Free Republic

...The new study supports the results of an earlier chemical analysis of the soldiers' teeth. Published last year... the paper found that roughly two-thirds of soldiers who died during the 480 battle were not of Greek origin and that one-fourth of troops who died in 409 were not local to the area...That’s likely because paying soldiers to fight did not fit the prevailing narrative of "heroic Greek armies of citizens and the armored spearmen known as hoplites" rising up to defend Himera that Greek writers wanted to portray, study co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, tells the New...

In the early 19th century, Jean-François Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to begin the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt. We already knew Egypt through the Bible and the histories of the Greeks, but even Herodotus wrote 2,000 years after the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the translation of hieroglyphics, the legend of Egypt came to life. What had been cloudy became clear. In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard’s Medical School and the Broad Institute, introduces us to...

How Europeans evolved white skin By Ann Gibbons ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago. The origins of Europeans...

Study of 44 ancient Middle Eastern genomes supports idea of independent farming revolutions in the Fertile Crescent. Two Middle Eastern populations independently developed farming and then spread the technology to Europe, Africa and Asia, according to the genomes of 44 people who lived thousands of years ago in present-day Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iran. ...the research supports archaeological evidence about the multiple origins of farming, and represents the first detailed look at the ancestry of the individuals behind one of the most important periods in human history — the Neolithic revolution. Some 11,000 years ago, humans living in the...