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Deep inside an underwater cave in Mexico, archaeologists may have discovered the oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas. Dubbed Eva de Naharon, or Eve of Naharon, the female skeleton has been dated at 13,600 years old. If that age is accurate, the skeleton—along with three others found in underwater caves along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula—could provide new clues to how the Americas were first populated. The remains have been excavated over the past four years near the town of Tulum, about 80 miles southwest of Cancún, by a team of scientists led by Arturo González,...

The anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed that in the 1930s, when she was busy remaking the idea of culture, the notion of cultural diversity was to be found only in the 'vocabulary of a small and technical group of professional anthropologists'. Today, everyone and everything seems to have its own culture. From anorexia to zydeco, the American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has observed, there is little that we don't talk about as the product of some group's culture. In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not...

WASHINGTON: Human beings for 100,000 years lived in tiny, separate groups, facing harsh conditions that brought them to the brink of extinction, before they reunited and populated the world, genetic researchers in a study said on Thursday. "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction," said paleontologist Meave Leakey, of Stony Brook University, New York. The genetic study examined for the first time the evolution of our species from its origins with "mitochondrial Eve," a female hominid...

PARIS (AFP) - After a nearly 30,000-year silence, Neanderthals are speaking once more, thanks to researchers who have modelled the hominids' larynx to replicate the possible sounds they would have made, New Scientist says. The work, led by Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton, is based on Neanderthal fossils found in France, the British journal said on its website on Wednesday. The item includes an audio snippet in which a computer synthesiser replicates how a Neanderthal would say an "e" and compares this with the same sound as made by modern humans. A study published...

The Tassili n’Ajjer of Southern Algiers is described as the “largest storehouse of rock paintings in the world”. But could it also be the origins of the ancient Egypt culture ? In January 2003, I made enquiries to visit the Hoggar Mountains and the Tassili n’Ajjer, one of the most enchanting mountain ranges on this planet. The two geographically close but nevertheless quite separate landscapes are located in the Sahara desert in southeast Algeria. I was told that if I could pack my bags immediately (literally), I could join the three weeks’ trip. Unfortunately, I could not, but planned to...

Field work can be hell. But thanks to the dogged researchers who attended 66 college parties in Southern California, now at last it can revealed: Playing drinking games at a party leads to increased levels of alcohol in the bloodstream. Fortunately, that wasn’t the only result of the investigation reported in the January issue of January issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. I don’t know why women would drink more at themed parties, but I do have a hypothesis: Could it be a coping mechanism for dealing with the sight of guys like John Belushi dressed in togas?

HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the...

Knowing Ourselves The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? – Jeremiah 17:9 IntroductionWhen Plato expressed the ultimate purpose and great imperative of philosophy with this command, “know yourself,” he had struck upon a valuable insight. If we would know our purpose in life, how we should relate to the world and to others around us, what our goals and dreams and desires should consist of, how we should spend our time, then we must know who we are. We must know how we were made and for what purpose, and we must know...

Stone man. This partial skull of a 500,000-year-old human was found in a slab of travertine from a quarry like this one in Turkey.Credit: John Kappelman/University of Texas, Austin Workers at a travertine factory near Denizli, Turkey, were startled recently when they sawed a block of the limestone for tiles and discovered part of a human skull. Now, it appears they unwittingly exposed fossilized remains of a long-sought species of human that lived 500,000 years ago, researchers say. Although only four skull fragments were found, the fossil also reveals the earliest case of tuberculosis. The Middle East has long been...

The first public showing of the face of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun, last week, exposed more than cracked, leathery skin and his buckteeth. (Gene Tierney’s overbite was much more fetching.) Archaeologists also detected a new feature, the hint of a Tut smile, transfiguring a regal mummy from antiquity into a human being with emotions perhaps like those of people today. The first reaction of Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s head of antiquities, was unscientific. The face, he said, “has magic; it has mystery; it has beauty.” The search for identifiable affinities, if only a smile, with people long ago may account for...

IS the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place? A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about...

Politically Correct Anthropology by: Don Irvine, September 25, 2007 Political correctness which has been invading academia with a vengeance has a new target- Anthropology. An ad-hoc group calling themselves the Network of Concerned Anthropologists is now circulating a petition on the internet called the Pledge of Non-Participation in Counterinsurgency whose central theme says that "Anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counterinsurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the 'war on terror.'"In other words it's an anti-war declaration for anthropologists. The organizers, two of whom are at George Mason University, feel that anthropologists...

