Today in History: Teenagers in France discover Lascaux Paintings after following their dog into a cave in 1940

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on September 12:

1940 – Four teenagers followed their dog when it disappeared down a hole near Lascaux, France, and discovered 17,000-year-old drawings now known as the Lascaux Cave Paintings.

1943 – Italian dictator Benito Mussolini rescued by German parachutists.

1974 – Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was deposed in an army coup. He had ruled since 1930.

1977 – Steve Biko, South African black civil rights leader, died in police detention. He was among at least 90 black leaders who were murdered or went missing under white rule.

1999 – Indonesia agreed to allow an international U.N. peacekeeping force into East Timor to help end violence there.

2001 – NATO invoked its mutual defence clause for the first time in its 52-year history, opening the way for a possible collective military response to the attacks in the U.S.

2002 – The Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello took over as the new U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights succeeding Mary Robinson. De Mello was among 22 people killed when the U.N. office in Baghdad was blown up in Aug. 2003.

2003 – Johnny Cash, country music’s “Man in Black,” died, silencing a deep and brooding voice that for nearly 50 years sang plaintive tales of coal miners and sharecroppers, convicts and cowboys.

2006 – At least 51 people were killed and 238 injured in a stampede at a Yemeni stadium in the southern province of Ibb, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh was holding a rally.

2007 – Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe abruptly announced his resignation after a year in power dogged by scandals, an election rout and a crisis over Japan’s support for U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan.

2014 – Verdict in Pretoria court convicts South African Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius of culpable homicide.

(Reuters)