"Australia was first settled by between 1,000 and 3,000 humans around 50,000 years ago, but the population crashed during the Ice Age before recovering to a peak of some 1.2 million people around five centuries ago, a study said on Wednesday."

"A metal-poor star located merely 190 light-years from the Sun is 14.46+-0.80 billion years old, which implies that the star is nearly as old as the Universe"

"Archaeologists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have discovered a cluster of 12 unusual stones in the back of a small, prehistoric rock-shelter near the town of Boquete. The cache represents the earliest material evidence of shamanistic practice in lower Central America."

"Nan Madol seems to have housed the ruling elite caste of Saudeleur dynasty. It was a political and ceremonial seat of power. As a means of control of their subjects Saudeleur dynasty had succeeded in uniting the clans of Pohnpei. The rulers forced local chieftains to leave their home villages and move to the city where their activities could be more closely observed."

"An Australian anthropologist has used forensic facial reconstruction techniques to show, for the first time, how the mysterious Flores 'hobbit' might have once looked. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-flores-hobbit-revealed.html#jCp"

."..as much as we may still love to superficially aestheticise history as a ‘style’ and a consumer ‘product’, we are also witnessing an engagement with nostalgia that is about ethics rather than simply style. Like postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, our current engagement with the past is consciously aware of what Fredric Jameson has termed its own “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past”, yet nevertheless seeks to say something beyond style in the process."

Archaeologists believe that the town was home to some 350 people and dates back to between 4700 and 4200 BC.

That is about 1,500 years before the start of ancient Greek civilisation.

"Ultimately, these hard-shelled aircraft shelters holds the two most commonly wanted superpowers: Flight vs. Invisibility. In John Hodgeman’s ‘informal’ survey, the desire for flight was really an ‘inflated mythical, heroic” image that people only aspired superficially. Ultimately, nobody wanted to use the powers to fulfil our traditional sense of ‘good’. As it turned out, being a Superhero was no fun."

"The Kibbo Kift were an early 'open air' social movement founded by John Hargrave in 1920. Hargrave’s aim was to encourage “outdoor education, the learning of handicrafts, physical training, the reintroduction of ritual into modern life, the regeneration of urban man and the establishment of a new world civilisation.”"

Archaeologists working in Europe and the Middle East have recently unearthed evidence of a mysterious Stone Age "skull-smashing" culture, according to New Scientist. Human skulls buried underneath an ancient settlement in Syria were found detached from their bodies with their faces smashed in. Eerily, it appears that the skulls were exhumed and detached from their bodies several years after originally being buried. It was then that they were smashed in and reburied separate from their bodies.

Today New York City is the Big Apple of the Northeast but new research reveals that 500 years ago, at a time when Europeans were just beginning to visit the New World, a settlement on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in Canada, was the biggest, most complex, cosmopolitan place in the region.

A supernova may have actually been the mysterious "Red Crucifix" in the sky that is cited in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle for the year 774. New correspondence between a university student and Nature carries interesting observations that astronomers could be looking at a previously unrecognized supernova.

Archaeological research carried out at the Neolithic site of La Draga, near the lake of Banyoles, has yielded the discovery of an item which is unique in the western Mediterranean and Europe. The item is a bow which appeared in a context dating from the period between 5400-5200 BCE, corresponding to the earliest period of settlement.

@MelissaSterry: [The Really] Old School Ravers: New scientific techniques reveal how large tribal gatherings swept neolithic Britain http://t.co/dkEZkibO http://twitter.com/MelissaSterry/status/201609554155409408

@mothninja: Lovely BBC4 doco on the Antikythera mechanism http://t.co/mkhqZ8gV (FAO @woofbarkyap amongst others) http://twitter.com/mothninja/status/201734655739830272

"Algol, aka the Demon Star, is actually a binary star in the Perseus constellation, and has been the subject of speculation for hundreds of years. Now a group of Finnish researchers propose that the peculiar behavior of Algol was first noted by the Egyptians some 3200 years ago."

