What was thought to be a cousin turns out to be parent on the human evolutionary family tree. 

The last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals was a tall, well-traveled species called Heidelberg Man, according to a new PLoS One study.

The determination is based on the remains of a single Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis) known as "Ceprano," named after the town near Rome, Italy, where his fossil -- a partial cranium -- was found.

Previously, this 400,000-year-old fossil was thought to represent a new species of human, Homo cepranensis. The latest study, however, identifies Ceprano as being an archaic member of Homo heidelbergensis. 

The finding may shed light on what the species that gave rise to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens looked like. .......

The leader of Majorca has become the first government official to apologise for the execution of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition – centuries after the events.  

Francesc Antich, the regional president of the Balearic Islands, issued an official condemnation of the killings in what was heralded by Jewish groups as the first of its kind in Spain.  

Catalogue launched to help historians and families trace art looted during Hitler era.

Despite a reputation for reaching for their revolvers at the merest mention of culture, the Nazis were among the most ruthless, avaricious and methodical art collectors ever to cast a greedy eye and thieving hand over other people's property.

"Use every means of transport to get all works of art out of Florence … [save] works of art from English and Americans," ran one of Heinrich Himmler's orders. "In fine get anything away that you can get hold of. Heil Hitler."

That appetite for the most beautiful and precious works of European art saw thousands of pieces stolen from their owners between 1933 and 1945 and entire collections raided, scattered and lost.

The quest to recover them and, where possible, return them to their rightful places has been under way for almost seven decades.

Now, thanks to a deal between some of the world's leading archives and museums, an online catalogue of documents has been created to help families, historians and researchers track down the missing artworks....

On May 5, 1961, 37-year-old Alan Shepard blasted off from Cape Canaveral on a historic flight that marked the moment the U.S. caught up to Russia in the Space Race. Here, rare and never-seen photographs from LIFE of that amazing era.

President John Kennedy pins NASA's Distinguished Service Medal on Shepard's chest, May 8, 1961. Two weeks later, JFK famously declared: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."...

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of medieval industry on the outskirts of Bury St Edmunds town centre.

The clay ovens and leather tanneries appear to date from the 12th-16th Centuries.

Housing developers called county historians after they found mortar and flint footings for wooden buildings. 

The precise location of the site is not being publicised to protect the dig.

The Warren Map of 1740 showed the area to be fields - so this is the first evidence of previous development.

Alongside the clay ovens, the archaeologists have found a series of sunken barrels. ...

One of the world's most wanted Nazi war suspects, Sandor Kepiro, 97, went on trial Thursday, in Hungary charged with the murder of 36 Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad, Serbia in 1942.

Kepiro, a former officer in the Hungarian gendarmerie, protested his innocence in the Budapest municipal court saying, "I am not guilty and I have always lived a decent life."

He denied having killed anyone during a raid on Novi Sad, instead claiming to have saved the lives of five people.

And he said he did not know Jews or Serbs were the targets of the raid, saying that as far as he knew it was against anti-Nazi "partisans."

Hungary sided with the Nazis early in World War II and in January 1942, its troops murdered about 3,000 Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Hungary had annexed the territory at the time.

Kepiro said he never participated in or saw any deportation of Jews. ...

The Polish Resistance fighter nervously crawled through the dank underground tunnel in desperate wartime Warsaw. But Jan Karski was not an escaper on his way to freedom. Quite the opposite.

When he emerged into the sunlight of a summer’s day in August 1942, he was inside an unimaginable hell-hole — the walled-up Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland’s capital.

He had crossed, he would recall with horror, from ‘the world of the living to the world of the dead’.

The patrician young man — a devout Catholic and a high-flying diplomat before the war — had gone there of his own free will. He was smuggled inside to see the Warsaw Ghetto for himself, an eyewitness to the Holocaust long before that epithet was widely used or the full extent of Hitler’s genocidal ambitions grasped.

What he saw that day would make him one of the first outside observers to witness Hitler’s evil plan to exterminate the Jews in action.

His intention was to report his findings to a world that was sceptical of rumours that such a massive atrocity was really happening under its nose....

"This is a fiction," Fergus M. Bordewich, renowned historian and author of five nonfiction books, told The Root about the latest rancorous debate about black Confederates that comes as the nation's commemoration of the Civil War's 150th anniversary continues.

"It's a myth," continued Bordewich, author of Washington: The Making of the American Capital and Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. "It is nonsense. I could be blunter than that, but you get the drift. It's a meaningless term, 'black Confederates.' There is no evidence whatsoever from any responsible source that there was more than the occasional slave who was forced to serve in the war."

Bordewich is not alone in his position. Top-ranking scholars have repeatedly torpedoed the myth, including Bruce Levine, the renowned professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Edwin Bearss, historian emeritus at the National Park Service; and Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, editor-in-chief of The Root and chair of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Yet it persists. 

Gates weighed in on the issue in a quote that appeared in a column by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor and blogger at Atlantic Magazine, several weeks ago. " 'I would worry if anything I wrote lent credence to the notion that tens of thousands of black men served as soldiers in the Confederate Army,' " Gates said of the bloody four-year battle, fought from 1861 to 1865. "No black rebel units ever fought Union forces, although many slaves fought alongside their owners, and thousands more were compelled to labor for the Confederacy, rebuilding rail lines or construction fortifications."...

