Vessels discovered in a Scythian grave mound contained traces of opium and marijuana, confirming the claim of an ancient historian.

They ruled the vast grasslands of Eurasia for a thousand years, striking fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians. But they left no cities or settlements behind, only massive grave mounds, called kurgans, dotting the steppes from Mongolia to the Black Sea.

Now one of those kurgans, located in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, has yielded an intriguing discovery: golden artifacts that are shedding light on the shadowy world of the Scythians, fierce nomads whose exploits—and drug-fueled rituals—were chronicled by the Greek historian Herodotus.

"It's a once-in-a-century discovery," says Anton Gass, an archaeologist at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. "These are among the finest objects we know from the region."

The find—kept secret until now to protect it from looters—first came to light in the summer of 2013, when Stavropol-based archaeologist Andrei Belinski began excavating the kurgan, called Sengileevskoe-2, to clear the way for a power-line project.

At first Belinski wasn't optimistic about finding much inside, as there were telltale signs that the kurgan had been plundered in the past. But a few weeks into the excavation, his team came across a thick layer of clay. Digging underneath, they discovered a rectangular chamber lined with broad, flat stones. Inside was something the looters somehow had missed: golden treasures placed there 2,400 years ago.

The chamber contained two bucket-shaped gold vessels, each placed upside down. Inside were three gold cups, a heavy gold finger ring, two neck rings, and a gold bracelet. In all, the well-preserved gold artifacts weighed nearly seven pounds (3.2 kilos).

"It was definitely a surprise for us," Belinski says. "We weren't expecting to find anything like this." (Read about another excavation of a Scythian kurgan and its gold.)

Belinski asked criminologists in nearby Stavropol to analyze a black residue inside the vessels. The results came back positive for opium and cannabis, confirming a practice first reported by Herodotus. The Greek historian claimed that the Scythians used a plant to produce smoke "that no Grecian vapour-bath can surpass ... transported by the vapor, [they] shout aloud."

Because the sticky residue was found on the inside of the vessels, Belinski and Gass think they were used to brew and drink a strong opium concoction, while cannabis was burning nearby. "That both drugs were being used simultaneously is beyond doubt," Gass says.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

Most adult Americans today are unaware of what caused the War of 1812, who started it, what the outcome was, or even who the belligerents were. If I recall correctly, my grade school / high school History Class covered The War Of 1812 - aka America's Second War Of Independence, or America's Forgotten War - for a total of maybe one week. And what a worthless week it was. Like most history teachers I've ever had, they turned an exciting story into a dry bundle of boring crap ... focusing on memorizing dates and random events without getting to the real story behind the story; i.e. why did it happen, how does the war affect us today, and what can we learn from it? This is a crying shame because the war had a tremendous impact on American political development, territorial expansion, and national identity.

A 19^th century French historian said, "History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit." The word 'history' comes from the Greek, and literally means "knowledge acquired by investigation". So, let us investigate the War Of 1812, and the spirit of humanity which caused it ... and changed America forever.

In late May 1945 Josef Stalin ordered Marshall Georgy Zhukov to leave Germany and come to Moscow. He was concerned over the actions of British allies. Stalin said the Soviet forces disarmed Germans and sent them to prisoners' camps while British did not. Instead they cooperated with Germans troops and let them maintain combat capability.

Stalin believed that there were plans to use them later. He emphasized that it was an outright violation of the inter-governmental agreements that said the forces surrendered were to be immediately disbanded. The Soviet intelligence got the text of secret telegram sent by Winston Churchill to Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, the commander of British forces. It instructed to collect the weapons and keep them in readiness to give back to Germans in case the Soviet offensive continued.

According to the instructions received from Stalin, Zhukov harshly condemned these activities speaking at the Allied Control Council (the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and France). He said the world history knew few examples of such treachery and refusal to observe the commitments on the part of nations that had an allied status. Montgomery denied the accusation. A few years later he admitted that he received such an instruction and carried it out. He had to comply with the order as a soldier.

A fierce battle was raging in the vicinity of Berlin. At his time Winston Churchill said that the Soviet Russia became a deadly threat to the free world. The British Prime Minister wanted a new front created in the east to stop the Soviet offensive as soon as possible. Churchill was overwhelmed by the feeling that with Nazi Germany defeated a new threat emerged posed by the Soviet Union.

That's why London wanted Berlin to be taken by Anglo-American forces. Churchill also wanted Americans to liberate Czechoslovakia and Prague with Austria controlled by all allies on equal terms.

Jaw and teeth fossils found in Ethiopia's Afar region in 2011 represent a previously unknown member of humankind's family tree that lived 3.3 to 3.5 million years ago alongside the famous human ancestor Lucy, scientists say.

