A new look at ancient bones with the latest DNA technology has confirmed Aboriginal Australians as the continent's first people.

Researchers say the findings overturn a 2001 paper that argued the oldest known Australian human remains found near Lake Mungo in New South Wales were from an extinct lineage of modern humans that occupied the continent before Aboriginal Australians.

This claim was based on mitochondrial DNA extracted from Mungo Man's 40,000-year-old fossilised remains by a team lead by Australian National University's Dr Greg Adcock.

But now, Professor David Lambert, from Griffith University, and colleagues, have used new DNA sequencing methods to re-analyse the material from Mungo Man, who was found in the World Heritage-listed Willandra Lakes region, in far western New South Wales.

Professor Lambert said the latest findings, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirmed earlier concerns with the 2001 report.

"There was a lot of suspicion at the time amongst a lot of international researchers in ancient DNA that there was a distinct possibility the results were due to contamination," he said.

"The reason for the suspicion was that the sequences for Mungo Man, in particular, were very unusual ... and gave rise to the thought that Aboriginal people were not in fact the first Australians — that there was a group there before them and that Aboriginal people displaced them.

"We could not, with better technology, repeat what the original study found and therefore the evidence that Aboriginal people were not the first Australians has no foundation."

Professor Lambert said it was important to attempt to replicate the 2001 findings to determine their authenticity.

Bada Valley (also known as Napu Valley) is a megalithic site situated in the Lore Lindu National Park, in the District of Poso, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Although the megaliths have yet to be formally catalogued and documented (as of 2001) several hundred of them have been located in and around the national park. These megaliths are often carved, and 30 of them depict human / human-like forms. Very little is known about these statues.

Difficult Dating of the Megaliths

The megaliths of Bada Valley were first discovered in 1908. Although slightly more than a 100 years has passed since they were first uncovered, it seems that what we know about these objects is still very little. For example, it is not known for certain when these megaliths were made.

Some have speculated that these stones were carved about 5000 years ago. Yet others suggest that they were created at a more recent point of time, i.e. 1000 years ago. Others have also proposed that they are related to a culture that carved megaliths in Laos, Cambodia and other parts of Indonesia 2000 years ago.

Uncertain Creators and Purpose

Neither are the creators of these megaliths known. Although it has been suggested that they were made by a culture that created megaliths in other parts of Southeast Asia, it has also been pointed out that the megaliths in Bada Valley are unique, and therefore could have been made by an entirely different culture. At the moment, no one really knows which culture made them.

The original purpose(s) of these megaliths has / have also been lost, though people have speculated about this as well. Local people, for example, believe that some of the megaliths were once used for ancestor worship. The locals also tell stories about how these megaliths came into being. For instance, there is a megalith they have named Tokala'ea, which is said to have been a rapist who was turned into stone. The deep cuts on this megalith are said to be knife wounds. Another megalith, known as Tadulako, is thought to have once been a village protector. After stealing some rice, however, he was turned to stone.

This paper, written under the title, "U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies," was delivered at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO on April 18, 2015.

US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed "racist" or "discriminatory," are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, "The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life."ⁱ The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.

In the ancient Greek City, Zeugma, which is located in today's Turkey, unbelievable mosaics were uncovered, dating back to the 2nd century BC, but incredibly well-preserved and look as beautiful and stunning as the first day.

The site came to the attention of the international archaeological community when it was threatened by flooding, due to the construction of a nearby dam in southern Turkey in 2000.

A pair of researchers has found a possible explanation for the sudden, mysterious reason that the Mongol army withdrew from Eastern Europe in 1242, just when it seemed poised to take Hungary. In their paper published in the journal Nature, Ulf Büntgen with the Swiss Federal Research Institute and Nicola Di Cosmo with the Institute for Advanced Study in the U.S. describe a study they made of tree ring data from trees in Hungary and historical records, which showed that the weather during the time of the Mongol invasion was not particularly well suited for an army traveling on horseback.

For hundreds of years, historical scholars have puzzled over the sudden retreat by the Mongols—they had conquered their way out of Asia and into Russia and had won every battle they had fought making their way into Eastern Europe during the early 1200s, when they abruptly turned tail and headed back to Russia, never to return. Some have suggested it was Mongol politics while others have maintained that armies in the Eastern Europe were putting up much more of a fight than the Mongols had expected. In this new effort, the researchers suggest that the reason might be much more mundane: simple bad weather.

The horses used by the Mongols, the researchers note, survived by eating the grasses that were plentiful on the Asian and Russian steppes—grasses that were healthy and strong and easily accessible due to several years of good weather. But, tree ring data, and some evidence in historical writings suggest that the winter of 1242, was particularly bad—not because it was too cold, or too snowy, but because it was just cold enough to cause widespread freezing which led to widespread melting during the spring, which just happened to coincide with the arrival of the Mongols. The melting led to flooding, because, coincidently, that part of Hungary sits at low elevations—melting ice and snow would have puddled, preventing the grass for growing very well that spring, leaving little for the horses to eat. Also, it would have meant lots of mud, making travel very difficult. The end result, the researchers suggest, might have been the Mongols simply deciding against progressing further because it did not seem worth the trouble.

