More than 8,000 Chinese from home and abroad gathered Friday morning at the tomb of Huangdi, the legendary Yellow Emperor who is considered the common ancestor of all Chinese.

The memorial ceremony started in Huangling County, Shaanxi Province at 9:50 a.m. That's an auspicious time because of the digits' association with the imperial line in ancient Chinese culture. The number nine is the biggest single-digit number, while five lies in the middle.

A drum was struck 34 times, once for each of China's 34 provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions and special administrative regions

The Yellow Emperor, a sovereign and cultural hero in Chinese mythology, is believed to have reigned from 2,697 BC to 2,598 BC. Although he was an actual ruler, his deeds have been embellished with time: for example, he has been credited with introducing the systems of government and law to human kind, civilizing the Earth, teaching people many skills and inventing all manner of items.

China has commemorated the Yellow Emperor since the Spring and Autumn Period around 8 BC.

"Kindred or family lines are especially honored in Chinese culture," said Zhang Jingkui, a former professor at Xiamen University who now lives in Hong Kong. "Each spring when smoke from joss sticks rises in Chinese communities around the world, it is a unique event."

When "Aunt Pete" wrote to her soldier nephew in France in 1918, she had no idea what she was starting.

The letter – almost perfectly preserved – gave a jaunty account of the mood in the midwest of the United States four months from the end of the First World War. But who was Aunt Pete? And who was her nephew soldier, Sgt Morres Vickers Liepman, of D Battery of the 130th Field Artillery?

It was known that Sgt Liepman survived the war but little else emerged from US government records.

Morres Liepman went on to serve as a Major in the US air force in the Second World War. He became a commercial artist and devised – among other things – the arrow that appears on all packets of Wrigley's chewing gum.

"Aunt Pete" was Sgt Liepman's mother's youngest sister, Luna Vickers, daughter of Congressman Andrew J Vickers of Kansas – part of family which traces its ancestry back to the American Revolution, the Mayflower and the Vickers engineering company in Sheffield. Aunt Luna's nickname was "Sweet Pete". By the time she wrote the letter, she was married to Robert M Scott, owner of a drugstore in Oklahoma City.

Cecil Liepman said the early part of the letter should not be seen as racist. The comments reflected attitudes at the time. Aunt Pete's family had, in fact, been anti-slavery and funded schools for black children.

Why did Sgt Liepman place his aunt's letter in a beer bottle and bury it? When found, the bottle was still equipped with its mechanical closing system. The tightly rolled up envelope and four pages were almost perfectly preserved.

Mr Liepman believes his grandfather buried the letter as a "time capsule". "He must have guessed it would be found one day and stand as a memorial of that terrible war," he said.

Letter transcription:

Welcome to Planet Earth: Population 0.

This is what our world would look like without people.

The images were created to illustrate what would happen if human life ceased tomorrow, if, for whatever reason, mankind was obliterated.

The question it raises is: how long would the remnants of our civilisation remain?

How much would we leave behind? What would an alien visitor learn about us upon landing on our planet a century or more after we had disappeared from it?

The answer, astonishingly, is: almost nothing.

Within a hundred years most traces of our modern-day lives would be so destroyed by weather, corrosion, earth tremors, surviving animals, insects and bacteria that the monuments and hieroglyphics of ancient civilisations would be better preserved than our buildings and our billions of books and electronic records.

An alien visiting Earth might well believe that the last civilisation on the planet were ancient Egyptians.

The prophetic forecast for the longevity of our 21st-century civilisation is contained in research for a History Channel documentary, Life After People.

And it's not guesswork. The two-hour special uses scientific expertise and understanding of history in order to predict the future.

Principal advisor on the TV programme is a 53-year-old Scot, Gordon Masterton, former president of the Royal Institution of Civil Engineers.

He says: "The lights will start going out around the world almost immediately. The last power will be produced by wind turbines but, after a few weeks, the planet will be plunged into a deep darkness it has not experienced since primitive Man huddled around camp fires."

Archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled an underground grotto believed to have been revered by ancient Romans as the place where a wolf nursed the city’s legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.

Decorated with seashells and colored marble, the vaulted sanctuary is buried 52 feet inside the Palatine hill, the palatial center of power in imperial Rome, the archaeologists said at a news conference.

Following up on Britney Spears’ Jamestown ancestor Richard Pace, I just discovered that we would have been deprived of one of the most loved Hollywood icons if Richard had not done what he did.

According to the ancestral history already digitally mapped out in the Family Forest®, Richard Pace is one of the 11^th great-grandfathers of Britney Spears.