Artifacts from 9,000 feet up are reshaping our understanding of North America’s earliest residents. The first sign that human history here was different emerged in 1968. Now, clues arrive steadily—evidence that the Clovis people may have occupied the Greater Yellowstone high country 13,000 years ago, when experts believed the region was buried under glacial ice. Those experts could be challenged by finds from the Beartooth Mountains at 9,000 feet. Together with the discovery of a Clovis-era child’s remains over 50 years ago, new research from Montana raises questions about early inhabitants of what is now the United States. Researchers are intent on finding answers. Archaeologist Scott Dersam noted that the sediment in the area should not exist. “I wouldn’t say it’s impossible,” he told Nick Mott in a detailed report for Mountain Journal, “but in standard paleoecology for the surrounding ecosystem, all glaciology experts agree this shouldn’t be present given the environment we assume.” Ancient Clovis Toolbox: Were Prehistoric Nomads DIYers? A Colorado man found archaeological value while digging in his yard—a cache of 83 shaped stones that proved to be tools made by the Clovis people 13,000 years ago.These sites may now be the highest and oldest human habitations in North America. “We could have the oldest Clovis sites here, in a place and ecosystem that shouldn’t exist,” Dersam said. “It’s more than a wrench in the current paradigm. It’s a full blow to the chest.” The questions began in 1968, when construction workers uncovered the so-called “Clovis Child” at the Anzick Site in Park County, north of Yellowstone National Park near Bozeman, Montana. The oldest known Clovis burial included a young child, an antler, and about 100 stone artifacts. Testing by Texas A&M, along with colleagues from the University of Oxford and Stafford Research of Colorado, led Michael Waters to state that the remains and artifacts were “confidently shown to be the same age and date between 12,725 and 12,900 years ago.” The Clovis people represent the first widespread prehistoric culture in North America, emerging around 13,000 years ago. Experts believe they originated south of the large ice sheets covering Canada and were direct descendants of the earliest arrivals in the New World roughly 15,000 years ago.The Clovis people are recognized for stone spear tips with grooved bases, called the Clovis point. These items appear across the United States, yet Dersam’s team has now located them in the Beartooth Mountains, a region once thought impossible for such finds. Dersam noted that a donation from a former game warden, gathered from the 1950s through the 1970s, clarified the high-elevation site. “Only after he gave the totality of his collection did we realize it’s the largest and most dense high-elevation lithic collection anywhere in North America,” Dersam said. In 2022, heavy rain and snow triggered flooding that reshaped sediment layers high in the Beartooths, revealing many artifacts. “Things just absolutely exploded,” he said. Known for hunting mammoths on the plains, the Clovis people probably adapted well to Montana’s alpine area, which had been said to be covered by the Pinedale Glacier. “This is the first time we don’t have just one or two Clovis points,” Dersam said. “We have full sites. Everything but the kitchen sink.” The evidence suggests an unknown chapter of Montana’s ancient ecosystem, challenging the idea that ice covered it and showing instead that it was full of mammoths, bison, and, apparently, an entire ancient culture.

How Did They Raise The Roof? If I told you that the roof of this prehistoric, pre-Nuragic tomb alone weighs around 27 tons and was placed at some point during the third millennium BC, what tools did they use to build it? How many people were needed? This simply demonstrates the capacity and ingenuity of humankind, using or creating tools to achieve these feats in an era without the technology we have today. The Sa Coveccada Dolmen is one of the megalithic monuments found on the island of Sardinia. The Sa Coveccada Dolmen, a pre-Nuragic megalithic structure on Sardinia dating to the third millennium BC, features a roof slab weighing approximately 27 tons. The construction raises significant questions regarding the tools employed and the labor force required, underscoring human ingenuity and organizational capacity in an era devoid of modern technology. Recognized for its substantial dimensions and its role in the evolution of Sardinian funerary architecture, the Sa Coveccada Dolmen is regarded as one of the most significant megalithic monuments globally. Beyond Sardinia, it invites comparison with the dolmens of the Ala Safat necropolis in the West Bank and the Coste-Rouge dolmen in Hérault, France. Both for its considerable size and for being considered an important element in the evolution of prehistoric funerary architecture in Sardinia, the Sa Covaccada dolmen is considered one of the most important in the world. Outside the island, comparisons can be drawn with the dolmens of the Ala Safat necropolis in the West Bank and with the Coste-Rouge Héraulte dolmen in France.

NEARLY 40% OF WEBPAGES THAT EXISTED IN 2013 ARE JUST GONE. AI WAS TRAINED MOSTLY ON THE LEFTOVER PARTS OF THE INTERNET THAT WERE EASY TO MONETIZE. Read more: readmultiplex.com/2026/07/22…

AI Found Memory Flaws in the PHP Engine That Let an Attacker Take Over Servers Running Most of the Web The PHP security team released emergency patches on October 21 for two critical vulnerabilities in the language’s core engine. Both carry a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2. Successful exploitation gives an unauthenticated remote attacker code execution as the web worker on any server running a vulnerable PHP version. PHP runs on roughly 70 percent of websites whose server-side language is known, according to W3Techs measurements that have held in that range for years. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Laravel, and plain scripts are all exposed when the underlying interpreter is. The issues are tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. They are not bugs in application code. They sit in the engine’s handling of request memory and fatal errors. Wiz Research reported the first of them in August after using its Atlas system together with Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol. The models helped locate the conditions, chain the memory effects, and adapt the resulting exploits across PHP versions, SAPIs, and heap layouts that a single researcher would otherwise have spent months mapping by hand. A working unauthenticated proof of concept against current WordPress and Drupal containers was ready within days of the initial finding. The company later posted a technical write-up under the name PHP2Shell. The core mechanism is the engine’s use of longjmp() to abort a request on out-of-memory. PHP treats memory exhaustion as fatal and jumps out of the current context rather than running normal cleanup that might itself allocate. In several paths—multipart form parsing that expands headers or nested fields beyond the apparent post_max_size and memory_limit, session upload-progress handling, and certain error-backtrace or OPcache persistence steps—request-owned structures are allocated and then left partially initialized or still referenced from process-global state when the jump occurs. The request heap is later freed, but the globals (BG(unserialize), EG(last_fatal_error_backtrace), session identifiers, and similar) continue to point at the now-invalid memory. A later request processed by the same worker can read or write through those stale pointers before normal initialization replaces them. With a controlled heap layout the result is a use-after-free that yields arbitrary read or write and, in the demonstrated cases, full code execution. One advisory describes the OOM path in detail: a multipart request can force allocation failure during startup or early parsing; longjmp() skips the matching reset; shutdown or the next request’s early diagnostics then operate on the corrupted state. The companion advisory covers the broader stale-global case, where fatal errors, non-fatal diagnostics during shutdown, or interrupted session operations leave request memory reachable across workers. Both were confirmed to produce unauthenticated remote code execution under default limits on common configurations such as Apache mod_php with prefork. Memory disclosure of other requests’ data (credentials, tokens, keys) is also possible. The flaws have been present since at least PHP 5.4; every version released in the last decade is affected by at least one of them. Patches are available for the supported branches: 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12. Older branches receive no official fix. Estimates of exposed internet-facing hosts that still advertise a version range from roughly 1.3 million upward, with a substantial fraction on end-of-life releases that cannot be updated in place. Some hosts have already disabled session.upload_progress as a temporary mitigation while waiting for the packages. Early scanning and exploitation attempts were reported on the morning of the release. 1 of 2