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  "Today Lake Turkana lies in the midst of a dry, hostile desert environment. But this was not always the case. About two million years ago, the lake was much larger and the surrounding area was greener, Since then, rapid changes to the climate have periodically caused the lake to shrink, and occasionally it has disappeared altogether. During the wetter times, it was an ideal place for early humans to live, and when they died it was a perfect place for their remains to fossilise. That is because Lake Turkana lies in a volcanic area, where tectonic activity can move earth's crust and create new layers. It is within these layers that fossils from different time periods are found." TURKANA BASIN ― CLIMATIC TIMELINE (mya = million years ago,  kya = thousand years ago) c. 4.5 mya    One of the earliest paleoenvironments of the Turkana basin was the Apak floodplain of the Pliocene epoch. Around 4.5 million years ago the ancestral Omo, Turkwell, and Keiro rivers were joined...

  ... the English called them wælwulfas ,  'slaughter-wolves' ... "Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence , not the contact ." The Vikings ominously enter the written record in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  for the year 789 AD:       ' Here [King] Beorhtric  [of Wessex] took [Mercian] King Offa's daughter Eadburh. And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from Hordaland: and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king's town because he did not know what they were; and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race. ' Some corrective notes are required for the chronicler's account. This occasion was probably not the first 'visit' of the th...

The Hospital  ...  considered itself permanently at war with the infidel ...  The Turk in the Levant and the Muslim corsair from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli ... along the Barbary coast ...  On their own through their regular statutory caravans or cruises throughout the Mediterranean, or with allies in formal war ...  Hospitallers tirelessly strive to seek him out, capture his ships, seize his merchandise, and carry his men into slavery ...  the whole relentless endeavour to keep the idea of the crusade alive ... [V Mallia-Milanes, 2003, 'Images of the Other: Venice's Perception of the Knights of Malta', Racial Discrimination and Ethnicity in European History , 63-77] NOTABLE NAVAL VICTORIES of the KNIGHTS OF MALTA These words formed the title of a newspaper feature piece run in the Sunday Times of Malta  on December 20, 2015. The article traced a number of battles at sea that were depicted in paintings from the Palazzo Falson Collection  in Malta. It ...