Board games began as an exclusive pastime for the elite, with the Roman Empire spreading their popularity throughout Europe.

Competitive board games -- played on the ground, on the floor, or on boards -- emerged as pastimes for the elite, with the Roman Empire spreading their popularity throughout Europe, according to a new study.

The study, published in the journal Antiquity, mentions that board games likely originated and disseminated from Egypt and the Fertile Crescent regions at around 3500 B.C. From there, they spread around the Mediterranean before reaching the Roman Empire and what is now Europe.

Based on the archaeological record, board games didn't even reach Britain until the very end of the 1st century B.C. from newly conquered Gaul. At the time, Gaul was a region encompassing present-day France, Belgium, most of Switzerland and other areas.

Not just anyone could play board games then either.

"Many of the first board games appear to have been diplomatic gifts to signify status," co-author Mark Hall told Discovery News. "We have early examples of quite splendid playing pieces belonging to elite, privileged people."

Hall said the world's oldest known board game could be "The Royal Game of Ur," also known as the Game of Twenty Squares. It was discovered in the Royal Tombs of Ur in Iraq. Although no one knows what the earliest rules for the game were, it's thought to have been a predecessor to today's backgammon.

Neandertals are stumping for bragging rights as the first builders of mammoth-bone structures, an accomplishment usually attributed to Stone Age people.

Humanity's extinct cousins constructed a large, ring-shaped enclosure out of 116 mammoth bones and tusks at least 44,000 years ago in West Asia, say archaeologist Laëtitia Demay of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and her colleagues. The bone edifice, which encircles a 40-square-meter area in which mammoths and other animals were butchered, cooked and eaten, served either to keep out cold winds or as a base for a wooden building, the scientists propose in a paper published online November 26 in Quaternary International.

Mammoth-bone huts previously discovered at Homo sapiens sites in West Asia date to between 27,500 and 15,000 years ago. The new discovery comes from Molodova, a Ukrainian site first excavated in the 1950s. There, Neandertals erected a mammoth-bone structure that's unlike later mammoth-bone huts, suggesting that the two Homo species developed these practices independently, says study coauthor Stéphane Péan, also of France's National Museum of Natural History.

Researchers have argued for decades about whether Molodova Neandertals left mammoth bones scattered about or built something out of them.

Jon Roberts was a made man, a drug smuggler, a killer. He hobnobbed with OJ Simpson and Ed Sullivan, rubbed shoulders with Pablo Escobar and Carlo Gambino, and made enemies out of John Gotti and Ronald Reagan.

He tortured college students for fun, helped snuff-out "mob accountant" Meyer Lansky's stepson and admits to brutalizing his ex-girlfriend with a belt when she tried to leave him. He flooded the country with cocaine in the 1980s.

Regrets? He has none.

"So would you call yourself a psychopath?" The Post asked him on Friday.

"Well, that depends on how you define psychopath," Roberts said.

"A lack of empathy or remorse."

"Well, then, yes I am," he said. "I enjoyed my life. How many other people lived the life I did? Maybe that Bernie guy, but who else?"

A new disturbing but intensely enthralling as-told-to memoir, American Desperado, co-written and vetted by Generation Kill author Evan Wright, gets deep inside the head of a lifelong criminal.

While the book is littered with famous names -- a testament to what Wright refers to as his place as the "Forrest Gump of crime and depravity" -- there are also passages so dark and violent that you wonder how a man this sinister can sleep at night.

Volunteers' find in national park adds to discoveries pointing to richer cultural history of northern England than assumed

Humanity's long attachment to Yorkshire has notched up another piece of early evidence with the discovery of the first 7th-century house to be recorded in the Dales national park. Volunteer archaeologists dug down into an outcrop of stones on the flanks of Ingleborough fell, one of the Three Peaks famous for walks and marathon runs, where settlements were thought to exist but none had been excavated owing to shortages of time, expertise and funds.

The team revealed two chamber rooms with charcoal remains and pieces of chert, a hard flint knapped in ancient times to make tools. Carbon-dating of the charcoal has placed the use of the building at between AD660 and AD780, when Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were consolidating in northern England. The dig adds to a growing list of discoveries, from a Roman amphitheatre at Aldborough to exquisitely carved golden rings near Leeds, which are changing the history of the north of England.

In each case, archaeologists have suggested that the relative poverty of previous finds in the region, compared with southern counties, has had more to do with where the profession previously looked rather than what may be there.

Archaeological dig reveals hundreds of objects, from six oak-tree boats to a bowl of food

Six boats hollowed out of oak tree trunks are among hundreds of intact artefacts from 3,000 years ago that have been discovered in the Cambridgeshire fens, the Observer can reveal.

The scale, quality and condition of the objects, the largest bronze age collection ever found in one place in Britain, have astonished archaeologists - and barely a fraction of the site has been excavated.

Unique textile fragments, wicker baskets and wooden sword handles have survived. There are even containers of food, including a bowl with a wooden spoon still wedged into the contents, now analysed as nettle stew, which may have been a favourite dish in 1000BC. The boats - two of which bear unusual decoration - are in such good condition that the wood grain and colour can be seen clearly, as can signs of repairs by their owners.

