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I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing

Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.

over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’

The Rosetta Stone, which is housed in the British Museum, is a black, possibly basalt slab with three languages on it (Greek, demotic and hieroglyphs) each saying the same thing.

Discovered at Rosetta (Raschid) in 1799, by Napoleon's army, the Rosetta Stone proved the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone tells of an agreement between Egyptian priests and the pharaoh on March 27, 196 B.C. It names honors bestowed on Macedonian Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes. After praising the pharaoh for his generosity, it describes the siege of Lycopolis and the king's good deeds for the temple. The text continues with its main purpose: establishing a cult for the king.

Perhaps the most consequential change Trump has wrought is in the Republican Party’s attitude toward democracy. I worked in the administration of George W. Bush, who was the first president since the 1880s to win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.

Bush recognized this outcome as an enormous political problem. After the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, on December 13, 2000, the president-elect promised to govern in a bipartisan and conciliatory fashion: “I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation,”

You may believe that Bush failed in that promise—but he made that promise because he recognized a problem. Two decades later, Trump has normalized the minority rule that seemed so abnormal in December 2000.

The group of Trump campaign officials came carrying cellphone cameras and a determination to help the president’s re-election efforts in Philadelphia. But they were asked to leave the city’s newly opened satellite election offices on Tuesday after being told local election laws did not permit them to monitor voters coming to request and complete absentee ballots.

On social media and right-wing news sites and in the presidential debate on Tuesday night, President Trump and his campaign quickly suggested nefarious intent in the actions of local election officials, with the president claiming during the debate that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and urging his supporters everywhere to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”

The calls for his followers to monitor voting activity are clear. What’s less apparent is how the Trump campaign wants this to play out.

uilt 4,500 years ago during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the pyramids of Giza are more than elaborate tombs — they’re also one of historians’ best sources of insight into how the ancient Egyptians lived, since their walls are covered with illustrations of agricultural practices, city life, and religious ceremonies. But on one subject, they remain curiously silent. They offer no insight into how the pyramids were built.

It’s a mystery that has plagued historians for thousands of years, leading the wildest speculators into the murky territory of alien intervention and perplexing the rest. But the work of several archaeologists in the last few years has dramatically changed the landscape of Egyptian studies. After millennia of debate, the mystery might finally be over.

For example, the Egyptians hadn’t yet discovered the wheel, so it would have been difficult to transport massive stones — some weighing as much as 90 tons — from place to place. They hadn’t invented the pulley, a device that would have made it much easier to lift large stones into place. They didn’t have iron tools to chisel and shape their stonework.

While it was built at roughly the same time as the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza, we know far more about those Egyptian sites. Incomplete knowledge of Stonehenge has turned it into a riddle that is now part of its identity.

a new exhibition at the British Museum, “The World of Stonehenge,” which runs through July 17. The show strives to lessen the mystery around the monument by focusing on recent discoveries and putting them in the context of life in Britain, Ireland and northwestern Europe before, during and after Stonehenge’s construction.

He described the site as a mix between a town hall and a cathedral, where people mingled for both religious and social reasons.

War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer.

There are four parts to the case I will make.

The first is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently.

This is nonsense. Let’s unpack all of it.

“We” and “They”

The “mainstream media”—I’m going to stop putting that in quotes, but keep imagining that I’m saying it sarcastically—is probably made up of several thousand individuals and then a three-figure number of institutions. At any given moment, on any given story, some number of these people and institutions will communicate facts that are eventually understood to be misleading or incorrect. Some of these people and institutions are better at their jobs than others.

The discovery, reported in the current issue of the journal Nature, lends weight to the hypothesis that not only did anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerge in Africa but also, to a previously unsuspected extent, their cognitive capacity for abstract and creative thought and the conception of increasingly complex technologies associated with modern human behavior.

The report describes the stone tools as microliths, thin blades about only an inch long that could be affixed to wood or bone. These tipped projectiles were either arrows propelled by bows or, more likely, spears launched by atlatls, wooden extensions of the throwing arm that act as a lever, imparting greater speeds and distances to the weapon. This technology, the researchers said, may have been pivotal to the success of Homo sapiens as humans left Africa and entered Eurasia some 50,000 years ago, encountering Neanderthals who were limited to hand-thrown spears.

“Every time we excavate a new site in coastal South Africa with advanced field techniques, we discover new and surprising results that push back in time the evidence for uniquely human behaviors.”

The Army bureaucracy and culture prizes information flow and reliance on assets and technology, making personal leadership a secondary priority. For example, reports --how to send them, what was the best format, and their content were the key priority prior to the commencement of DATE during our preparations. This over-emphasis on information flow and technology meant that during the actual exercise, there was little attempt to actually gain good situational awareness through battlefield circulations and terrain analysis.

in The Sling and the Stone. Hammes argues that during the 1990s and into the first years of the 20th century, DOD developed an institutional mindset completely centered around technology. The planning and vision papers put out "see increased technical capabilities of command and control as the key factor shaping future war." The command and control systems created would "exceed the capabilities of any opponent and will provide us with a near-perfect understanding of the battlefield."