Ring-shaped structures made of stalagmites found deep in the Bruniquel cave network, in the Tarn-et-Garonne, are much older than first thought, scientists have said.

They are among the earliest examples of human construction ever found - and were built in the pitch-dark cave by neanderthals, long before homo sapiens reached this part of the world.

Shortly after they were first discovered in 1990, the structures were carbon-dated to about 47,600 years old - already older than even the most ancient cave paintings yet found, and at the limit of carbon-dating reliability.

But a new study, published in the journal Nature, has put the date of construction back to 176,500 years ago.

The stalagmites had been cut to similar lengths and laid out in two oval patterns up to 40cm high. Scientists do not know what purpose the structures could serve.

"Their presence at 336m from the entrance of the cave indicates that humans from this period had already mastered the underground environment, which can be considered a major step in human modernity," the article in Nature says.

The study's co-author, Jacques Jaubert, from the University of Bordeaux, said he had ruled out the possibility that these rings, which show traces of fire, could have been made by animals such as bears or wolves, whose bones were found near the entrance of the cave.

The problem with the past sometimes, is that it isn't past at all, as the Dutch have been forced to face up to recently. For the Dutch, the history of the mid- 20^th century was quite simple until very recently: a freedom loving people (the Dutch) were attacked by an aggressive neighbor (Germany) and suffered for five years until, with the help of some friends, they were liberated. Conveniently forgotten was that, following this episode, the Dutch state mobilized the largest army in its history and fought a war against the Indonesian independence movement. The Dutch lost the conflict, and in December 1949 their former colony, the Dutch East Indies, gained independence. During the following decades this tropical misadventure formed an almost blank page in the nation's history. But that, it seems, is changing. Events during the past year have forced the Dutch nation to reconsider the myth that for over a half century has formed their collective memory. Especially in the past couple of months, history has become front page news.

The Dutch had ruled most of Indonesia for 350 years, but found themselves prisoners of the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. With the defeat of Japan, Indonesian nationalists declared independence. The Dutch tried, with great difficulty, to reassert their control of the archipelago. After over four years of bitter conflict The Netherlands was forced to concede independence to Indonesia in December 1949.

By the end of the war numerous cases of military excesses had come to the attention of the Dutch public. Massacres by Dutch Special Forces on the island of South Celebes (present day Sulawesi) had been the subject of parliamentary debate. A massacre in the village Rawagede had been the subject of debate at the United Nations Security Council in 1948. Such incidents gradually led a minority of the Dutch press to turn against the war. In February 1949 leftist De Groene Amsterdammer published a letter from an unidentified officer. He wrote that Dutch officers:

King Tut continues to astound the archaeological community, as new research shows that the ancient Egyptian child pharaoh was buried with a dagger that originated in outer space.

The iron blade placed in his sarcophagus next to the right thigh of his mummified body was manufactured from a meteorite, according to researchers from Milan Polytechnic, Pisa University and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The team carried out an analysis using non-invasive, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and published their results in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

How a legendary bond trader from Salomon Brothers brokered a do-or-die deal that reshaped U.S.-Saudi relations for generations.

Failure was not an option.

It was July 1974. A steady predawn drizzle had given way to overcast skies when William Simon, newly appointed U.S. Treasury secretary, and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, stepped onto an 8 a.m. flight from Andrews Air Force Base. On board, the mood was tense. That year, the oil crisis had hit home. An embargo by OPEC's Arab nations—payback for U.S. military aid to the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War—quadrupled oil prices. Inflation soared, the stock market crashed, and the U.S. economy was in a tailspin.

Officially, Simon's two-week trip was billed as a tour of economic diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East, full of the customary meet-and-greets and evening banquets. But the real mission, kept in strict confidence within President Richard Nixon's inner circle, would take place during a four-day layover in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The goal: neutralize crude oil as an economic weapon and find a way to persuade a hostile kingdom to finance America's widening deficit with its newfound petrodollar wealth. And according to Parsky, Nixon made clear there was simply no coming back empty-handed. Failure would not only jeopardize America's financial health but could also give the Soviet Union an opening to make further inroads into the Arab world.

It "wasn't a question of whether it could be done or it couldn't be done," said Parsky, 73, one of the few officials with Simon during the Saudi talks.

British archaeologists have presented the first results of their underwater excavations in the Hellenic cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion, which sank into the Mediterranean Sea somewhere around the 8th century AD, Nature magazine wrote. Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion were two major port cities that existed in the Nile Delta in the 5th century BC.

Founded by Greek and Macedonian colonists during the 26th dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, the cities survived the country's' occupation, first by Persians and then by Alexander of Macedonia's armies before being taken over by Rome during Queen Cleopatra's reign.

Then, around 750-800 AD the millennium-old cities were mysteriously submerged several meters into the Mediterranean and their location was lost for centuries before a team of British and French archeologists began large-scale excavations in the Abu Qir Bay in the Nile Delta.