"Traces of ancient viruses which infected our ancestors millions of years ago are more widespread in us than previously thought. A study shows how extensively viruses from as far back as the dinosaur era still thrive in our genetic material."

"Fossils of the three-toed horse genus Hipparion that have been found on the Tibetan Plateau have provided concrete evidence for studying the uplift of the plateau, including a skull with associated mandible of Hipparion zandaense from Zanda."

"There were two "moments" in the defeat of liberal centrist politics in Germany, Austria, Spain etc. in the 1930s: the first, where polite society realised the working classes were swinging to the right and left, but patronisingly reassured themselves that the world of Jazz, surrealist poetry and foreign holidays could never end. That is, they said to themselves: the workers are clinging to the past, but we, avatars of a more liberal and progressive future, have economic history with us, which points only in the direction of liberalism and economic co-operation."

"Named the Red Deer Cave people, after their apparent penchant for home-cooked venison, they are the most recent human remains found anywhere in the world that do not closely resemble modern humans."

"The genome represents the first high-coverage, complete genome sequence of an archaic human group - a leap in the study of extinct forms of humans. “We hope that biologists will be able to use this genome to discover genetic changes that were important for the development of modern human culture and technology, and enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world, starting around 100,000 years ago” says Pääbo."

"A fogou or fougou (pronounced "foo-goo") is an underground, dry-stone structure found on Iron Age or Romano-British defended settlement sites in Cornwall." (Also ref. Cope's "The Modern Antiquarian" tv docu, available on YouTube) (I'm always forgetting this word.)

via John Coulthart: someone is posting the entire run of Man, Myth & Magic--1970 occult encyclopaedia in 112 weekly parts--on Flickr

" I unearthed this rather charming and naive, cheque book size, direct mail piece produced for the Midland Bank in 1975, although its design styling is pure 60s…"

A former factory worker from the British Midlands may be the last living master of the centuries-old Sikh battlefield art of shastar vidya. The father of four is now engaged in a full-time search for a successor.

"Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries."

Mariners may have been traveling the Aegean Sea even before the end of the last ice age, according to new evidence from researchers, in order to extract coveted volcanic rocks for pre-Bronze Age tools and weapons.

A suspected Iron Age road, made of timber and preserved in peat for 2,000 years, has been uncovered by archaeologists in East Anglia.

The programme examines a fascinating transcript of a conversation between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger which reveals the depth of the US antagonism towards Edward Heath's pro-European stance.

"The team compared symbols created by the Picts – a Scottish Iron Age society that flourished from the fourth to the ninth centuries AD – with over 400 known ancient and modern language texts."

Oxford scientists are aiming to produce a global map of the land owned or revered by the world’s religions. Many of these ‘religious forests’ and sacred sites contain some of the richest biodiversity in the world, including some of the highest numbers of threatened species.

"Vikings worldwide seem to have taken up a fashion for painful but impressive modification of teeth around the 10th century AD"

"I have previously discussed Great Britain's unprecedented escape from the Malthusian trap. Such escapes require virtuous cycles, i.e. positive feedback loops that allow productive capital to accumulate faster than it is destroyed. There are a number of these in Britain in the era of escape from the Black Plague to the 19th century, but two of the biggest involved transportation. "

"Themes and moods for documentary, scientific and industrial subjects."

"Rulloff was a murderer and a thief whose savant-like intelligence and erudition have invited comparison to Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. He committed robberies throughout his life in order to fund his grandiose research into the science of philology; an obsession that may have had unrecognized origins in a deep-seated sense of remorse."

"Previously it had been thought that causewayed enclosures spread slowly across the country over five centuries, between 3700-3000BC. However the research team was able to show that these enclosures actually spread within around 75 years."

"Researchers found a tunnel under the Temple of the Snake in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan, about 28 miles northeast of Mexico City."

"It has long been suspected that the enigmatic stone structures that dot the Syrian landscape were involved in harvesting gazelles."

"Everyone knows about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and, now, Fukushima. But what about Semipalatinsk, Palomares and Kyshtym? The world is full of nuclear disaster zones.."

