Almost from the start, it seems, humans headed for the shore to get away from the cares at home. But this was no holiday for them. More than likely, it was a matter of survival at a perilous time of climate change throughout Africa 164,000 years ago.

By then, Homo sapiens had developed a taste for shellfish, out of necessity and much earlier than previously thought, while adapting to life in caves on the craggy coast of southern Africa, scientists report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Exploring a cave in a steep cliff overlooking the ocean, an international team of scientists found deposits of shellfish remains, hearths, small stone blades and fragments of hematite, some of which had been ground apparently for use as the coloring agent red ocher, which sometimes had symbolic meaning.

"The shellfish," the researchers concluded, "may have been crucial to the survival of these early humans as they expanded their home ranges" in response to the cooler and drier conditions that had prevailed for thousands of years in the interior of Africa.

A sheriff's dive team discovered what is believed to be a late-1800s era steamboat at the bottom of a Central Florida lake during a training exercise last month.

The Lake County sheriff's dive team found the boat at the bottom of Lake Minneola in the lake's southwest corner in Clermont while training with side-scan sonar, which they recently acquired.

The sonar is a piece of equipment that is dragged by a boat and projects images of the underwater environment.

It was just a broken plate found buried in a trash heap. But to researchers at James Madison's estate, Montpelier, fragments of porcelain unearthed last month from the Virginia piedmont tell a story of a first lady, two U.S. presidents, a king and queen and the revolutions that bind their legacies more than 200 years later.

Discovered amid oyster shells, a chamber pot and shards of glass that filled a midden, or trash pile, near Dolley Madison's kitchen, a fractured dessert plate found by researchers during a $24 million restoration of Montpelier is believed to date to the late 1700s and might have once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the French queen with an infamous penchant for decadent living who perished at the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The gathering of prominent black leaders and activists at Faneuil Hall a century ago was a pivotal moment in the history of the African-American civil rights movement and for Boston, but it has been largely forgotten.

W.E.B. DuBois, Boston's William Monroe Trotter, and scores of other organizers of the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization that spawned the NAACP, met in 1907 to discuss how best to oppose segregationist laws in the United States.

Disagreements among the 800 civil rights leaders and activists from around the country widened a split between DuBois and Trotter, fractured the young Niagara Movement, and marked the start of Boston's decline as a national political and social hub for African-Americans.

Yesterday, local scholars and community leaders, including Governor Deval Patrick, launched four days of recognition and educational talks about the 1907 Boston meeting and its role in the city's history.

The 2008 crop of presidential candidates is certainly a literate bunch. They've all written books, except Rep. Duncan Hunter,R-Calif., unless he's the Duncan Hunter who wrote, "A Martian Poet in Siberia," a self-published sci-fi novel about global warming. Published between 1972 and two weeks from now, the candidates' books vary as much as their authors, ranging from gripping personal revelation to high-minded speechifying to run-of-the-mill wonkery.

And we have read many of them, though we didn't get to Alan Keyes' oeuvre because of his late entry into the race. In the 16 reviews that follow, the books are rated on a rising scale of one to five, with icons appropriate to the candidates -- the first President Roosevelt for the Republicans, the second for the Democrats, and cosmonauts for the more, um, idealistic entrants in the race for the White House.

Never mind the man she's married to, Hillary Clinton isn't big on feelings. "Unthinking emotion," she wrote a friend in college, "has always been pitiful to me." In "For Love of Politics," Sally Bedell Smith's new book on Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage during their White House years, the First Lady is a woman determined not to surrender to emotion, even when her husband and the nation have. While President Clinton idles away an hour hugging his way through a rope line at a Democratic Leadership Council fund-raiser, his wife, backstage, waits patiently to depart. As the president admits on TV to an affair with Monica Lewinsky, the First Lady waits in the White House solarium and greets staffers with a smile. Chelsea, the dutiful daughter, tries hard to mimic mom: "Emotions aren't rational," she tells friends.