Contact: Payson Sheets Payson.Sheets@colorado.edu 303-492-7302 University of Colorado at Boulder CU-Boulder team discovers first ancient manioc fields in Americas Prehistoric manioc plantation buried by volcanic ash about 600 A.D. may help explain how Maya supported dense populations CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Payson Sheets maps ancient household at site of Ceren in El Salvador. A University of Colorado at Boulder team excavating an ancient Maya village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption 1,400 years ago has discovered an ancient field of manioc, the first evidence for cultivation of the calorie-rich tuber in the New World. The manioc field was discovered...

Source: University of California, Davis Date: August 16, 2007 Handsome By Chance: Why Humans Look Different From Neanderthals Science Daily — Chance, not natural selection, best explains why the modern human skull looks so different from that of its Neanderthal relative, according to a new study led by Tim Weaver, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Davis. Model of the Neanderthal man. Exhibited in the Dinosaur Park Münchehagen, Germany. (Credit: iStockphoto/Klaus Nilkens) "For 150 years, scientists have tried to decipher why Neanderthal skulls are different from those of modern humans," Weaver said. "Most accounts have emphasized natural selection and the...

BRASILIA, July 4, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Brazilian university professor claimed that the practice of infanticide by indigenous tribes should be respected as a cultural practice, the Telegraph reports. Dr. Erwin Frank, an anthropology professor at the Federal University of Roraima, Brazil, is quoted in the Telegraph as having defended the violent practice, saying, "This is their way of life and we should not judge them on the basis of our values. The difference between the cultures should be respected." Certain tribes believe that some babies are "cursed" and therefore do not have souls. Such children include those with...

Ancient Human Behavior Uncovered Article Date: 24 Jun 2007 - 4:00 PDT A major question in evolutionary studies today is how early did humans begin to think and behave in ways we would see as fundamentally modern" One index of 'behavioural modernity' is in the appearance of objects used purely as decoration or ornaments. Such items are widely regarded as having symbolic rather than practical value. By displaying them on the body as necklaces, pendants or bracelets or attached to clothing this also greatly increased their visual impact. The appearance of ornaments may be linked to a growing sense of...

Contact: Erik Trinkaus trinkaus@wustl.edu 314-935-5207 Washington University in St. Louis The emerging fate of the Neandertals For nearly a century, anthropologists have been debating the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans. Central to the debate is whether Neandertals contributed directly or indirectly to the ancestry of the early modern humans that succeeded them. As this discussion has intensified in the past decades, it has become the central research focus of Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Trinkaus has examined the earliest modern humans in Europe, including specimens in Romania, Czech Republic and France. Those...

Contact: Mary Pohl mpohl@mailer.fsu.edu 850-644-8153 Florida State University FSU anthropologist finds earliest evidence of maize farming in Mexico TALLAHASSEE, Fla.--A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought. Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The analysis extends Pohl's previous work in this area and validates principles...

A 40,000-YEAR-OLD skeleton found in China has raised questions about the "out of Africa" hypothesis on how early modern humans populated the planet. The fossil bones are the oldest from an adult "modern" human to be found in eastern Asia. They contain features that call into question the widely held view that all humans alive today are descended from a small group of sub-Saharan Africans who made their way out of the continent about 60,000 years ago. Gradually they colonised other parts of the planet, replacing older human species such as the Neanderthals, which became extinct. The older humans had...

[A]ncient tartar-encrusted teeth may be a biological gold mine for scientists, thanks to a new technique for extracting food particles from teeth that once belonged to prehistoric humans. The method already has solved a mystery surrounding what early coastal Brazilians ate. In the future, similar studies may reveal clues about other ancient diets, particularly in areas with little plant preservation from earlier times... Eggers explained that ancient tartar could reveal what an individual ate in the days or weeks before death. Evidence suggests some prehistoric populations cleaned their teeth -- using fibrous foods and shell fragments as natural abrasives --...

Attention Fred Flintstone and the Geico cave guys: "Stone Age" is no longer acceptable, joining the list of other words and terms deemed offensive in polite society.

God; doesn't it explain why religion continues to be so pervasive? But many scientists are coming up with their own, decidedly secular, theories about the origins of faith. In fact, over the last few years, a small cottage industry made up of scientists and philosophers has devoted itself to demystifying the divine.

The December issue of the journal Current Anthropology offers a new hypothesis for how the Neanderthals died out 10,000 years ago. It happens that there was little or no division of labor in Neanderthal society. Unlike in early human communities, where the men hunted and the women gathered (or hunted small animals), male and female Neanderthals were both engaged in going after big game, at least if the evidence from their gravesites is to be believed. When there was no big game, there was no food at all. Betty Friedan is probably turning over in her own gravesite right now,...