It might be hard for young folks to believe, but there was a time not that long ago that blacks in the South were not allowed to sit in the front of a bus. Blacks and whites could not sit side by side. CBS News correspondent Russ Mitchell reports all that changed with a movement that began 50 years ago today with the first of the Freedom Rides.

Fifty years ago, the Freedom Riders challenged Jim Crow's travel rules, divided buses, separate waiting depots and race-based rest rooms.

It was the spring of 1961, when the first 13 Freedom Riders planned a two week trek from Washington, D.C. They would take two buses through the deep South.

Hank Thomas was just 19 when he boarded the bus. "We had no thought of any kind of violence," he said.

After a century-long ban, French legislators voted in mid-April to legalize absinthe, the legendary potion prized by 19th-century bohemians for its hallucinogenic and inspirational effects. Find out more about the spirit’s heyday in the 19th century, its fall from grace in the early 1900s and why it’s once again becoming a drink of choice.

The Origins of Absinthe
Absinthe’s long history dates back to the ancient Egyptians, who used the drink’s most famous ingredient, the flavorful plant known as wormwood, for medicinal purposes as early as 1550 B.C. Ancient Greek texts also make reference to wormwood-based remedies, as well as a wormwood-flavored wine called absinthites oinos that may have been the predecessor of modern absinthe.

Absinthe as we know it was first distilled in Switzerland by the French doctor Pierre Ordinaire in 1792; five years later, a distillery began producing the spirit for medicinal use. French soldiers fighting in Algeria in the 1840s were administered absinthe to ward off malaria and dysentery, which it appears to have successfully prevented in some cases. (Wormwood is believed to act as a mild antiparasitic.) Returning home from the front, these men sought out the potent cure-all in the bars and cafes of Paris, where it had gained a following among bohemians and the bourgeoisie.

Absinthe’s Cup Runs Over
Throughout the second half of the 19th century, a parasite ravaged the France’s vineyards, sending wine prices skyrocketing and further kindling the growing rage for absinthe. By 1910, France was knocking back 36 million liters of absinthe per year. Savvy drinkers poured the spirit through a sugar cube placed on a slotted spoon and mixed it with ice-cold water, creating a milky green concoction; though trendy bars around the world now offer absinthe-based cocktails, this is still seen as the traditional method of preparation....

Galena, Ill.

'Images of U.S. Grant" has arrived at the Galena-Jo Daviess County Historical Society & Museum in time to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War (and Grant's birthday on Wednesday). But this exhibition, in the picturesque historic village that the Union general and American president briefly called home, is designed to draw repeat visits from history buffs over the course of its four-year run.

The first year's installment is subtitled "Soldier," to be followed in subsequent Aprils by segments on "Family," "Presidency" and "Death"—all featuring never-before-displayed portraits, artifacts and memorabilia. Most of the items on display come from the private collection of Bill Margeson, a Chicago radio personality and Grant devotee. "He simply called us up and said: 'Hey, I have all this great Grant stuff. Would you like to display it?" said Nicole L. Louis, the museum's assistant director....

Imagine this: your beloved great uncle bequeaths to you an old book; so old that it is literally coming apart at the seams. You tuck away the tattered tome in the attic, where it will stay for decades. One day you decide to unearth the inherited manuscript and have it appraised. To your astonishment, your great uncle left you a highly coveted artifact that dates back to the 15th century. This biblio-fairy tale turned into a true story for one Sandy, Utah resident.

The discovery of the partial copy of the 500-year-old Nuremberg Chronicle left antique book dealer, Ken Sanders, flabbergasted. “You don’t expect to see one of the oldest printed books pop up in Sandy, Utah” Sanders said. It’s a long journey indeed; one that begins in Nuremberg, Germany.

Originally published in Latin in July of 1493 and referred to by Latin scholars as the Liber Chronicarum (Book of Chronicles), the text was translated into German five months later and called the Nuremberg Chronicle – a reference to the city in which it was published.  To honor its author, Hartmann Schedel, German speakers refer to the text as Die Schedelshe Weltchronic or Schedel’s World History. The pages describe a version of human history segmented into seven chapters or “ages,” beginning with the Biblical Creation and ending at the Last Judgment....

WASHINGTON — Alan Shepard never became a household name like fellow astronauts John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and Neil Armstrong, the first to walk on the moon.

But 50 years ago — on May 5, 1961 — Shepard became the first American to reach space at a time of heightened Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.

He later became one of only a dozen men to walk on the moon, where he hit a golf shot that became perhaps the most memorable moment of the Apollo 14 mission he commanded.

Kennedy Space Center, where both those missions were launched, will celebrate the anniversary of Shepard's first flight as one of the key moments in human spaceflight, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said....

  Osama bin Laden is dead, but the U-S-A chant lives on. One of the strangest things about the Al-Qaeda leader's death has been the patriotic and at least a little absurd celebrations that have taken place from last night's Phillies-Mets game at Citizens Bank Park to the campus of Iowa State University and beyond, and especially at the White House, where my colleague Alexis Madrigal captured an atmosphere of "aimless celebrating" in which Washington Capitals hockey fans formed a mob alongside college kids and other onlookers. And perhaps stranger still is that all of these scenes gave rise to cheers of "U-S-A! U-S-A!".

How did this utterance, with its odd mix of sporting-event fervor and borderline nativist patriotism, make its way to the mouths of countless Americans last night? Here at The Atlantic, we've pieced together the story of the U-S-A chant, a cultural saga spanning three decades and encompassing everything from professional hockey to Jerry Springer to 9/11....