the events as 'a large-scale genocide against the Russian population.' These events were due to both a weakening of the central government and an appeal by the population to restore justice after Stalin's deportation of the Chechen people. The republic's new authorities very successfully speculated on these sentiments.'

In July 1999, the Ministry of Nationalities of the Russian Federation reported that from 1991 to 1999 more than 21 thousand ethnic Russians were killed (not counting those killed in war) and more than 100 thousand apartments and houses belonging to members of non-Chechen ethnic groups were seized in Chechnya. More than 46 thousand were turned into de facto slaves, with their property and passports confiscated with the connivance of the republican and federal authorities (putin-itogi.ru, p. 5).

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

Tsodilo (also referred to as the Tsodilo Hills) is a site in Botswana that contains one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world. It has been claimed that in an area of just 10 square km (6.21 square miles), more than 4000 or 4500 individual paintings (scattered over 400 rock art sites) have been found. As a result, Tsodilo has been referred to as the 'Louvre of the Desert'.

The archaeological record of Tsodilo provides a chronological account of human activities and changes in the environment over at least 100,000 years, though not continuously. Thus, the rock paintings at this site span from the Stone Age all the way until the 19th century AD. It has, however, been pointed out that these paintings have not always been dated accurately.

The "Family" of Tsodilo

Tsodilo is situated in the Okavango Sub-District, Ngamiland District, northwestern Botswana, and is close to the country's border with Namibia. This site lies in the Kalahari Desert, and is made up of huge quartzite rock formations. To the east of Tsodilo are ancient sand dunes, whilst to its west is a dry fossil lake bed. The Tsodilo range is made up of four main outcrops, and is revered as a sacred site in the landscape by the indigenous peoples who live in the area.

The CIA reportedly came up with some outlandish plots to kill former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but this could just be the craziest yet. The US National Security Archive published information that Washington tried to give Castro a diving suit contaminated with tuberculosis.

The National Security Archive alleges that the US government contacted lawyer James Donovan to conduct secret negotiations with Castro. Given Donavan's connections to the Cuban leader, the CIA believed they could use this to their advantage to try and assassinate Castro.

"At some point during Donovan's negotiations with Castro" several officials in the covert operations division "devised a plan to have Donovan be the unwitting purveyor of a diving suit and breathing apparatus, respectively contaminated with Madura foot fungus and tuberculosis bacteria, as a gift for Castro," a passage from the National Security Archive reveals.

Aboriginal Australians have been genetically isolated from the rest of humanity for 50,000 years with no direct evidence that they had ever intermarried with South-East Asians about 4,000 years ago, as some scholars have suggested, a DNA study has revealed.

A detailed analysis of the male Y chromosome from 13 Aboriginal men found no traces of DNA from other ethnic groups, such as people from the Indian sub-continent who were thought to have migrated to Australia about 2000BC.

Geneticists have calculated from mutations present in the Aboriginal Y chromosome that the first inhabitants of Australia had separated from other members of Homo sapiens living elsewhere in the world about 50,000 years ago - probably long before our species had arrived to live in Europe.

The findings of the study, however, fail to explain the arrival of the dingo wild dog in Australia, which is not a native species and was almost certainly brought by humans to the continent from other parts of south-east Asia.

French anthropologists believe they have discovered the oldest Muslim burial in Europe by far, dating back to the eighth century AD. It's the first time scientists get archaeological proof of Islamic presence in Europe at this historic period.

A rare discovery described by a team of French archaeologists in an article in PLoS One was made near French city of Nimes: archaeologists dug up a burial site of three people, allegedly of Muslim origin. The radiocarbon analysis showed that remains date back to the 7th to 9th centuries AD. The unique finding corresponds with Muslim presence in the south of France around 720-760 AD, described in historic texts.

Previously found Islamic graves in Europe date back to the 12th and 13th centuries.

A valuable iconic painting was found during renovations of the Nativity Church in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, a Palestinian official said on Saturday.

Ziad al-Bandak, a Palestinian presidential advisor for Christian Affairs, told Ma'an on Saturday that an icon of great religious and historical value made of gold, brass, silver, shells and stones was found about two months ago. Photographs of the icon were not yet available.

Al-Bandak, who chairs a committee in charge of the renovation process, highlighted that the Nativity Church, built where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born, had not undergone major renovation in centuries.

The renovation project, done in collaboration between Palestinian and foreign archaeologists, came to protect and uncover the historic and religious "treasures" still hidden inside the church.

The Tourism Minister of Egypt Hisham Zaazou may have slipped up during a recent visit to Spain when he revealed startling information about the investigations into a hidden chamber in Tutankhamun's tomb ahead of official press announcements due to take place in April. Zaazou said that the hidden chamber has been found to be full of treasures and will be the 'Big Bang' of the 21^st century.

According to the Spanish National daily newspaper, ABC, Zaazou made the sensational claims during a visit to Spain a few weeks ago.

"We do not know if the burial chamber is Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures," said Zaazou [via ABC] ... "It will be a 'Big Bang', the discovery of the 21st Century".

The ancient civilization that inhabited Easter Island wasn't destroyed by warfare, according to a recent study, contrary to what some researchers believe.

Researchers from Binghamton University analyzed spear-like blades of obsidian, known as mata'a, that were scattered about the island. They found that the mata'a were not used for violence, saying the shapes are inconsistent and different from other recovered weapons. The mata'a were more likely all-purpose tools, the study found.

"We found that when you look at the shape of these things, they just don't look like weapons at all," Carl Lipo, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, said in a statement.