Ancient remains, once thought to be a key link in the evolution of mankind, have now been shown to be 400,000 years too young to be a part of man's family tree. The remains of the apeman, dubbed Little Foot, were discovered in a cave complex at Sterkfontein by a local South African team in 1997. Its bones preserved in sediment layers, it is the most complete hominid fossil skeleton ever found. (Photo Credit: Alf Latham) The remains of the apeman, dubbed Little Foot, were discovered in a cave complex at Sterkfontein by a local South African team in 1997....

Escalating rates of diabetes among indigenous cultures could make the Maori and Polynesian races "extinct" before the end of the century, an Australian expert warns. Professor Paul Zimmet, director of Monash University's International Diabetes Institute, said the rising number of diabetes victims among the world's indigenous communities would decimate entire cultures. "Without urgent action there certainly is a real risk major wipings out of indigenous communities, if not total extinction, within this century," he said. "Life expectancy is already low and dropping, diabetes is hitting them very hard and the infections, amputations and kidney disease will just wreak more havoc."...

The skeleton of the fossilised, 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor known as Lucy, will go on display in the US, Ethiopian officials say. After four years of negotiations with the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Texas, Ethiopia agreed to lend the bones for scientific study until 2013. It is hoped Lucy's 11-leg tour will boost tourism and increase Ethiopia's profile as the "home of all humanity". She will leave her country of origin - and the origin of mankind - in June. As well as Lucy, the travelling exhibition will also include about 190 other Ethiopian artefacts including humankind's earliest...

An archaeological dig may have uncovered ‘Eden’ in Turkey, says sean thomas I am standing above an archaeological dig, on a hillside in southern Turkey. Beneath me, workmen are unearthing a sculpture of some sort of reptile (right). It is delicate and breathtaking. It is also part of the world's oldest temple. If this sounds remarkable, it gets better. The archaeologist in charge of the dig believes that this artwork once stood in Eden. The archaeologist is Klaus Schmidt; the site is called Gobekli Tepe. In academic circles, the astonishing discoveries at Gobekli Tepe have long been a talking...

Fossil remains show the merging of Neandertals, modern humans By Neil Schoenherr The early modern human remains from the Pestera Muierii (Cave of the Old Woman), Romania, which were discovered in 1952, have been poorly dated and largely ignored. But recently, a team of researchers from the Anthropological and Archaeological Institutes in Bucharest, Romania, and from WUSTL has been able to directly date the fossils to 30,000 years ago. The fossils prove that a strict population replacement of the Neandertals did not happen. "What these fossils show is that these earliest modern humans had a mosaic of distinctly modern human...

The history of this dig may be found here. AP - Mon Oct 9, 10:40 AM ET In this undated photo provided Monday, Oct. 9, 2006 by the Vatican Museums, a general view of an ancient necropolis unearthed at the Vatican is seen. Vatican Museums officials and archaeologists on Monday unveiled the necropolis, which was unearthed three years ago during the construction of a parking lot for Vatican City employees and vehicles. Visitors to the Vatican will soon be able to step into the newly unveiled necropolis likened by archaeologists to a ''little Pompeii'' of cemeteries which were the final...

September 20, 2006 · Scientists in Ethiopia have discovered the skeleton of a 3.3 million years old child, the oldest child fossil on record. The fossil is known as the Dikika child, after the region where it was found. Though not a human, the apelike creature could walk upright. The child is from the same species as the famous fossil Lucy, which was also discovered in Ethiopia over 30 years ago. It was probably female, and about three when it died. The child lay within a sandstone tomb for over 3 million years. Six years ago, an Ethiopian scientist saw...

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region. The female bones are from the species Australopithecus afarensis , which is popularly known from the adult skeleton nicknamed "Lucy". Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature. They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor. The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones. "The Dikika fossil is now revealing many secrets about...

Some of the skulls are ovoid, others are more like wedge-shaped. The eye sockets are rather narrow, almost rectangular; and anthropologists think the nose was probably quite flat with wide nostrils. Of medium height for an average contemporary Asian, the men are thought to have been slightly taller than the women. From today's perspective, the people who roamed what is now Thailand thousands of years ago may not have been particularly handsome - but interpretation of their appearance, and the ramifications for archaeology, could be very striking indeed. Comparing the skeletons could unravel some of the myths, and settle some...

Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times by Richard B. Firestone & William Topping The Paleoindian occupation of North America, theoretically the point of entry of the first people to the Americas, is traditionally assumed to have occurred within a short time span beginning at about 12,000 yr B.P. This is inconsistent with much older South American dates of around 32,000 yr B.P.1 and the similarity of the Paleoindian toolkit to Mousterian traditions that disappeared about 30,000 years ago.2. A pattern of unusually young radiocarbon dates in the Northeast has been noted by Bonnichsen and Will.3,4 Our research...

Early Fig Farming Scientists tracing the origins of agriculture have followed the trail of cultivated grains like wheat and barley back to about 10,500 years ago in the Near East . Now a new study reported in the 2 Jun 2006 Science suggests that fig trees could have been the first domesticated crop, preceding cereals by about a thousand years. Kislev et al. ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/312/5778/1372) described the remains of figs found in several archaeological sites in the Jordan Valley as early as about 11,400 years ago. The carbonized fruits represent a variety of fig in which the fruit forms and...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The earliest known hominid fossil, which dates to about 7 million years ago, is actually some kind of ape, according to an international team of researchers led by the University of Michigan. The finding, they say, suggests scientists should rethink whether we actually descended from apes resembling chimpanzees, which are considered our closest relatives. U-M anthropologist Milford Wolpoff and colleagues examined images and the original paper published on the discovery of the Toumaï cranium (TM 266) or Sahelanthropus tchadensis, as well as a computer reconstruction of the skull. Two other colleagues were actually able to examine the skull,...

Old tools shed light on hobbit origins Tiny toolmaker or microcephalic? The 'hobbit' debate continues. Michael Hopkin They may have been tiny, but the hobbits of the Indonesian island of Flores are still the focus of the biggest controversy in anthropology. The latest twist in the tale suggests that these one-metre-tall hominids, with a brain the size of a grapefruit, were the final members of a tool-making tradition stretching back more than 800,000 years. But amid fresh doubts over the species' evolutionary history, the idea that the curious creatures were deformed modern humans refuses to go away. Tools from Liang...

ELLENSBURG, Wash. - Behind two locked doors at Central Washington University, what might be called Son of Kennewick Man sits inside a cardboard box. The faceless skull dates back 9,000 years - just 400 years younger than the superstar skeleton unearthed from the banks of the Columbia River. While Kennewick Man ignited a legal battle over the control of ancient bones, the skull at CWU has barely raised a ripple. "It just misses the mark in terms of people's interest," said CWU anthropology professor Steven Hackenberger. Nicknamed "Stickman" for the mythical beings some tribes believe once inhabited the Columbia plateau,...

Terms of Estrangement Race is small but volatile word. It lacks a clear definition or scientific purpose. Yet it persists. Not only in the lingo of the streets but in the language of the laboratory. By James Shreeve DISCOVER Vol. 15 No. 11 | November 1994 | Anthropology In 1984, Norm Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, received a call from the state police. Somebody had found a body in the woods. The decomposed corpse displayed the typical mute profile of an unknown homicide victim: no clothing, no personal possessions at the scene, not even enough soft tissue...

Scientists in northeastern Ethiopia said Saturday that they have discovered the skull of a small human ancestor that could be a missing link between the extinct Homo erectus and modern man. The hominid cranium — found in two pieces and believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old — "comes from a very significant period and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human," said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia. Archaeologists found the early human cranium five weeks ago at Gawis in Ethiopia's northeastern Afar region, Sileshi said. Several stone...

Anthropologists: Early Humans Probably Pretty Peaceful Friday, March 17, 2006 By Heather Whipps Depending on which journals you've picked up in recent months, early humans were either peace-loving softies or war-mongering buffoons. Which theory is to be believed? A little bit of both, says one archaeologist, who warns against making generalizations when it comes to our long and varied prehistory. The newest claim concerns Australopithecus afarensis, who lived approximately five million years ago and is one of the first hominids that can be linked directly to our lineage with some certainty. Scientists say the small and furry creature was hardly...

Kennewick Man was laid to rest alongside a river more than 9,000 years ago, buried by other people, a leading forensic scientist said Thursday. The skeleton, one of the oldest and most complete ever found in North America, has been under close analysis since courts sided with researchers in a legal battle with Indian tribes in the Northwest who wanted the remains found near the Columbia River reburied without study. Douglas Owsley, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, discussed his findings in remarks prepared for delivery Thursday evening at a meeting of the American Academy of...

