Scientists from South Ural State University (SUSU) have discovered new facts about the use of horses in the Bronze Age, working with materials from the monuments of Andronovo culture. As part of an international team from Kazakhstan, Russia, and the U.S., the researchers studied the age of animals found in the ancient mound, as well as changes in the skull that indicate the use of horses by riders. An article on the result of a multidisciplinary study of horse burial is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Horse breeding in the Andronovo culture

The international team of scientists, which included senior researcher Igor Chechushkov, proved that the Andronovites mastered horse riding several centuries earlier than is commonly believed. The researchers made this conclusion when working with the findings of the fifth barrow in the system of the Novoilinovsky-2 burial ground.

One myth about WikiLeaks is that it favors U.S. enemies and declines to publish documents against them, while another legend is that WikiLeaks, for obscure reasons, is soft on Israel, reports Patrick Lawrence.

As WikiLeaks continued its document releases, and as major news organizations continued to publish fulsome accounts and analyses of these releases, the media's stance toward Julian Assange and his organization began to turn: What had begun as collegial collaboration was transformed into criticism and denigration — this in accordance with the hardening attitudes of the U.S. and allied governments.

The key events in this shift were WikiLeaks' publication in October 2010 of "Iraq War Logs," comprised of 392,000 Army field reports, and, a month later, the phased publication of "Cablegate," a collection of 251,287 State Department emails. "Cablegate" was the first major release of U.S. diplomatic traffic in WikiLeaks' "Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy." At writing, this continually expanding collection makes available more than 3 million documents spanning the 1966-2010 period.

The gruesome, unexplained deaths of Soviet hikers at the Dyatlov Pass in 1959 have inspired countless theories about UFOs and even secret military tests. Now, Russian sleuths have revealed that nature's wrath killed the group.

Nine graduate students from a local technical university in the Urals region, led by Igor Dyatlov, embarked on their ill-fated hiking trip in February of that year. Being experienced and well-equipped for the journey, they were planning to cover 350km on skis through extremely harsh terrain in the northern Ural Mountains.

It was all going fine initially and many happy photos left by the group attest to this. But the hikers failed to send a signal from their scheduled endpoint, triggering a rescue operation.

People these days look at you like a weirdo if you talk about the healing properties of plants or any other holistic practices. Much like anything else, there is a lot of politics and money behind our modern medical system.

It all starts with John D. Rockefeller (1839 - 1937) who was an oil magnate, a robber baron, America's first billionaire, and a natural-born monopolist.

By the turn of the 20th century, he controlled 90% of all oil refineries in the U.S. through his oil company, Standard Oil, which was later on broken up to become Chevron, Exxon, Mobil etc.

An Iron Age skeleton with his hands bound has been discovered by HS2 project archaeologists, who believe he may be a murder victim.

The remains of the 2,000-year-old adult male were found face down at Wellwick Farm near Wendover in Buckinghamshire.

Project archaeologist Dr Rachel Wood described the death as "a mystery" and hopes further analysis will shed light on the "potentially gruesome" find.

A Stonehenge-style wooden formation and Roman burial have also been discovered.

People living on the Israeli coast 120,000 years ago strung ocher-painted seashells on flax string, according to a recent study in which archaeologists examined microscopic traces of wear inside naturally occurring holes in the shells. That may shed some light on when people first invented string — which hints at the invention of things like clothes, fishing nets, and maybe even seafaring.

Seashells by the seashore

Picking up seashells has been a human habit for almost as long as there have been humans. Archaeologists found clam shells mingled with other artifacts in Israel's Misliya Cave, buried in sediment layers dating from 240,000 to 160,000 years ago. The shells clearly weren't the remains of Paleolithic seafood dinners; their battered condition meant they'd washed ashore after their former occupants had died.

For some reason, ancient people picked them up and took them home.

Shell collectors at Misliya seemed to like mostly intact shells, and there's no sign that they decorated or modified their finds. But 40,000 years later and 40km (25 miles) away, people at Qafzeh Cave seemed to prefer collecting clam shells with little holes near their tops. The holes were natural damage from scraping along the seafloor, but people used them to string the shells together to make jewelry or decorations. Tel-Aviv University archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer and her colleagues examined five shells from Qafzeh and found microscopic striations around the edges of the holes — marks that suggest the shells once hung on a string.

Archaeologists even have a good idea of what that 120,000-year-old jewelry looked like. Wear marks around the holes suggest hanging on a string, and other wear marks on the edges of the shells suggest that the shells rubbed against each other, so they probably hung close together. And four of the shells still carried traces of red ocher pigment. The only thing missing is also the most interesting piece: the string.

"In pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative, we should ensure that when it comes to different civilizations, exchange will replace estrangement, mutual learning will replace clashes, and coexistence will replace a sense of superiority. This will boost mutual understanding, mutual respect and mutual trust among different countries"

-Xi Jinping, Belt and Road Summit, 2017

Now that a new paradigm of trust, mutual respect and cooperation amongst the various cultures of the world has taken on a new empowering life led by Xi Jinping's vision of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS+, thinking citizens must take the opportunity now to embody the best character of this new renaissance spirit. This means that instead of looking only at what separates the various cultures of the world as distinct from their neighbours, the time has come to commit ourselves to a true universal renaissance, whereby each culture finds what is most beautiful, good and truthful in themselves and also in their neighbours. The best discoveries of each culture when cross pollinated in this way will create new and incredible wholes that will always be more than the sum of their parts, and contain greater degrees of potential for creative expression and understanding than each could sustain on their own.

The unique discovery of a clearly composed, artistic rendering of a herd of animals is shifting the way archaeologists think about the little-understood peoples who created the thousands of massive stone burial chambers, or dolmens, that dot northern Israel's Golan and Galilee.

"This is the first time we see this kind of rock art in dolmens in the Middle East," said Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Uri Berger in a video accompanying the IAA press release on Wednesday. The findings were published in a scholarly article co-authored by Berger and Tel Hai College's Prof. Gonen Sharon last week in the peer-reviewed journal Asian Archaeology.

"These megalithic structures were built more than 4,000 years ago. They are ancient burials and they were built by a group of people of whom the only thing we know is that they built their dolmens," said Sharon in the video.

"Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man's belief...The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world."

- William Sargant "Battle of the Mind"

It is rather ironic that in this "age of information", we are more confused than ever...

It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognise that one was "oppressed" meant they must first have an idea of what was "freedom", and if one were allowed the "privilege" to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.

If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of "dangerous ideas" that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in "The Brave New World", would quickly organise the masses and revolution against their "controllers" would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to "think".

However, it hasn't exactly played out that way has it?

It was all about the ochre.

Thousands of years ago, the first inhabitants of the Americas journeyed deep into caves in present-day Mexico to mine red ochre, a highly valued, natural clay earth pigment used as paint.

Now, according to a new study, scientists and divers have discovered the first evidence of this mining operation deep within underwater caves in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

"What is remarkable is not only the preservation of the mining activity, but also the age and duration of it," said study lead author Brandi MacDonald of the University of Missouri. "We rarely, if ever, get to observe such clear evidence of ochre pigment mining of Paleoindian age in North America, so to get to explore and interpret this is an incredible opportunity for us.