Now Senator Clinton is moving toward the Democratic presidential nomination, and emotions have little place in her campaign. Even discussions about her marriage, that gripping, grating psychodrama, come off as cerebral and qualified—when the candidate and her staff choose to have them at all. The Clintons' marriage is important, they say, because it gave her the unparalleled experience of seeing a presidency up close. Except not "up close" in the dynastic sense; Clinton, they say, is an accomplished senator and an independent woman. Except not "independent" in the separate-lives/marriage-of-convenience sense; theirs, they say, is in every way a real marriage. Either way, the Clintonites contend, all that is irrelevant now.

Smith does not agree. A biographer who's written on Pamela Harriman, Princess Diana and Jackie and Jack Kennedy, she has a keen instinct for history made inside of marriages. She knows the irrational is often most important. Her book is narrower than other recent Clinton biographies, which deal with the nuts and bolts of her career, but is perhaps more relevant. Certainly, it is more subversive. Homing in on "the push and pull" between them and their love of politics, Smith presents a story Clinton isn't eager to remember: how her marriage made and then nearly wrecked her career.

A dramatic rise in tourism ignites a debate in Mexico: Should a private family own an archaeological treasure?

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Chichen Itza, Mexico - This ancient city, once the most important center of the Maya world, has stood in the jungle here for more than 1,000 years. Scattered across 100 acres, the remains of stone temples and a crumbling observatory offer an imposing glimpse into the innovative Maya civilization, which recorded the annual solar cycle with Swiss-watch precision.

Today tourists gape as they walk past Chichen Itza's most-recognized site, the 80-foot Temple of Kukulkan pyramid, where during the spring and fall equinoxes the sun casts a shadow in the shape of a plumed serpent. They walk across the Great Ball Court, the largest sports venue in Mesoamerica, where losing players were believed to be decapitated.

They also happen to be – unwittingly – walking on private property.

Over the last half century, the land within this archaeological site has belonged to the Barbachanos, a wealthy and powerful family in the state of Yucatán. The family purchased the grounds from an American diplomat, who excavated here in the 1900s but fell out of grace with Mexico for shipping artifacts back to the US.

It's an ownership issue that few Mexicans have known about or even cared about. Until now. This summer, a global contest to rename the Seven Wonders of the World brought renewed tourism and a corollary of unwanted curiosity to this ancient corner of Mexico. Now, suddenly, federal legislators are seeking to take over the land. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) covets it, too. The Barbachano family is divided over what to do. And locals, most of Maya descent, claim it should be theirs.

[Prime Minister Howard's plan to require students in grades 9 and 10 to take 150 hours of Australian history classes has raised practical questions, say some.]

The History Teachers Association of Australia obviously wants the subject accorded a higher status, but warns of the time and resources this plan requires. It estimates 10,000 extra specialist teachers would have to be trained as history goes from a fringe subject to one taught over a mandated 150 hours to every student. To put that in perspective, most VCE units — a semester of work at year 11 or 12 standard — require 54 to 72 hours' classroom study, depending on the subject.

As Francois Dellatre stepped across the outdoor platform at a rededication ceremony Wednesday in Morristown, he looked at the two red, white and blue flags mounted at either side of him.

"As a Frenchman, it is moving to me to be here with you, and to have the French flag side by side with an American flag," said Dellatre, the Consul General of France in New York.

The French diplomat's statement about the two countries' historic and recently mended relationship highlighted the reopening of the Green in Morristown, which served as the site of a historic meeting between the countries 227 years ago that cemented their alliance and was a turning point in the American Revolutionary War.

More than 400 people from Morristown, Morris Township and Morris Plains, and as far away as Minnesota and Puerto Rico, watched as members of the Trustees of the Morristown Green Inc., which owns the 2.5-acre site, and the French diplomat pulled the strings of white sheets covering three bronze sculptures depicting the May 10, 1780, meeting between General George Washington, his wartime aide Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette, a French diplomat.