Because of the emphasis on information flow and technology, it's natural for commanders to remain in their command posts where they can have access to the flow of reports from the front and UAV feeds from above. In theory, they can access a near-perfect view of the battlefield and micro-manage their formations thanks to the excellent communication and sensor technologies at their disposal. In such circumstances, commanders moving forward behind their lead assault elements aren't necessary to get a good idea of the battle or drive their subordinates to take action quickly.

Stampede kills more than 700 at Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca

The stampede occurred Thursday morning during the ritual known as "stoning the devil" in a tent city in Mina, about two miles from the holy site in Mecca, Islam's holiest city.

The incident is the deadliest disaster at Mina since 1990, when 1,426 people died.

Around 7,000 years ago the Earth was enjoying a warm climate. Now glaciers and patches of perennial ice in the high mountains of Southern Norway have started to melt again, revealing ancient layers.

He is an archaeologist working for Oppland County, and has for many years done fieldwork in glaciers and ice patches, finding things our ancestors discarded or lost.

The summer of 2014 was hectic in this respect. In Oppland County alone, Pilø and his colleagues found 400 objects, now emerged from the deepfreeze.

It was a skeleton of a young boy, discovered at Lake Turkana in the deserts of northern Kenya. He died when he was about eight years old and his bones sank into the sediments of the lake, where they were preserved for 1.5 million years. He was, and is, the most complete early-human fossil ever discovered

Together they span four million years of human evolution.

1.9 million-year-old Homo rudolfensis, known as "skull 1470".

F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors are investigating Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers militia, for any role he might have played in the storming of the Capitol two months ago, according to court documents and a law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter.

The Oath Keepers, who largely draw their members from the ranks of former military and law enforcement personnel, have from the start been a central focus of the sprawling investigation into the Capitol riot, which has led to charges against nearly 300 people. Eleven members of the group stand accused of a variety of crimes stemming from the siege, most prominently an alleged conspiracy reaching back to shortly after Election Day to break into the Capitol and interfere with Congress’s Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College vote.

In the same communiqué, Mr. Rhodes announced that the Oath Keepers would be sending “multiple volunteer security teams” to provide protection to “V.I.P.s” at events surrounding Mr. Trump’s speech and rally in Washington earlier on the day of the riot. The New York Times has identified a group of Oath Keepers who worked as security guards for Mr. Trump’s close ally and adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. at such events, and this week two of them — Roberto Minuta and Joshua A. James — were arrested in connection with the Capitol attack.

For almost 30 centuries—from its unification around 3100 B.C. to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.—ancient Egypt was the preeminent civilization in the Mediterranean world

Neolithic (late Stone Age) communities in northeastern Africa exchanged hunting for agriculture and made early advances that paved the way for the later development of Egyptian arts and crafts, technology, politics and religion (including a great reverence for the dead and possibly a belief in life after death).

agriculture (largely wheat and barley) formed the economic base of the Egyptian state. The annual flooding of the great Nile River provided the necessary irrigation and fertilization each year; farmers sowed the wheat after the flooding receded and harvested it before the season of high temperatures and drought returned.

Massive prehistoric stone structures found in desert landscapes from Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan have baffled archaeologists for decades. Each can stretch for up to a few miles, and resembles a kite with tail strings in overall shape.Recent studies have built a consensus that the so-called desert kites were used to trap and kill wild animal herds. But how ancient hunters conceived — and perceived — these grandiose structures has remained a mystery. The kites, in their entirety, are “only visible from the air,” said Rémy Crassard, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “Even with our modern ways of envisaging our landscape, it’s still difficult for us archaeologists, scientists, scholars to make a proper map.”

Dr. Crassard and his colleagues were overjoyed in 2015 when they found two stone monoliths with precise depictions of nearby desert kites in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Engraved between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, these representations are by far the oldest known to-scale architectural plans recorded in human history, the team reported on Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. They also highlight how carefully planned the desert kites may have been by the ancient peoples who relied on them.

Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers. 

Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.   

The first evidence to raise significant questions about the Clovis model emerged in the late 1970s, when the anthropologist Tom Dillehay came across a prehistoric campsite in southern Chile called Monte Verde. Radiocarbon dating of the site suggested that the first campfires were lighted there, all the way at the southern tip of South America, well before the first Clovis tools were made

Professor Waters announced finding dozens of stone tools along a Texas creekbed. After using a technique that measures the last time the dirt around the stones was exposed to light, Professor Waters concluded, in a paper in Science, that the site was at least 15,000 years old — which would make it the earliest reliably dated site in the Americas.

Having compared the DNA of modern American Indians with that of groups living in Asia today, scholars have estimated that the last common ancestor of the two peoples probably lived between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. That figure doesn’t square with the arrival of the Clovis people from Asia only 13,500 years ago.