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Between 1997 and 2016, researchers at an excavation near Ashkelon in Israel examined the remains of more than one hundred humans, remains that dated from the 12th to 6th centuries before Christ. The researchers hoped to find human DNA in order to answer an old question: Who were the Philistines? Where did they come from? As it turns out, the Philistines were exactly who the Bible says they were, and they came from where the Bible says they did. Amos 9 speaks of God bringing up the Philistines from Caphtor, just as he brought Israel out of Egypt. Deuteronomy 2...

While studying acquisition of imagination in children, Dr. Vyshedskiy and his colleagues discovered a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. It became apparent that modern children who have not been exposed to full language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination essential for juxtaposition of mental objects, known as Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS). " Flexible object combination and nesting (otherwise known as recursion) are characteristic features of all human languages. For this reason, linguists refer to modern languages as recursive languages." Unlike vocabulary and grammar acquisition, which can be learned throughout one's...

The vast cultural and linguistic diversity of Latin American countries is still far from being fully represented by genetic surveys. Western South America in particular holds a key role in the history of the continent due to the presence of three major ecogeographic domains (the Andes, the Amazonia, and the Pacific Coast), and for hosting the earliest and largest complex societies... A thorough study, a collaboration between scientists and institutes from Europe, the USA, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, including geneticists, linguists and anthropologists, has shed new light on the population history of South America... The results confirmed the impact...

RNA -- the short-lived transcripts of genes -- from the "Tumat puppy", a wolf of the Pleistocene era has been isolated, and its sequence analyzed in a new study by Oliver Smith of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues publishing on July 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The results establish the possibility of examining a range of RNA transcripts from ancient organisms, a possibility previously thought to be extremely unlikely because of the short lifespan of RNA. DNA, which encodes the "hard copy" of genes, is known to survive for thousands of years under favourable conditions. But RNA...

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—The massive Toba volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra about 74,000 years ago did not cause a six-year-long "volcanic winter" in East Africa and thereby cause the human population in the region to plummet, according to new University of Arizona-led research. The new findings disagree with the Toba catastrophe hypothesis, which says the eruption and its aftermath caused drastic, multi-year cooling and severe ecological disruption in East Africa. "This is the first research that provides direct evidence for the effects of the Toba eruption on vegetation just before and just after the eruption," said lead author Chad...

In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we detail how during this remarkable journey the ancestors of modern humans met and genetically mixed with a number of archaic human groups, including Neandertals and Denisovans, and several others for which we currently have no name. The traces of these interactions are still preserved in our genomes. For example, all modern non-African populations contain about 2 percent Neandertal ancestry. This strong universal signal shows that the original Neandertal mixing event must have happened just after the small founding population left Africa. We can even use the Neandertal...

New research using ancient DNA has revealed that plague has been endemic in human populations for more than twice as long as previously thought, and that the ancestral plague would have been predominantly spread by human-to-human contact -- until genetic mutations allowed Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), the bacteria that causes plague, to survive in the gut of fleas. These mutations, which may have occurred near the turn of the 1st millennium BC, gave rise to the bubonic form of plague that spreads at terrifying speed through flea -- and consequently rat -- carriers. The bubonic plague caused the pandemics that...

Located in northern Newfoundland, the site of L'Anse aux Meadows was founded by Vikings around A.D. 1000. Until now, archaeologists believed that the site was occupied for only a brief period... In August 2018, an archaeological team excavated a peat bog located nearly 100 feet (30 meters) east of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows. They found a layer of "ecofacts" -- environmental remains that may have been brought to the site by humans -- that were radiocarbon dated to the 12th or 13th century. These ecofacts include remains of two beetles not native to Newfoundland -- Simplocaria metallica,...

An international team of archaeologists has uncovered the earliest example of the use of a bridle bit with an equid (horse family) in the Near East. The discovery provides first evidence of the use of the bit (mouth piece) to control an animal long before the appearance of the horse in the Near East. Evidence of the bridle bit was derived from the skeleton of a donkey dating to the Early Bronze Age III (approximately 2700 BCE) found at the excavations of the biblical city Gath (modern Tell es-Safi) of the Philistines, the home of Goliath, located in central Israel....

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, ALASKA — It's a sacred annual mission: a group of mortuary affairs recovery experts arrives each June at a glacier high in Alaska's Chugach mountain range to continue the hunt for the remains of 52 troops killed in an Air Force transport crash 66 years ago. The C-124 was carrying 42 airmen, eight soldiers, one sailor and one Marine when it crashed into Mount Gannett on Nov. 22, 1952 as it traveled from McChord Air Force Base, Washington to what is now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. Winter had descended on the treacherous mountain range, and no remains...

