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Just in time for picnic-table trivia, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rewrites the origins of domesticated watermelons. Using DNA from greenhouse-grown plants representing all species and hundreds of varieties of watermelon, scientists discovered that watermelons most likely came from wild crop progenitors in northeast Africa. The study corrects a 90-year-old mistake that lumped watermelons into the same category as the South African citron melon. Instead, researchers, including a first author now at Washington University in St. Louis, found that a Sudanese form with non-bitter whitish pulp, known as the Kordofan melon (C....

Among the most exciting of the new acquisitions are the materials from the site of Jebel Sahaba, now in northern Sudan, which were donated to the Museum by Dr Fred Wendorf in 2002. Excavating here in 1965–66, as part of the UNESCO-funded campaign to salvage sites destined to be flooded by the construction of the Aswan High Dam, Dr Wendorf found a cemetery (site 117) containing at least 61 individuals dating back to about 13,000 years ago. This discovery was of great significance for two reasons. First, as a designated graveyard, evidently used over several generations, it is one of...

Archaeology, linguistics, and genetics have demonstrated a Nilo-Saharan dispersion across a vast expanse of the global south extending from the Niger-Benue Trough to India during the Holocene Wet Period. I have termed this the “Afro-Asiatic Dominion.” It is older than the Vedic Age and the dominate religion diffused with the dispersion of Proto-Saharan and Kushite priests variously called O-piru, Apiru, Habiru (Hebrew) and Horite (Horim) in ancient texts. Tool evidence Discoveries made by Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, cast doubt on the theory that the volcanic eruption of Toba in Indonesia was catastrophic for humans living even great...