Viking warriors filed deep grooves in their teeth, and they likely had to smile broadly to show them off, according to new finds in four major Viking Age cemeteries in Sweden. Caroline Arcini of Sweden's National Heritage Board analyzed 557 skeletons of men, women and children from between 800 and 1050 A.D. They discovered that 22 of the men bore deep, horizontal grooves across the upper front teeth. "The marks are traces of deliberate dental modifications ... they are so well-made that most likely they were filed by a person of great skill," Arcini wrote in the current issue of...

It is a mystery in the desert hills near Los Lunas, New Mexico. It has puzzled experts for more than 50 years. It has been referred to by many different names -- Ten Commandments Rock, Mystery Rock, The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone. It is most commonly known as the Mystery Stone. Mystery Stone is located at the base of Hidden Mountain, on New Mexico state trust land, about 16 miles west of Los Lunas. It is a boulder weighing an estimated 80 to 100 tons and is about eight meters in length. Nine rows of 216 characters were chiseled at...

The 7,500- to 11,000-year-old remains suggest the oldest settlers of the Americas came from different genetic stock than more recent Native Americans. Modern Native Americans share traits with Mongoloid peoples of Mongolia, China, and Siberia, the researchers said. But they found dozens of skulls from Brazil appear much more similar to modern Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans. A Brazilian study involving a large collection of South American skulls suggests at least two distinct groups of early humans colonized the Americas. Anthropologists Walter Neves and Mark Hubbe of the University of Sao Paulo studied 81 skulls of early humans and found...

The Sunday Times November 20, 2005 Scientists show we’ve been losing face for 10,000 years Jonathan Leake, Science Editor THE human face is shrinking. Research into people’s appearance over the past 10,000 years has found that our ancestors’ heads and faces were up to 30% larger than now. Changes in diet are thought to be the main cause. The switch to softer, farmed foods means that jawbones, teeth, skulls and muscles do not need to be as strong as in the past. The shrinkage has been blamed for a surge in dental problems caused by crooked or overlapping teeth. “Over...

HEAD CASES: The physical phenotypic differences between this Sudanese skull (right) and this European skull (left) are apparent. (From J.L.A. de Quatrefages, E.T. Hamy, Crania ethnica: les Cranes des races humaines, Baillere et fils: Paris, 1882.) Henry Flower became director of the British Museum of Natural History in 1884, and promptly set about rearranging exhibits. He set a display of human skulls to show their diversity of shape across the globe. A century later, the skulls had gone, and in their place was a large photograph of soccer fans standing in their terraces bearing the legend: "We are all...

Biology doesn’t explain why societies collapseCollapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, New York: Viking, 592 pages, $29.95 Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is neither “superb” (The New Statesman), “incisive” (The Washington Post), “magisterial” (BusinessWeek), nor “insightful and very important” (Boston Herald). It is, instead, a telling example of how a smart man can be terribly misled by a fixation on one big idea. In this case, Diamond, a biologist, is trying to apply biology’s master narrative to human societies. In 1838 the founding father of modern biology, Charles...

ERBIL, Iraq - If a neighborhood is defined as a place where human beings move in and never leave, then the world's oldest could be here at the Citadel, an ancient and teeming city within a city girded by stone walls. Resting on a layer cake of civilizations that have come and gone for an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 years, the Citadel looms over the apartment blocks of this otherwise rather gray metropolis in Iraqi Kurdistan. The settlement rivals Jericho and a handful of other famous towns for the title of the oldest continuously inhabited site in the world. The...

TBILISI, Georgia - Archaeologists in the former Soviet republic of Georgia have unearthed a skull they say is 1.8 million years old — part of a find that holds the oldest traces of humankind's closest ancestors ever found in Europe. The skull from an early member of the genus Homo was found Aug. 6 and unearthed Sunday in Dmanisi, an area about 60 miles southeast of the capital, Tbilisi, said David Lortkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum, who took part in the dig. In total, five bones or fragments believed to be about the same age have been found...

In the Wake of the Phoenicians: DNA study reveals a Phoenician-Maltese link The idea is fascinating. Who among us hasn't considered our heritage and wondered if we might be descended from ancient royalty or some prominent historical figure? Led by a long-standing interest in the impact of ancient empires on the modern gene pool, geneticist and National Geographic emerging explorer Spencer Wells, with colleague Pierre Zalloua of the American University of Beirut, expanded on that question two years ago as they embarked on a genetic study of the Phoenicians, a first millennium B.C. sea empire that—over several hundred years—spread across...