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New insights into how people first arrived in Australia have been revealed by a group of experts brought together to investigate the continent's deep history. They used sophisticated modelling to determine not only the likely routes travelled by Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years ago, but also the sizes of groups required for the population to survive in harsh conditions. The research, published today in two companion papers (one in Scientific Reports and the other in Nature Ecology and Evolution), confirms the theory that people arrived in several large and deliberate migrations by island-hopping to reach New Guinea more...

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have retrieved nuclear genome sequences from the femur of a male Neandertal discovered in 1937 in Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave, Germany, and from the maxillary bone of a Neandertal girl found in 1993 in Scladina Cave, Belgium. Both Neandertals lived around 120,000 years ago, and therefore predate most of the Neandertals whose genomes have been sequenced to date. By examining the nuclear genomes of these two individuals, the researchers could show that these early Neandertals in Western Europe were more closely related to the last Neandertals who lived in the...

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia -- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died not in a gunbattle with soldiers but in a suicide pact, according to a new play based on police archives from the Bolivian mining town where the legendary American outlaws met their end.

Director George Roy Hill dies at 81 12/27/2002 Associated Press NEW YORK - George Roy Hill, the independent-minded former Marine pilot who directed Paul Newman and Robert Redford in both "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting," died at his home Friday. He was 81. Hill died of complications from Parkinson's disease, said Hill's son, George Roy Hill III, and Edwin S. Brown, his business manager for 35 years. The Redford-Newman films brought Hill honors and awards as well as the distinction of being the only director to have two films among the all-time top 10 moneymakers...

William Goldman liked to call himself a "storyteller", and he told them in almost every form: he wrote films and plays and musicals and novels and children's books and non-fiction; he wrote a very good insider's view of Hollywood (Adventures in the Screen Trade) and an even better one of Broadway (The Season). He was not equally partial to all these outlets. Goldman would have liked to have been a "great novelist", but seemed to intuit early on that it was not for him. He told me long ago in London, during a West End season that was an embarrassment...

I have been informed by friends of the family that William Goldman died last night. He was 87. Goldman, who twice won screenwriting Oscars for All The President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, passed away last night in his Manhattan home, surrounded by family and friends. His health had been failing for some time, and over the summer his condition deteriorated. We will be following this and building out the story today, but I wanted to let Deadline readers know straight away. From his scripting work to his books like Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman is...

Butch Cassidy is arguably one of the most infamous bandits of the Old West. His lucrative heists, daring schemes of tactical brilliance many years ahead of their time, wrested hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks, trains, and businesses—equivalent to multi-millions today. Only caught once on a charge of horse theft for which he served 18 months in jail, the wildly successful Cassidy earned himself such fame that pop culture today still knows his name. And he was a Mormon.A Mormon outlaw? It seems like it should be an oxymoron. Latter-day Saints take pride in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent,...

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 19, 2012 -- /PRNewswire/ -- On Sunday, September 30, 2012, California Auctioneers in Ventura, California, will auction off the Colt .45 SAA (Serial Number 158402) that belonged to Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, the legendary bank thief, train robber, and leader of the Wild Bunch Gang—the notorious Wyoming-based bandits that stalked the American West throughout the 1890s. His legacy as an icon of the American Old West was immortalized in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Known as the "Amnesty Colt," this is the most documented of Cassidy's guns. Hunted by...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Did Butch Cassidy, the notorious Old West outlaw who most historians believe perished in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia, actually survive that battle and live to old age, peacefully and anonymously, in Washington state? And did he pen an autobiography detailing his exploits while cleverly casting the book as biography under another name? A rare books collector says he has obtained a manuscript with new evidence that may give credence to that theory. The 200-page manuscript, "Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy," which dates to 1934, is twice as long as a previously known but...

The red canyons and parched planes surrounding the new Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid Memorial Museum might make you think you're in the Old West. But the electrical wiring and a searing altitude headache tell you this is not California circa 1900, but high-up the mountains in present day Bolivia. Here in the tiny town of San Vicente (population 800), the world's most famous outlaws are supposed to have been gunned down 101 years ago, days after robbing the payroll of a Bolivian mine. Offing the bandits would seem to have been sufficient revenge but area residents still think the...

