An ancient temple in Turkey has been found filled with various artifacts, including stone slabs engraved in Luwian, an extinct language. The site is casting new light on the “dark age” that was thought to have engulfed the region from 1200 to 900 B.C.

Written sources from the era—including the Old Testament of the Bible, Greek Homeric epics, and texts from Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III—record the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age as a turbulent period of cultural collapse, famine, and violence.

But the newfound temple suggests that may not have been the case, say archaeologists from the University of Toronto’s Tayinat Archaeological Project, led by Timothy Harrison.

“We’re beginning to find new archaeological evidence that there was a continuation of writing traditions, as well as cultural and political continuity from the Bronze Age into this Iron Age period,” Harrison said.

Slate answered an interesting question about whether Adolf Hitler’s descendants can profit off of his works.

Hitler did produce a last will and testament leaving his inheritance to his three siblings. But the German state of Bavaria seized all of Hitler’s property after the Third Reich fell in 1945, and it currently owns the rights to his estate. Some historians have speculated that Hitler’s living family members—there are more than a dozen residing in Germany, Austria, and Long Island—could sue the state of Bavaria and claim royalties for the Führer’s literary and artistic work. But none has come forward to claim a cut from the auction. The odds of getting paid would be slim, and the potential fallout from trying to profit off the genocidal maniac’s work is enormous.

On another note: it was on this day, 64 years ago in 1945, that Hitler commited suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head.

Ever wondered what New York like before it was a city? Welcome to Mannahatta, 1609.

Now, after nearly a decade of research, the Mannahatta Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society has un-covered the original ecology of Manhattan. That’s right, the center of one of the world’s largest and most built-up cities was once a natural landscape of hills, valleys, forests, fields, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, beaches, springs, ponds and streams, supporting a rich and abundant community of wildlife and sustaining people for perhaps 5000 years before Europeans arrived on the scene in 1609.  It turns out that the concrete jungle of New York City was once a vast deciduous forest, home to bears, wolves, songbirds, and salamanders, with clear, clean waters jumping with fish.  In fact, with over 55 different ecological communities, Mannahatta’s biodiversity per acre rivaled that of national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Great Smoky Mountains!

I’ve seen a lot of maps showing how land has changed over time, usually featuring a number of overlays representing eras. However, this is the first time I have seen photo-realistic computer recreations showing an area in the past, and I think it is effectively enables you to mentally time-travel.

According to Dr. David Starkey an English historian, a television and radio presenter, and a specialist in the Tudor period, Britain was governed more competently under Henry VIII than Gordon Brown.

“I am being serious. We are ruled at the moment more incompetently than we have been ever before. We have to go back to the Heptarchy.”

Dr Starkey said a key part of Tudor politics revolved around rewarding success and punishing failure, which had been lost in the present age, taking a swipe at Peter Mandelson, the Business Secretary and former European Commissioner.

He added: “I don’t think that if you have turned out to be a cheat that you should be made a European Commissioner. I think it’s intolerable that people ruining companies have got away with fortunes.

“What example does that set for the young? Henry’s court was brutal and awful but it seems to me that there was a degree of rationality about it.”

Dr. Starkey also goes on to lament the art of “scholarship and knowledge”; something which has been lost as pupils increasingly rely on the internet for facts.

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