World War II hero Audie Murphy got his own U.S. postage stamp. So did Elvis Presley, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Buffalo’s most decorated war veteran, the late Matt L. Urban, should get a stamp, too, according to organizers of a nationwide petition drive.

The Polish American Congress recently renewed its petition drive and other efforts to convince the U.S. Postal Service to honor Urban with a stamp.

The organization argues that Urban and Murphy — both U.S. Army veterans from World War II — are the two most decorated veterans from that war. Murphy’s face was put on a stamp in 2001, and the group wants Urban to receive the same honor.

State underwater archaeologists plan to raise a cannon Monday from a sunken ship that could have belonged the pirate Blackbeard.

They plan to raise the roughly 8-foot-long cannon weighing about 2,500 pounds as part of an ongoing excavation project at the presumed site of Queen Anne's Revenge.

The cannon would be on display Wednesday for the public at the N.C. Maritime Museum expansion site at Gallants Channel in Beaufort.

Little did the pigeons at the dilapidated warehouse on Chicago's South Side know they were roosting near historical treasures.

Sadly, no one else knew either.

These long-lost riches included virtually every letter, ordinance, election return, permit and scrap of paper that the Chicago City Council received or generated between 1833 and 1940. Here were the original 1833 town incorporation vote (12-1), city physician reports from cholera epidemics, building blueprints and requests from citizens that ran from the silly to the poignant--like the man begging the city to cover his wife's medical costs after a fire truck ran her over in 1854. The papers form a diary of Chicago's birth and formative years and are crucial to understanding the city's history.

[HNN Editor: This article goes on at great length to describe the discovery of these documents in the 1980s by state archivists and the ways in which Chicago history had to be rewritten.]

For the first time, the Nile River will be the subject of an archeological excavation. An Egyptian archeological team affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities will track down the locations of the river’s ancient sunken treasures.

Alaa Mahrous, director of the underwater antiquities department in Alexandria, told Daily News Egypt that the team of archaeologists headed by Dr Zahi Hawass, director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, has selected the Nile to be the subject of their search. The river has not been excavated to date.

ST. LOUIS - The slender little beech tree planted recently on property near the Missouri Botanical Garden looked pretty much like any other specimen. But it was special - both scientifically and historically.

The clump beech, cloned from one at President Teddy Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill home on New York's Long Island, joined an ash tree cloned from George Washington's Mount Vernon estate, and plans are to add genetic replica trees from properties owned by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

Ultimately, the small grove will become a tree tribute to the four presidents represented on Mount Rushmore.

This unique nod to history and horticulture will grow on the grounds of the National Garden Clubs Inc., a non-profit group with roughly 230,000 members that promotes a love of gardening in the United States and overseas.

IN AUGUST 2006, the Prime Minister's history summit agreed on six principles, the first that any core version of Australian history had to be teachable. What this meant was that teachers and students should feel engaged by the course — otherwise the whole initiative would be a disaster. Fourteen months later, John Howard has announced a final version of his guide to the history program. The good news is that the guide is fair and balanced, not at all the ideological sermon some feared. The bad news is that the course, if implemented as it stands, is scarcely teachable and will almost certainly alienate large numbers of both teachers and students, killing off any long-term interest in the subject.

To understand why this is the case, we need to move quickly from history to some elementary mathematics. In the first instance, the PM's guide has a decent foundation in the principles of teaching and learning, but it just doesn't add up when it comes to the content. This is because the number of "milestones" (key events to be studied in detail) has tripled since the August summit and has more than doubled since the draft guide in April. There are now 75 milestones and more than 100 biographies to choose from.