SAN VICENTE, Bolivia --On a November afternoon 99 years ago, two American outlaws straggled into this forlorn mining town, 14,500 feet above sea level, and sought lodging in an adobe hut. They didn't know that a posse in hot pursuit had already settled in another hut and soon would get word of the Americans' arrival. A shootout ensued. It ended when the wounded Americans made a desperate dash out of their hiding place, guns blazing, only to run into volleys of gunfire from Bolivian troops lying in wait. That, at any rate, is how Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...

Let's trade some less "political" Hollywood mistakes. I can think of a few: 1) In the film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," the final shootout happens in a town with lots of trees. But the real San Vincentes in Bolivia is way above the treeline. And, whoever those 2 Americans were, they killed themselves after they were wounded (at least according to those who say they found the bodies). 2) a) In the movie "Patton"...Patton says "I read your book!" after he beats Rommel in command of a tank battle. But Rommel had never written a book on armor...

One of the enduring consequences of the era of Phoenician influence -- which had by around 800 BC progressed from trading outposts to full-blown colonies in southern Spain -- was the adoption of alphabetic writing by the native population, first in the south-west. The number of known Tartessian inscriptions on stone is now about 90 and steadily rising with new discoveries. Concentrated densely in southern Portugal (the Algarve and Lower Alentejo), there is a wider scatter of fifteen over south-west Spain. The best exhibition of the inscriptions is on view in the new and innovative Museu da Escrita do Sudoeste,...

Don't worry, it's totally legal. Quite a few plants may be safely, and pleasurable, lit up in a pipe or rolling papers. Those listed below are legal, unregulated, and totally safe to use. They are also non-hallucinogenic and non-addictive – perhaps that explains their lack of popularity? While they won’t get you high, when blended according to the instructions below, these herbs produce a smooth, tasty smoke and give a gentle, relaxing buzz. All of the following varieties may be purchased online or at any well-stocked herb store. You may also grow your own. Of course, we’d be remiss not...

AUSTIN, Texas — DNA kits that were supposed to be heading to a Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab from San Antonio ended up in the Texas sun under a mailbox. Clint Hudler contacted KVUE Thursday, saying he was walking to get his mail when his four-year-old daughter found five DNA test kits inside a mail carrier box underneath the community mailboxes... According to Austin police, officers came and collected the kits and took them directly to DPS. "Anyone could grab it, anyone could tamper with it. Anyone could take one dispose of it," Hudler said. "I mean, so...

Even single-celled organisms desire partners every now and then. Leishmania—single-celled parasites that cause infections of the skin and internal organs—have long been known to multiply asexually, like bacteria. But occasionally, researchers have found hybrid parasites that carry genetic material from more than one strain—or even more than one species—of Leishmania, suggesting that some kind of genetic mixing is going on.Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that the hybrid Leishmania parasites can mate with one another to produce fertile offspring that carry genes from both parents—signs of...

Viking Cats – DNA Study Shows the Crucial Role Felines Played in Viking Life Apr 12, 2019 Reginald Martyr After conducting extensive research, scientists believe that they have stumbled upon an interesting revelation concerning the history of cats, a species which is among the world’s most popular pets today. New findings suggest that eons before cats became household pets across the globe, they were the frequent companions of ancient Vikings, in some cases accompanying them as they sailed across the globe. The first-ever major examination and analysis of ancient DNA from our feline friends provided these rather unexpected preliminary conclusions...

If there is any doubt about the scope of how children are being used as pawns in the migrant surge, take a look at this story from the Washington Examiner: In a pilot program, approximately 30% of rapid DNA tests of immigrant adults who were suspected of arriving at the southern border with children who weren't theirs revealed the adults were not related to the children, an official involved in the system's temporary rollout who asked to be anonymous in order to speak freely told the Washington Examiner Friday

Around 30 percent of migrants tested at the US-Mexico border was found to be faking family relationships with children they were traveling with, according to rapid DNA testing by ICE.A pilot of new rapid DNA testing at the US Southern Border, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), discovered that almost a third of the adults tested were not biologically related to the children in their custody.The pilot was conducted by ICE for a few days earlier this month in El Paso and McAllen, Texas.

A pilot rapid DNA-testing program revealed that approximately 30 percent of illegal alien adults suspected of arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border with children who were not theirs were unrelated to the children accompanying them, according to an anonymous source in the program who spoke to The Washington Examiner. “There’s been some concern about, ‘Are they stepfathers or adopted fathers?'” the official told the newspaper. “Those were not the case. In these cases, they are misrepresented as family members.” In some of the cases, when the adults were asked to submit to a cheek swab to prove their relation to the...