Free Republic

In 1844, when the Ottoman Empire still controlled the Holy Land, a census was conducted, which revealed that Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem. Where were the "Palestinians"? Where were the Canaanites? The census count reported the presence of three groups in the city: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Canaanites were apparently not present. But suddenly, inexplicably, all Palestinians were spontaneously transformed into Canaanites in 2019, just as quickly as all Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs in Israel were spontaneously transformed into Palestinians in 1967. It took nothing more than the word of Yasser Arafat to create Palestinians out...

More than 3,000 years have passed since this dramatized event, but for the archaeologists of the Lautenschläger Azekah Expedition, it looks as if it had happened only yester-day. Slowly and carefully -- it took four full seasons -- we uncovered a building filled with more than 200 complete ceramic vessels, 45 stone tools, exceptional metal objects, 108 beads, five scarabs, eight034 amulets, and the remains of four people. This collapsed building is located on the top of Tel Azekah. The name of Azekah (or 'Azeqah) is known to most readers as the location of the famous battle between David and...

Gezer is mentioned in a well-known passage in the Hebrew Bible that states that Solomon used forced labor "to build the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, [and] Gezer" (1 Kings 9:15)... at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer... most of the structures clearly belong to the Iron Age. In contrast, the water system at Tel Gezer has now been dated by project archaeologists to a much earlier period -- the MBA -- with a date as early as 2000 B.C... Gezer is also the site of massive fortifications and other structures dating to the MBA -- in addition to the Iron Age...

The bill is titled "H.R. 6666 — COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone," or the TRACE Act. It aims to provide $100 billion in funding for the Health and Human Service Department for the purpose of "diagnostic testing for COVID–19, to trace and monitor the contacts of infected individuals, and to support the quarantine of such contacts ..." The bill also says that it will provide, "as necessary, testing [for] individuals and ... services related to testing and quarantine at their residences."

Led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Santa Cruz, the team analyzed genome-wide data from 89 individuals who lived between 500 and 9,000 years ago. Of these, 64 genomes, ranging from 500 to 4,500 years old, were newly sequenced - more than doubling the number of ancient individuals with genome-wide data from South America. The analysis included representatives of iconic Andean civilizations from whom no genome-wide data had been reported before, including the Moche, Nasca, Wari, Tiwanaku and Inca. The central Andes, surrounding present-day Peru, is one of the few places in the world where...

A French medical team is to spend six months analysing the presumed remains of Joan of Arc, who was burned at the age of 19 in 1431, the daily Le Parisien reported Monday."We will use the remains that were recovered from beneath the pyre, essentially bones and skin fragments that have been preserved over generations," said Philippe Charlier, a known specialist in the field of forensic medicine. A complete DNA analysis of the remains will be carried out, he added.The examination is intended mainly to definitively identify the remains. The girl known the world over as "The Maid of Orleans"...

The bottle containing the bones first surfaced at a pharmacy in 1867. Its label read: "Remains found under the pyre of Joan of Arc, maiden of Orleans." Different techniques, including DNA analysis, several forms of microscopy, chemical analysis and carbon dating, were used to examine the bottle's contents. A few years ago, Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, France, and his team first determined that the bottle contained an approximately 4-inch-long human rib covered with a black coating. It also housed part of a cat femur covered with the same coating, three fragments of "charcoal"...

Bones thought to be the holy remains of 15th Century French heroine Joan of Arc were in fact made from an Egyptian mummy and a cat, research has revealed. In 1867, a jar was found in a Paris pharmacy attic, along with a label claiming it held relics of Joan's body. But new forensic tests suggest that the remains date from between the third and sixth centuries BC - hundreds of years before Joan was even born. The study has been reported in the news pages of the Nature journal. Forensic scientist Dr Philippe Charlier, who led the investigation, told...

table width=100% valign=top border=0> Sensational News: Joan of Arc was not executed. She died at 57 01/17/2004 16:25 A Ukrainian anthropologist Sergey Gorbenko claims that Joan of Arc was not burned at the stake. She lived till 57.He was able to reach such conclusion after examining several skulls of the French royal family of Ludwig XI at the Notre Dame de Cleri Cathedral near Orleans, reports Ukrainian newspaper "Uryadovy cur"r" ("The Government's courier").In the course of his studies, the anthropologist revealed that a skull which used to be considered to belong to the king himself, in fact belongs to a...

A rib bone and a piece of cloth supposedly recovered after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake are probably not hers, according to experts trying to unravel one of the mysteries surrounding the 15th century French heroine.Eighteen experts began a series of tests six months ago on the fragments reportedly recovered from the pyre where the 19-year-old was burned for heresy.Although the tests have not been completed, findings so far indicate there is "relatively little chance" that the remnants are hers, Philippe Charlier, the head of the team, told The Associated Press on Saturday.The fragment of linen from...

