The discovery of more of the ruins of the Second Temple in Jerusalem clearly puts the lie to claims by some Islamists that there was never a Jewish temple on Temple Mount -- and seems to confirm the belief of some Jewish groups that renovations and improvements by Muslim religious authorities are really directed at destroying Jewish artifacts there.

Remains of the Jewish second temple may have been found during work to lay pipes at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in east Jerusalem, Israeli television reported Thursday.

Israeli television broadcast footage of a mechanical digger at the site which Israeli archaeologists visited on Thursday.

Gaby Barkai, an archaeologist from Bar Ilan University, urged the Israeli government to stop the pipework after the discovery of what he said is "a massive seven metre-long wall."

Television said the pipework carried out by the office of Muslim religious affairs, or Waqf, is about 1.5 metres deep and about 100 metres long.

The compound, which houses both Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, is located in east Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967 and then annexed. It is the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.

For Jews it as known as the Temple Mount, which they revere as the site of the King Herod's second temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. It is the holiest site in Judaism.

All that remains today is the temple's Western Wall, or Wailing wall.

I agree with Barkari's assessment that the Israeli government must act to stop the construction work so that this historical treasure may be preserved, studied, and properly venerated by the Jewish faithful.

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As Houston prepares to welcome Lucy from Ethiopia, a new discovery will likely cause a reevaluation of the evolutionary timeline of the human species.

Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably split six or seven million years earlier than widely thought, according to landmark study released Wednesday.

The handful of teeth from the earliest direct ancestors of modern gorillas ever found -- one canine and eight molars -- also leave virtually no doubt, the study's authors and experts said, that both humans and modern apes did indeed originate from Africa.

The near total absence to date of traces on the continent of apes from this period had led many scientists to conclude that the shared line from which humans and living great apes emerged had taken a long evolutionary detour through Eurasia.

But the study, published in the British journal Nature, "conclusively demonstrates that the Last Common Ancestor (of both man and ape) was strictly an African phenomenon," commented paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio.

Lovejoy described the fossils as "a critically important discovery," a view echoed by several other scientists who had read the paper or seen the artifacts.

"This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of humanity," Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told AFP.

The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human progenitors diverged from today's great apes -- including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees -- several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on molecular genetics had previously asserted.

Looks like I may have to revise my lesson plans for Wednesday. Who says there is nothing ever new in history?

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The missing children of RussiaÂ’s last Tsar have been identified, nearly 90 years after they and their family were murdered on the orders of Vladimir Lenin.

Prosecutors announced Friday that they have reopened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the last Russian czar and his family nearly 90 years ago after an archaeologist said the remains of the czar's son and heir to the throne at last may have been found.

The announcement of the reopened investigation, while a routine matter, signaled that government may be taking the claims — announced Thursday by Yekaterinburg researcher Sergei Pogorelov — seriously.

In comments broadcast on NTV, Pogorelov said bones found in a burned area of ground near Yekaterinburg belong to a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of Czar Nicholas II's 13-year-old son, Alexei, and a daughter whose remains also never have been found.

Yekaterinburg is the Urals Mountain city where the czar, his wife and children were held prisoner and then shot in 1918.

If confirmed, the find would solve a persistent mystery and fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed family, victims of the violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that ushered in more than 70 years of communist rule.

* * *

The spot where the remains were found appears to correspond to a site described in writing by Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the family's killers, said Pogorelov, an archaeologist at a regional center for the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in Yekaterinburg.

"An anthropologist has determined that the bones belong to two young individuals — a young male he found was aged roughly 10-13 and a young woman about 18-23," he told NTV television by telephone.

Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. The next year, they were sent to Yekaterinburg, where a Bolshevik firing squad executed them on July 17, 1918.

Historians say guards lined up and shot Nicholas; his wife, Alexandra; their five children and four attendants in the basement of a nobleman's house. The bodies were loaded onto a truck and initially dumped in a mine shaft but were later moved, according to most accounts.

And thus closes a sad chapter in the violent, murderous history of Communism.

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Let's be honest here -- some pretty lousy things have happened in just about every society since the beginning of civilization. However, do people alive today bear some moral responsibility for the actions of their ancestors? Do they have a moral responsibility to apologize for those actions? To make some recompense for them?

I've long argued that the answer is no. Two stories today illustrate how absurd such apologies can be.

For the first story, let's go to Papua New Guinea.

THE descendants of Papua New Guinea cannibals who killed and ate four Fijian missionaries in 1878 have apologised.

Fiji's High Commissioner to PNG, Ratu Isoa Tikoca accepted the apologies at a reconciliation ceremony near Rabaul in PNG's East New Britain Province yesterday in front of thousands of people.

"We at this juncture are deeply touched and wish you the greatest joy of forgiveness as we finally end this record disagreement," Ratu Tikoca said.

PNG's Governor-General Paulias Matane told the crowd he appreciated the work of the early Fijian missionaries in spreading Christianity in the islands region.

The ceremony marked 132 years since Methodist ministers and teachers from Fiji arrived in the New Guinea islands region in 1875 headed by Englishman George Brown.

In April 1878, a Fijian minister and three teachers were killed and eaten by Tolai tribespeople on the Gazelle Peninsula.

Brown directed and took part in a punitive expedition that resulted in a number of Tolais being killed and several villages burnt down.

His actions caused a storm of protest in the Methodist Church.

Official investigations by British colonial authorities in the Pacific cleared him of criminal charges.

I'll be the first to accept the notion that contrition and repentance are good things. However, doesn't it seem rather bizarre for non-cannibals to apologize for having ancestors who were cannibals? These people bear no responsibility for the crimes or sins (and let's not discuss in this context whether cannibalism was either) of their ancestors. For what are they apologizing? Their mere descent from these people? I think the headline of the article catches the craziness of it all -- Sorry we ate your forefathers. Nobody apologizing did any such thing.

And then you get into even older historical disputes.

MORE than 1200 years ago hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants.

On Wednesday, one of their more mild-mannered descendants stepped ashore to apologise.

The Danish Minister for Culture, Brian Mikkelson, who was in Dublin to celebrate the arrival of a replica Norse longboat, apologised for the invasion and destruction inflicted.

"In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship but we are not proud of the damage to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings," Mr Mikkelson declared in his welcoming speech delivered by the River Liffey.

"But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven."

Good grief! We are talking about things that happened over a millennium ago! It is how the world was at the time, a much less civilized place. Warfare and raiding were an accepted part of Scandinavian culture (Irish, too -- thought they tended to do it more among themselves ). Why apologize for it?

What next? Will the Greek ambassador to Turkey make a visit to Hisarlik and formally apologize for the actions of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus during the Trojan War?

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