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Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia.

In December, they published the entirety of a Neanderthal genome extracted from a single toe bone. Comparing Neanderthal to human genomes, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues found that we share a common ancestor, which they estimated lived about 600,000 years ago.

They found that his DNA was more like that of non-Africans than that of Africans. But the Ust’-Ishim man was no more closely related to ancient Europeans than he was to East Asians.He was part of an earlier lineage, the scientists concluded — a group that eventually gave rise to all non-African humans.

The Evangelical Roots of American Economics

Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton were all founded to educate Protestant ministers and the men who would sit in the pews of their churches.

After 1920, even when Catholics and Jews started to be hired as faculty members, they still could not find work easily teaching American literature or American history because it was thought that only Protestants could properly carry on the lineage that defined the American character.

Emancipation should have laid waste to the Southern aristocracy. The economy was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, and almost half the Confederacy’s wealth was invested in owning humans. Once people could no longer be treated as chattel, that wealth evaporated.

But less than two decades after the Civil War, Southern slave-owning dynasties were back on top of the economic ladder, according to an ambitious new analysis

by 1880, the sons of slave owners were better off than the sons of nearby Southern whites who started with equal wealth but were not as invested in enslaved people.

Both male and female roles influence each other.

Japan, like China and Korea, is heavily influenced by Confucian ideals.

en are the heads of the household; women are dependent on the men.

Even skin color is not a reliable indicator of one’s origins.

As one study calculated, almost a third of white Americans possess up to 20 percent African genetic inheritance, yet look white, while 5.5 percent of black Americans have no detectable African genetic ancestry. Race has a political and social meaning, but not a biological one.

Her disappearance from the historical record is precisely the point. When we can so easily lose the daughter of a president and his slave, it forces us to acknowledge that our racial categories are utterly fallacious and built on a science that has been thoroughly discredited.

The fortunes of the Tudor dynasty were laid by the most romantic mésalliance in English history, the secret betrothal of a Welsh attendant at the Court of Henry VI to the dowager queen

Henry V, the hammer of the Welsh, had continued his father's proscription of the whole nation in punishment for the rebellion

Owain's marriage to Katherine of Valois, although hubristic, was not annulled when discovered, and the fruit of its consummation, the two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were not declared illegitimate.

History may not repeat itself, but there is no gainsaying its fondness for close affinities

When in 1807 Ferdinand, heir to the throne, stood accused by his father, Charles IV of Spain, of sedition and seeking to usurp the royal title, the young prince fearfully recalled the analogous events two hundred and forty years previously

In 1568 Philip II had similarly confronted his recalcitrant son Carlos, resulting in the latter’s imprisonment and mysterious death seven months later

we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the Founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group.

We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance, and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.

enslavement “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics” of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves

From DNA recovered from the bones, researchers deduced that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals some 60,000 years ago, after leaving Africa.

People of African ancestry, it was thought, have little to no Neanderthal DNA.

Using a new method to analyze DNA, however, a team of scientists has found evidence that significantly reshapes that narrative.

Why tribal family lore is so common among white people from Oklahoma to Georgia

running joke in Indian country

If you meet somebody who you wouldn’t necessarily think they’re Native, but they say they’re Native, chances are they’ll tell you they’re Cherokee

The ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial of Pfizer/BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine confirms its protection lasts at least six months after the second dose, the companies said Thursday.

The question of how long vaccine protection lasts can only be answered once enough time has passed, and while six months of protection is a modest target, it's longer than previously known.

The vaccine remains more than 91% effective against disease with any symptoms for six months, the companies said.

A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.

For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.

“I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”

Discoveries at Sanxingdui have totally transformed our understanding of how multiple, regionally distinct yet interrelated early cultures intertwined to produce what came to be understood as “Chinese” civilization.

Why is there such a gap in the attention paid in the West to the Egyptian archaeology, as opposed to Chinese archaeology — given that each is important to our understanding of human history?

Stories of Western archaeologists competing to find tombs in the 19th century riveted Western Europeans, and today’s news coverage is a product of that imperialist tradition

One, first identified in southeast England, has now shown up in at least 50 countries and appears to be spreading more efficiently than older variations of the virus. Its appearance has frightened political leaders, who have closed borders and imposed travel restrictions in attempts to curb its spread.

So far, none has done what scientists most fear and mutated to the point that it causes more severe disease, or evades the protection provided by vaccination. While some of the new variants appear to have changes that look like they could affect immune response, it's only by a matter of degree.

At the top of the list for researchers in the US is the B.1.1.7 variant first seen in Britain. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned last week it could worsen the spread of the pandemic.

With no robust system to identify genetic variations of the coronavirus, experts warn that the United States is woefully ill-equipped to track a dangerous new mutant, leaving health officials blind as they try to combat the grave threat.

it has the potential to explode in the next few weeks, putting new pressures on American hospitals, some of which are already near the breaking point.

About 1.4 million people test positive for the virus each week, but researchers are only doing genome sequencing — a method that can definitively spot the new variant — on fewer than 3,000 of those weekly samples. And that work is done by a patchwork of academic, state and commercial laboratories.

The main thesis of Muraresku's exceptional investigative work: the modern Eucharist is a placebo variation of a psychedelic brew that originally represented the body and blood of Christ, as was likely practiced during the secret Eleusinian Mysteries.

This power play—one that, Muraresku writes, potentially demonized psychedelics and ousted them from spiritual rituals, as well as the keepers of ancient ritualistic secrets, women—has forced us to attribute the foundations of Western civilization to Christianity.

The real lineage belongs to Greece. Muraresku, who holds a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, spent 12 years investigating this book due to his longstanding love of the Classics, which he believes to be the West's actual inspiration.

Protest is the foundational variable of the American experiment. Every pivot point in the history of our country is rooted in it.

Those unfamiliar with “no justice, no peace,” the oft-used mantra of the protest movement that arose in 2020, should first look to the lineage and legacy of nonviolent protest in the United States. Many forget that, in his later career, Dr. King wrestled deeply with the possibility of violence within emergent resistance movements.

Black and brown people have always protested for comprehensive systemic change and freedom for all Americans, even when they’ve been denied freedom themselves.

Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".

Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.

Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.

Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance.

Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”

social media gave the revolution a “spirit for destruction.” The constant push for attention, the purity spiraling in which each activist had to prove himself more loyal to the revolution than any other, the disdain for the compromises of politics or the hard work of organizing—the coalition’s problems all seemed to extend from the culture of highly public platforms.

a tool such as this one provides the opportunity to build what Zeynep Tufekci in her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, calls “network internalities”: all those deep relationships that help any movement survive through hardships

Facebook or Twitter is social in the way a large cocktail party is, where you move from one conversation to the next, only half-hearing most of what is said, and where the loudest voice or funniest joke grabs everyone’s attention