"Researchers from the University of York and Manchester have successfully extracted protein from the bones of a 600,000 year old mammoth, paving the way for the identification of ancient fossils."

"Scientists say that fractures and marks on the bones suggest the man, who was aged between 26 and 45, died most probably from hanging, after which he was carefully decapitated and his head was then buried on its own."

"Humans first arrived in North America more than 2,500 years earlier than previously thought, according to an analysis of ancient stone tools found in Texas. And the people who left them appear to have developed a portable toolkit for killing and preparing meat."

"An experiment has shed light on how Iron Age people communicated from their hilltop homes 2,500 years ago."

"God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar."

"A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain."

"...allowing for the custom visualization of numismatic data might lead to intuitive leaps in the understanding of history by economists, art historians, classicists and others that both the coins themselves and the data itself would not."

"His research, just published in an academic journal, reveals that the Strait became a permanent feature between 5,800 and 4,600 years ago around the time when hunter-gatherers were replaced by the first farmers in North Wales..."

"Using LanguageWare as a basis, the team created a set of digital language analysis tools, including one they called Wordsmith, and used them to understand the creation of propaganda in the aftermath of the 1641 Irish Rebellion..."

"This film records an in-depth interview with Duchamp which took place five years before his death, at the time of his first ever one-man show (at the Pasadena Art Museum). It records for posterity Duchamp talking about his life, his ideas on art, why he chose to continue living in America after fleeing France in 1915, and why he virtually abandoned his work as an artist in 1923"

Strange fossils, including some that could be predecessors to modern animals, found in China shed new light on the evolution of large, complex organisms, and indicate that they may have diversified earlier than  thought.

"It still remains unknown who discovered the Kungur Ice Cave. It is cloaked with legends which is actually easy to understand judging from the mysterious atmosphere inside."

"Syani or Syanskie stone mines is a Moscow artificial cave system, where limestone was excavated for the city building."

"In a number of places, places rich in history and therefor rich in latent archaeological information, it is too hard to dig. Either the politics, terrain or the need to budget makes even educated guesswork prohibitive. But now, an Australian archaeologist has found almost 2,000 new sites in Saudi Arabia using a program that takes less than a minute to download: Google Earth."

"The Nottingham Caves Survey is in the process of recording all of Nottingham’s 450+ sandstone caves. The project is now underway and we are surveying caves even as you read this."

"There were also 4 models of “Buran” spaceship. One of them still rests in Baikonur cosmodrome. In the 1990s it was used by local youth for drinking sessions, so some windows are broken and its general condition is very poor."

"The Brooklyn Historical Society has strikingly restored this beautiful map, an early edition of Bernard Ratzer‘s “Plan of the City of New York” from 1770:"

"Professor Parncutt said one of the most compelling arguments is that music is based on ‘motherese’, a universal form of sonic and gestural communication between mothers and infants, which probably emerged between one and two million years ago as brain size increased and the gestation period of humans shortened. As infants became increasingly fragile, mother-infant communication became increasingly important for survival..."

"A spectacular haul of stone tools discovered beneath a collapsed rock shelter in southern Arabia has forced a major rethink of the story of human migration out of Africa."

"Anyone who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 A.D. would have seen it looming in the distance—a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza."

"A research project investigating the sonic properties of the rock outcrops at Preseli in SW Wales, source of the original bluestones transported to Stonehenge."

"Camp Century—aka "Project Iceworm"—was a "city under ice," according to the U.S. Army, a "nuclear-powered research center built by the Army Corps of Engineers under the icy surface of Greenland," as Frank J. Leskovitz more specifically explains. A fully-functioning "underground city," Camp Century even had its own mobile nuclear reactor—an "Alco PM-2A"—that kept the whole thing lit up and running during the Cold War..."

"Around 450 BC, the ancient Greek island of Rhodes was so well known for its robots that the poet Pindar wrote..."

The lost tomb of Caligula has been found, according to Italian police, after the arrest of a man trying to smuggle abroad a statue of the notorious Roman emperor recovered from the site.