68 years after disappearing during the Korean War, this soldier is finally home Jordan Travis, The Record-Eagle July 27, 2019 at 10:56 AM U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Leah Ferrante TRAVERSE CITY — At long last, U.S. Army Cpl. Charles Stanley Lawler is home. The former Traverse City resident's remains arrived at Cherry Capital Airport Thursday afternoon, 68 years after he disappeared in a Korean War battle. A parade of police vehicles and veterans on motorcycles rolled with the hearse, taking Lawler on his second-to-last trip to Covell Funeral Home where a military honor guard awaited. People came out to pay...

Ancient people may have moved some of the massive megaliths of Stonehenge into place by greasing giant sleds with pig lard, then sliding the giant stones on them across the landscape, a new study suggests. After re-analyzing ceramic pots that earlier researchers believed were used to cook food, archaeologist Lisa-Marie Shillito concluded that many of those pots may have been used to collect fat that dripped off pigs as they were spit-roasted. The grease would have been stored as lard or tallow and used to lubricate the sleds most archaeologists believe were used to move the stones... The pottery fragments...

Skeletal remains in an island cave in Favignana, Italy, reveal that modern humans first settled in Sicily around the time of the last ice age and despite living on Mediterranean islands, ate little seafood. The research is published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Marcello Mannino and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. Genetic analysis of the bones discovered in caves on the Egadi islands provides some of the first mitochondrial DNA data available for early humans from the Mediterranean region, a crucial piece of evidence in ancestry analysis. This analysis reveals...

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained how migrant children are being “rented” to help other migrants claim asylum when attempting to cross into the U.S. over the southern border. During an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” host Maria Bartiromo pressed Graham on the claim that migrants have been “renting” their children so that others can claim asylum in the U.S. and his claim that 30% of families apprehended while attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border are not really related. Graham responded by saying that officials at the border have started a “pilot program” where...

YONAGUNI, OKINAWA PREF. - A team of Japanese and Taiwanese paddlers in a dugout canoe on Tuesday successfully replicated a hypothetical human migration between Taiwan and Okinawa about 30,000 years ago. During the two-day, 200-kilometer voyage from Taitung County, southeastern Taiwan, to Yonaguni Island, Okinawa Prefecture, the team of five paddlers — one Taiwanese, three Japanese men and one Japanese woman — relied solely on the stars, sun and wind for their bearings. They departed Taiwan on Sunday afternoon in their 7.6-meter-long, 70-centimeter-wide wooden canoe, crossing the Black Stream, which begins off the Philippines and flows northeastward past Japan. The...

Sequencing a person's DNA is now a routine task. That reality has left doctors looking for ways to put the technology to work. A decade ago, a top federal scientist said, "Whether you like it or not, a complete sequencing of newborns is not far away." Dr. Francis Collins, who made that statement, has been head of the National Institutes of Health for the intervening decade. But his prophecy hasn't come to pass, for both scientific and practical reasons. Scientists have found that, so far, a complete genetic readout would be a poor substitute for the traditional blood test that...

Over 17,000 years ago this original contingent crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska and began peopling the New World. Fossil DNA shows an affinity between this migratory current and the populations of Siberia and northern China. Contrary to the traditional theory it had no link to Africa or Australasia. The new study also reveals that once they had settled in North America the descendants of this ancestral migratory flow diversified into two lineages some 16,000 years ago. The members of one lineage crossed the Isthmus of Panama and peopled South America in three distinct consecutive waves. The first...

JERUSALEM — Goliath the Greek? Human remains from an ancient cemetery in southern Israel have yielded precious bits of DNA that a new study says help prove the European origin of the Philistines — the enigmatic nemeses of the biblical Israelites. The Philistines mostly resided in five cities along the southern coast of what is today Israel and the Gaza Strip during the early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago. In the Bible, David fought the Philistine giant Goliath in a duel, and Samson slew a thousand of their warriors with the jawbone of an ass. Many archaeologists have proposed...

July 2 (UPI) -- A former corrections officer was arrested in connection with three rapes in the Sacramento area more than 20 years ago. DNA evidence led detectives to Mark Manteuffel, 59, who lived in Decatur, Ga. He was arrested Friday and is expected to be extradited to Sacramento to face multiple charges, including torture and rape. Police matched DNA from the crime scenes and rape kits to a profile assembled from a genetic testing company. The genetic profile could have been Manteuffel or a family member. Detectives used a similar method to catch the so-called "Golden State Killer," who...

The current theory on human migrations into Japan is that the original inhabitants, the Jomon people, were met about 2,500 years ago by a separate group coming mainly from the Korean Peninsula, the Yayoi people. Archaeologists have identified fewer Jomon sites from the Late Jomon Period, the era immediately before the Yayoi arrival. Global temperatures and sea levels dropped during that period, which could have made life more difficult for the hunter-gatherer Jomon people. When the Yayoi people arrived, they brought wet rice farming to Japan, which would have led to a more stable food supply for the remaining Jomon...