Two Baby Girls, Who Lived And Died In The Last Ice Age, Reveal Lost American Ancestor Group

Two Baby Girls, Who Lived and Died in the Last Ice Age, Reveal Lost American Ancestor Group

The two infants were ceremonially buried by a previously unknown population of ancient humans around 11,500 years ago. Their remains were found at Upward Sun River, a site in Alaska. DNA analyses show that the two girls were likely cousins, and descend from people separated from a population in eastern Asia, which remained isolated for thousands of years before migrating into Alaska, sometime after 15,000 years ago.

Named the Ancient Beringians — for the Bering Land Bridge that once connected North America to Asia — they were a “sister” population, or clade, that shared recent common ancestors with modern Indigenous North and South Americans. Their tool technology also appears to descend from Asian tools. Both the human remains at Upward Sun River and modern Native Americans were descended from the same ancestral source, which carried a mixture of East Asian and Mal’ta-related ancestry (the Mal’ta were an ancient population near Lake Baikal in modern Siberia, known largely from the remains of a four year old boy who died around 24,000 years ago).

Of course, all this latest find shows is that the Ancient Beringians existed about 11,500 years ago, and that they descended from the same group as modern Native Americans. We do not know what happened to this population after these two little girls died. This find does not tell us if the Ancient Beringians persisted, intermarrying with what would become modern North and South Americans. It does not tell us if they died out, perhaps because of climate change at the end of the Ice Age making their way of life untenable, or even because of conflict with other indigenous groups. These two young relatives raise many questions, and answer only a few.

Taxidermy

I know that “stuffed my face” is an idiom because you can’t really stuff anyone’s face, unless you are a taxidermist.

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againsmiletothelife

7 years ago

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

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againsmiletothelife

6 years ago

Apparently, Spain and France Are Great at Keeping Treaties

In 1659, when Louis XIV of France and Philip IV of Spain met to sign the Treaty of the Pyrenees following the Thirty Years’ War, they did so on Pheasant Island, an uninhabited island in the Bidasoa river between their two nations.

Ever since, the island has remained under joint sovereignty. But only one country has sovereignty at any given time. The island is governed alternately by Spain and France, changing hands every six months.

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againsmiletothelife

7 years ago

What Was The First Available Antibiotic?

To my surprise, it is not penicillin! Instead it was an antibiotic named Prontosil. Developed in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, by Bayer, it was a clever impostor that mimicked bacteria’s food: they ate prontosil and starved to death. Prontosil and drugs derived from it saved millions of lives up till the 1960’s. Its creator, Gerhard Domagk, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts.

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againsmiletothelife

7 years ago

Perfino a me, si direbbe...

Franco Scandurra, “Il medico della mutua” (Luigi Zampa, 1968).

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againsmiletothelife

7 years ago

All right, since nobody is reading this except me, I decided to use this Tumblr in the most random way ever:

I’ll go through the whole alphabet, choosing a food for every letter and writing facts, factoids and so on about it.

And I’ll do it simply ‘cause I can.

I’m ridiculously proud about this project, even if I’ll probably be the only person knowing about it.

P.S.: the food names will be in Italian, since I’m Italian XD (I’m writing in English to practise it)

The Lakshmi of Pompeii

But wait, you’re thinking – Lakshmi is a Hindu goddess, right? She is, the goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity and the wife of Vishnu.

But this particular Lakshmi figurine was found in the ruins of Pompeii. It is beautiful proof of the trade links between the Roman Empire and the other great civilizations of their day.

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againsmiletothelife

7 years ago

Questa non me l’aspettavo...

Medieval Japan Was A Great Place To Be Gay

By the 1300s, Japanese samurai had started taking their proteges as lovers. Usually, this was an older man with a younger boy. It was so common that one samurai said, “A young man without a pledged, elder he-lover is likened to a young girl without a fiance.”

Same-age male love was normal, too. A pair of aging male lovers, they said, were like “two old cherry trees still in bloom.”

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