Each milestone is meant to represent a significant event in Australian history and so needs to be given a context. The PM's course lasts 150 hours in years 9 and 10 (with some possibly covered in year 8), which seems a lot of time for one subject. In this case, not so. Divide the hours by the milestones and you get about a double lesson for each significant event, with no stops for individual research, visits to museums or heritage sites or classroom discussion. Imagine a properly contextualised version of the 1975 Dismissal taught in a double lesson?...

The museum’s founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch, seems to understand the nature of this daunting task.

He doesn’t want to wait until 2015 to begin it, and late last month the museum actually opened — not in the world of bricks and mortar but in the world of hyperlinks and tags. With $1 million in assistance from I.B.M., the Smithsonian Institution created what Mr. Bunch calls a “virtual platform,” a Web museum (nmaahc.si.edu)....

Unfortunately, though, these declared ambitions are jarring given the half-realized efforts on display. Even in the realm of hyperlinks, the mortar has a long way to go here before it congeals. Given the enormity of the interpretive project ahead, and its national importance, why was it prematurely undercut with something as thin and uninspiring as this site?

Consider the exhibition of portraits. If it were going to be unveiled on the Web, then why not do it in full? Many images are not available. All have brief, overly compressed biographical notes. And the essays from the show’s catalog are unavailable.

Even the selection of portraits seems unshaped by an interpretive idea. The exhibition’s title, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” is taken from a fervent message delivered to free Northern black Americans by a black clergyman, Henry Highland Garnet, in 1843. And while there are photos of some who variously resisted the debilitating forces arrayed against them — from W. E. B. Du Bois to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — the idea of resistance is interpreted so broadly and blandly as to also encompass artists like Diana Ross and Wynton Marsalis. The idea may be that given historical circumstances any achievement can be interpreted as a kind of resistance; but distinctions, even among political positions, are left unexplored, at least on the Web.

Attracted by the calm of long-abandoned machine gun posts, rare animals have been settling in the ruined bunkers that make up the Siegfried Line Hitler built to protect Germany's western border. Now wildlife groups are battling to stop authorities from bulldozing this giant legacy of the Nazi era.

The Siegfried Line, the 630-kilometer network of bunkers Hitler built in a vain attempt to protect his western frontier from an Allied invasion, is finally serving a purpose six decades after the end of World War II -- as a quiet haven for wild cats, bats and a host of other rare species.

HISTORIANS WON a small victory last week in their quest to lift the heavy cloak of privilege from papers generated by the president and his White House staff. A federal judge ruled that the National Archives should have the final say on when those papers are publicly released. But that action takes care of only part of the problem. Congress has before it a law that would make as many of those documents available as possible. The only obstacle is Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.).

Since 1978, a president has been allowed to hold back certain records from public view for 12 years after leaving the White House. In addition, a 1989 executive order from President Ronald Reagan lets former occupants of the Oval Office ask the sitting president to withhold certain records. If the request is refused, the former president can go to court to stop their release. Then came President Bush's 2001 executive order, which compelled presidents to honor the requests of their predecessors. And in an unprecedented bit of overreaching, Mr. Bush extended the right of executive privilege to relatives of the president and the vice president. Archivists can go to court to try to get the records released, but even if their lawsuits are successful, current and former presidents could delay the release of records indefinitely.

Because that "effectively eliminates" the discretion of the National Archives, which by law has the power to release presidential documents, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, in an Oct. 1 ruling, invalidated the indefinite presidential review of privileged records. Left in place, though, was the broad cloak of privilege for the president's relatives and for the vice president that Mr. Bush's executive order imposed. The Presidential Records Act Amendment of 2007, sponsored by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would take care of that by undoing the order and giving current and former presidents no more than 40 days to review privileged documents before they are released.

But Mr. Bunning is blocking the bill. He didn't return our call, but he was quoted in the Dallas Morning News last month as saying, "The president ought to have the right to withhold any records he chooses" and that former presidents should have "a reasonable amount of time" to release their records. Mr. Bunning's hold and his rationale are unacceptable. Presidential records belong to history because they help provide insight into the decisions made by a president and his administration. More important, because they are the byproducts of work done on behalf of the nation, those records belong to the people of the United States.