Geneticists, archaeologists and historians are joining forces to investigate the history of transatlantic slavery, in a €4.3-million (US$5.8-million) project launched today. The researchers say that the project is a unique opportunity to improve our knowledge of the slave trade, but warn that some of their results might be "uncomfortable".

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of people from west and central Africa were captured and shipped across the Atlantic by European slave traders to a life of forced labour in the Americas. The subject has been well studied by historians, but one of the coordinators of the project, geneticist Hannes Schroeder of the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, says that there are still "large gaps in our knowledge" regarding the origins of the people captured as slaves, for instance, and how the slave trade operated.

"The historical records are fragmentary," he says. "For example, they tend to mention just the port of export, rather than the ethnic or geographical origin of the person. The idea is that by bringing in genetics, we get a different view."

Schroeder got the idea for the collaboration after studying isotopes of strontium, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen in the bones and teeth of slaves buried at the Newton plantation in southern Barbados. Archaeologists were keen to find a method to distinguish between first-generation captives and individuals who were subsequently born on the island, and to relate that to ancient African cultural practices such as filing teeth or burying grave goods with bodies.

A rare and ancient tool found on a building site in Moreton is said to a "significant find" for the town according to experts.

Cotswold Archaeology made the exciting discovering earlier this month while carrying out an excavation on the Fire Service College housing development.

The flint hand axe, thought to have been used primarily for butchering large animals, is the second of its kind to be found in Moreton in eight years.

Neil Holbrooke, chief executive at Cotswold Archaeology, said the artefact could be up to 100,000 years old.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a medieval church, said to date from some time in the 12th to 14th centuries, and the front gate of the ancient city on the location of today's Sozopol, on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.

The north wall and the apse of the church are just metres from the ancient fortress in the city, Bulgarian National Television said. The church is near today's St Cyril and Methodius church, which houses what are purported to be relics of John the Baptist, found on St Ivan island off the coast of Sozopol in summer 2010.

The walls of the medieval church were close to 12 metres long, about 70cm thick and with an estimated height of between three and four metres.

Newfound stone artifacts suggest humankind left Africa traveling through the Arabian Peninsula instead of hugging its coasts, as long thought, researchers say.

Modern humans first arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa. When and how our lineage then dispersed has long proven controversial, but geneticists have suggested this exodus started between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago. The currently accepted theory is that the exodus from Africa traced Arabia's shores, rather than passing through its now-arid interior.

However, stone artifacts at least 100,000 years old from the Arabian Desert, revealed in January 2011, hinted that modern humans might have begun our march across the globe earlier than once suspected.

Now, more-than-100 newly discovered sites in the Sultanate of Oman apparently confirm that modern humans left Africa through Arabia long before genetic evidence suggests. Oddly, these sites are located far inland, away from the coasts.

"After a decade of searching in southern Arabia for some clue that might help us understand early human expansion, at long last we've found the smoking gun of their exit from Africa," said lead researcher Jeffrey Rose, a paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in England. "What makes this so exciting is that the answer is a scenario almost never considered."

Update: We covered a list of prophecies in the first part of this series. The idea of California 'falling into the sea' was mentioned. Just a few days ago, another chunk of it did just that. Specifically, part of the Paseo del Mar road in San Pedro fell into the Pacific Ocean after a landslide on 21 November. We don't think this particular landslide is what the Cs were referring to, just thought the timing was interesting in light of bringing it up here!

Just as new discoveries in science can overturn a previously held 'consensus' in a heartbeat (often to the consternation or willful disbelief of those promoting the consensus), new historical data can turn our ideas of what we think happened in our history on their head. We often take for granted that event X occurred in year Y, forgetting that either or both of those variables may be completely false. The event may turn out to have been a fiction, created by scribes and leaders of the time (or years later) for purposes of political propaganda. Dating methods may be inaccurate or possess possible confounding factors, mucking up the accepted timeline. Or, when new documents or scientific data are discovered, the event may turn out to bear little resemblance to our previous ideas of how it happened. New actors emerge with new motivations, necessitating a revision of the history books and the way we see the events and personages of our near and distant past.

Then there are the problems inherent in the study of prehistory, before the advent of 'history' as we know it. There, we only have scarce clues to rely on, all built on sciences which are themselves built on certain assumptions about the way things work. Archaeology, paleoanthropology, population and molecular genetics, climate science, geology... all of these contribute to a story of the past that historians create for us. When we consider the relatively young age of many of these sciences, the amount of information that we have amassed in that short amount of time is pretty staggering. But it's important to keep in mind that history too is a work in progress; new theories and advancements in science can prompt a radical revision of old ideas.

Prehistory occupies a good portion of the Cs transcripts. While archaeologists and anthropologists can piece together broad outlines of migrations, genetic mixing, human behaviors, population bottlenecks, etc., this was a period from which no written records appear to have survived. As such, it's hard to verify specific historical details and much of what the Cs say about these times remains interesting conjecture. But while much of it is unverifiable, it also provides opportunities to test the material as new discoveries come to light: fossil finds, climate studies, evidence for catastrophes and extinctions, and more.