The fossils shed new light on a key period in the human lineage's evolution before the emergence of our genus, Homo, and provide the first evidence that two early human ancestor species lived at the same time and place prior to 3 million years ago.

The new species, Australopithecus deyiremeda, combined ape-like and human-like traits as did Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, but was sufficiently different to warrant recognition as a separate species, scientists said announcing the discovery on Wednesday.

Lucy's skeleton was unearthed in 1974 from the Hadar site, near Woranso-Mille, where the new fossil was found.

Wounds discovered on a 430,000-year-old human skull discovered in Spain could indicate that the individual was one of the first-ever murder victims, according to a new study published in the May 27 edition of the open-access journal PLOS One.

In the study, Dr. Nohemi Sala from Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos, Spain, and her colleagues explain that the skull was discovered at Sima de los Huesos, a site located deep within a series of underground caves located in northern Spain.

The skull, known as Cranium 17, was found with the skeletal remains of at least 28 individuals dating back to the Middle Pleistocene period. The specimen is comprised of 52 cranial fragments recovered during a series of excavations at the site over the past two decades, and contains a pair of penetrating lesions on the frontal bone, just above the left eye, Dr. Sala's team said.

Around 20,000 residents in Cologne in Germany were evacuated after a 200-kilogram bomb from World War II was discovered during preparations for construction work.

Deactivation of the device, found near Muelheim Bridge over the Rhine River, is scheduled to take place on Wednesday afternoon, the DPA news agency reported.

The bomb, believed to be a US design, is 1.76 meters long and 60 centimeters in diameter.

It is buried 5 meters underground, which is going to complicate the task of the bomb disposal squad.

"As is common with these heavy bombs, this one is very deep down. Such a big bomb can't simply be taken out. We need to dig a deep and wide hole first," Dieter Daeneck, who is leading the operation, told FAZ.

Earlier, 20,000 people had to leave their homes, including over a 1,000 residents of a nursing home, which required dozens of ambulances to arrive on the scene.

The stereotype of Stone Age men was cave dwelling brutes rather than sophisticated town planners who lived in two-storey houses.

But archaeologists have uncovered the remains of 60 large houses built 8,000 years ago as part of a Neolithic village, in south west Bulgaria.

Thought to be built by farmers, the town has three parallel streets with homes spread over five acres (215,278 square ft or 20,000 square metres).

The village also features a canal, a port for boats and an unusual cemetery.

Many people think of World War I as the trench war, but few realize it went hundreds of feet deeper. As both sides dug in, they found ancient quarries and caves below the bombed-out forests of northeastern France, and they took temporary refuge from the war's horrors there. The offices, kitchens, worship spaces, and artworks they made have rested unchanged for a century in underground cities visited by just a few historians and enthusiasts.

The locations of these quarries and caves remain relatively secret for now, but the entrances are unprotected.

Dr. Jeffrey Gusky, an emergency room physician and professional photographer, has shot these underground cities in eerie detail and published the images extensively in National Geographic, the New York Times, and other periodicals. The BBC, NPR, CBC and other news outlets have interviewed him about it. This exposure brings the caves' culture and beauty to a large audience, but with that fame comes danger for the sites themselves.

Roughly 3.3 billion years ago, Earth's early life forms were plunged into an unimaginable hell, when a series of massive asteroids smashed into the young planet, vaporizing the oceans and scorching the skies.
We've heard about one of these asteroids before—a 58 kilometer-across object that, upon impact 3.26 billion years ago, shook the entire planet for a half hour. Now, geologist Don Lowe of Stanford University presents us with two other 50 to 100 kilometer-across impactors from the same time period. Each of these asteroid collisions would have boiled Earth's oceans, reducing global sea levels by up to 100 meters. As Lowe told Science News, the cataclysmic events probably had a dramatic impact on the early evolution of life:

"These impacts would have a profound influence on any life trying to evolve into more complex, low-temperature organisms. They'd keep getting whacked by these giant impactors and driven to extinction or near extinction."

A recently unearthed stone tool kit consisting of hammer stones, anvils, worked cobblestones and other items dates to 3.3 million years ago, predating our genus Homo by over half a million years, according to a new study.

The items, described in the latest issue of the journal Nature, are now the oldest stone tools ever found.

They "show that early humans (essentially proto-humans) used and made stone tools 3.3 million years ago, which is about 700,000 years earlier than the previously earliest known date for early stone tools," Erella Hovers, who authored an accompanying "News & Views" article, told Discovery News.

Hovers, who is a senior member of the Institute of Archaeology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, added that the other more recent tools were attributed to Homo habilis, aka "Handy Man," whose culture is called the Oldowan. Now it looks like there was a much earlier culture--as of yet unnamed--and that stone tool making was not unique to our genus.

The approximately 149 stone artifacts tied to tool making were found at a site called Lomekwi 3 next to Lake Turkana in Kenya.