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY – Attorney Norman E. Kent '71, '75 has established an endowed scholarship named for his friend Allard K. Lowenstein, the late Long Island congressman and champion of civil rights in the 60s and 70s.

The scholarship will be awarded to a qualified upperclassman selected on the basis of financial need, academic achievement and an undergraduate record that demonstrates a history and commitment to advancing the cause of equality and civil rights for all Americans, said Mr. Kent, a nationally known criminal defense attorney who lives in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

According to the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Law Clinic at Yale University, established by Yale students after his death, Mr. Lowenstein “was a relentless opponent of injustice in the United States and throughout the world. His passionate leadership played a crucial role in the civil rights, anti-apartheid, anti-war, and human rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Promised real power as Bill Clinton's vice president, Al Gore found he had a rival for that role: the First Lady. And when Hillary decided to run for the Senate, a tense competition got ugly. In an excerpt from her new book about the Clinton White House years, [Sally Bedell Smith] reveals how conflicting agendas—the triangle of a scandal-ridden lame-duck president, the wife he'd betrayed, and his designated successor—sapped Gore's 2000 campaign as the bond between two couples dissolved into distrust, anger, and resentment.

The JD1.25 million Lot’s Museum at the Dead Sea is expected to open to the public early next year, tourism authorities said on Sunday.

Tourism Ministry Assistant Secretary General Ihab Amarin said construction of the museum has been completed, with work under way to furbish the museum’s exhibits.

“The building is finally ready and we expect the opening at the end of this year or early next year, once the exhibits are ready,” said Amarin.

The museum, located some 300 metres from the cave where Lot and his family are said to have sought refuge from the devastation of Sodom and Gomorrah, has been in the works for more than three years.

A controversial Holocaust denial film is raising questions about free speech at GrassRoots TV, the Aspen community-access station.

Steve Campbell, founder of Citizens for 9/11 Truth, asked the station to air “Judea Declares War on Germany: A Critical Look at World War II” on Monday, but GrassRoots TV board members stopped the screening.

The one-hour program features Dr. Frederick Töben, an Australian national and member of the Adelaide Institute, an organization that denies that the Holocaust ever happened.

“This film is offensive not only to Jews in the world, but to any sensible person,” said GrassRoots TV Executive Director John Masters.

A chilling new book about Hitler's Lebensborn programme - the sinister project to create the perfect Aryan race to rule the world for 1,000 years - shows the Nazis kidnapped thousands of children from occupied countries to fill the demand for future manpower.


Lebensborn, or Fount of Life, was hitherto thought to be just a breeding programme where S.S. "studs" mated with suitable female specimens in Nazi nursing homes.

Nine months later the offspring were turned over to the state to be brought up in an all-Nazi environment.

These budding supermen were supposed to grow up to be hard, cruel standard bearers of Hitler's "New Order" in Europe.

But eminent German historian Volker Koop says in his new book "Give a Child to the Fuehrer - the Lebensborn Organisation" that the S.S.-run group kidnapped thousands of children from occupied lands and murdered those that quack racial "experts" back in the Reich deemed "unfit for Germanisation".

Recently discovered rare Kodachrome slides taken on a remote Pacific Island during World War II will lead Gregg Hagley of Grand Rapids and his two sons on a historic journey.

Staff Sergeant Raymond H. Hagley of the 73rd Bombardment Wing of the 20th Air Force took the slide photos while stationed at Isley Field on Saipan in 1944/1945. Before Hagley passed away in January 1991, he gave the slides to his son, Gregg Hagley. “I knew they were special, just how special I wasn't sure until recently,” Hagley said.

The fully restored slides are remarkable in color, content, and composition. They show details of the island rarely seen by historians. Kodachrome slide film was not widely used during World War II.