View Recent Blogs

Ancient tooth enamel from China has opened a rare molecular window onto one of the murkiest chapters in human evolution. A new Nature study reports that proteins preserved in 400,000-year-old Homo erectus teeth carry a signal also seen in Denisovans, raising the possibility that these two ancient human relatives once met and mixed in East Asia. Protein Clues from Ancient Teeth The research team, led by Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, analysed enamel proteins from six Middle Pleistocene Homo erectus individuals from Zhoukoudian, Hexian, and Sunjiadong in China. As The Independent noted in its report on the find, the sampled teeth belonged to five males and one female, giving researchers a rare biological
A new reconstruction of Ice Age Britain suggests people were back in the British Isles around 15,200 years ago, roughly 500 years earlier than the old climate timeline allowed. The finding, reported by ScienceDaily from an original article by Adrian Palmer in The Conversation, points to a sharp burst of southern British summer warmth that may have opened the door for hunter-gatherers and the animals they pursued. Rather than waiting for the famous warming seen in Greenland ice cores, these people seem to have moved into a locally improving landscape first. The research matters because Britain was still joined to the continent. Reindeer and horses were moving into expanding grazing grounds, and people could follow them across a landmass not
A forgotten scrap of parchment has brought 22 Black Death survivors back into the historical record: named people who fell ill, endured weeks of sickness, and returned to work. The document, found in the records of the Ramsey Abbey manor of Warboys in Huntingdonshire, England, lists peasants excused from labor services during the terrible summer of 1349. As Alex Brown and Grace Owen report in The Conversation, it offers an unusually human view of recovery during Europe’s most infamous pandemic. A Rare Roll Call of Recovery The new study, published in Historical Research, was written by A. T. Brown, Grace Owen and Barney Sloane. It examines a document inserted into the accounts of Warboys, held by the Benedictine monks of

There is a vast spiritual movement that arose during the earliest years of Christianity that was conducted in secret, which created impressive, yet illegal texts that produced a very different form of salvation than the Jewish, Roman, and all other orthodox teachings had ever produced. This movement is called Gnosticism and consisted of many different groups of early Christian mystics and philosophers who sought concealed or hidden knowledge from within themselves. 

Sun Tzu is one of the most well-known military figures in history, yet instead of being remembered as simply a prophet, king, or empire challenger, he is recognized as a strategic mastermind. Sun Tzu was born in 500 B.C., and lived during the Warring States period, a time when China was divided into many different states that constantly fought with one another; the combat normally involved large armies.

Throughout the history of religion, many of its most notable figures were either prophets who preached to large groups of people and kings who constructed beautiful temples and reformers who took on empires. However, among these, one of the greatest spiritual thinkers of 16th-century Europe would be an Italian philosopher, a mystic and a cosmologist named Giordano Bruno.

The most famous figures in religious history are often prophets who spoke to multitudes, kings who built great temples, or reformers who challenged empires. However, there was a great mind in spirituality in the sixteenth century that died at thirty-eight years old, did not write much, and spent the majority of his life teaching a small number of scholars in the remote Galilee Mountains of Modern Day Israel. He was Rabbi Isaac Luria also known to history as the Ari, (the Lion). Luria was a mystic, visionary, and spiritual revolutionary living in Safed (Modern Israel) in the 1570's.

The modern world is overwhelming, and, unfortunately, that stress is being passed on to everyone. We all have moments where we feel like we are unable to do anything right, and when our goals seem unreachable, we give up. However, what many people do not realize is that when they are feeling this way, they are actually exerting themselves far more than they should. The reason is that many of us are trying so hard to achieve every outcome. We have developed an obsessive tendency to control the outcomes of our lives by forcing them into some sort of predetermined path.

The most important people in religion could be named Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Moses or the Buddha. But there is an important religious thinker from a very remote time who appears to have had a profound influence on the fundamental beliefs of both the major western religions. This is Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks). He was a mystic, poet, and revolutionary living in ancient Persia (modern Iran) between 1500-1000 BC.