Archaeologists found the burials in 2017, ahead of the construction of a skate park in Lechlade-on-Thames, a town in the southwestern county of Gloucestershire, England. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the two men lived in about 2200 B.C. The chieftain's burial held the skulls and hooves from four different cattle, Hood said. Head and hoof burial offerings were practiced in Europe during the Bronze Age, but were less common in Britain. "In fact, all previous examples here [in the U.K.] have been single cattle burials, so the Lechlade burial is unique in this regard," because it had four, Hood said. "It's...

The early settlement of anatomically modern humans in MSEA dates back to at least 65 thousand years ago (kya) and is associated with the formation of a hunter-gatherer tradition called Hoabinhian. Since the Neolithic period, which dates to about ~4,000-5,000 years ago, cultural transitions and diversification have happened multiple times.. ...Vietnam has a population size of more than 96 million people comprising 54 official ethnic groups; 110 languages are spoken in the country. To date, there are hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups in MSEA, speaking languages belonging to five major language families: Austro-Asiatic (AA), Austronesian (AN), Hmong-Mien (HM), Tai-Kadai (TK), and...

Conspiracy theorists will readily tell you that the U.S. military is hiding alien corpses in a secret facility in the Nevada desert. But paleontologist and University of Washington geology professor Peter Ward thinks that scientists should be looking for a different type of alien life on earth: alien microbes. Ward is the author of several popular books about astrobiology, including the controversial Rare Earth, co-authored with Donald Brownlee. In his latest book, Life as We Do Not Know It, Ward addresses an issue often avoided by astrobiologists. Although all known life on Earth has a similar DNA-based chemistry, life found...

By inserting DNA obtained from the mushroom, the scientists were able to create plants that glow much brighter than previously possible. This biological light can be used by scientists for observing the inner workings of plants. In contrast to other commonly used forms of bioluminescence, such as from fireflies, unique chemical reagents are not necessary for sustaining mushroom bioluminescence. Plants containing the mushroom DNA glow continuously throughout their lifecycle, from seedling to maturity. The new discovery can also be used for practical and aesthetic purposes, most notably for creating glowing flowers and other ornamental plants. And while replacing street lights...

A Native American man in Montana has what may be the oldest DNA native to the Americas, according to news reports. After getting his DNA tested, Darrell "Dusty" Crawford learned that his ancestors were already in the Americas about 17,000 years ago, according to the Great Falls Tribune, a Montana newspaper.

A femur discovered in a cave in southwestern Germany has provided researchers with firm evidence that a small population of humans left Africa and then vanished, long before the big migration that saw humans populate the globe. Signs of this mysterious early migration remained in the DNA of the Neanderthal who left the leg bone behind, revealing not only a previous tryst between the two hominin populations, but a sign that Neanderthals were far more diverse than we thoughtA team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Tübingen in...

Human tooth shape varies greatly among individuals and populations. Examples of common dental features include the groove patterns in crowns, the relative size of cusps, the number of roots, and the presence or absence of wisdom teeth. These dental traits are heritable, with certain traits commonly observed within families. Some of them occur at different frequencies across populations in a way that is similar to the inheritance and variation of DNA. "Dental traits can be used in population genetic studies when DNA is not available," says Hannes Rathmann. Teeth are the hardest tissue in the human body and individuals' dental...

When the ancestors of modern humans left Africa 50,000 years ago they met the Neandertals. In this encounter, the Neandertal population contributed around two percent of the genome to present day non-African populations. A collaboration of scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark, deCODE Genetics in Iceland, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have conducted the most comprehensive study to date using data obtained from 27,566 Icelanders, to figure out which parts of our genomes contain Neandertal DNA and what role it plays in modern humans. Every person of non-African decent shares around two percent of...

It is perhaps best-known for its hipsters, but long before Shoreditch became avant garde, it was a place of agriculture and farmers according to evidence from a radiocarbon dating technique that has revealed details about Neolithic London. The technique proved that the most significant early Neolithic pottery discovered in London is 5,500 years old. It reveals for the first time that the city's prehistoric inhabitants led a less mobile, farming-based lifestyle than their hunter-gathering forebears. The research, published in Nature, reveals that an area around Shoreditch High Street was once populated by farmers herding their livestock across a once-green landscape....

An international team found that during this period, crops were being cultivated in a remote location in what is now northern Bolivia. The scientists believe that the humans who lived here were planting squash, cassava and maize. The inhabitants also created thousands of artificial islands in the forest. The end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, saw a sustained rise in global temperatures... Researchers have previously unearthed evidence that crops were domesticated at four important locations around the world. So China saw the cultivation of rice, while in the Middle East it was grains, in Central America...