Sep 28, 2018 04:04 PM
Spanish Men Were Completely Wiped Out By The Arrival Of A New Tribe 4,000 Years Ago
https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-an...years-ago/
EXCERPT: . . . the arrival of a group of people in Europe known as the Yamnaya. With the newly invented wheel and domesticated horses, they were able to expand like few others. “These people spread over a vast territory from Mongolia to Hungary and into Europe, and are the single primary most important contributors to Europeans today" [...]
About 4,500 years ago they arrived in Britain, replacing 90 percent of the gene pool, possibly as a result of the diseases they brought and climate change. But on the Iberian Peninsula, something more dramatic took place. It appears there was some sort of “violent conquest”, notes New Scientist, where local males were either killed or enslaved and the females claimed by the Yamnaya. This is evidenced by a “complete Y-chromosome replacement,” according to Reich. In other words, Spanish men disappeared completely from the gene pool....
MORE: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-an...years-ago/
Laser mapping shows the surprising complexity of the Maya civilization
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lase...ion?tgt=nr
EXCERPT: . . . Aerial laser maps of northern Guatemala obtained in 2016 and map-guided ground surveys and excavations in 2017 compel a reevaluation of traditional assumptions about the ancient Maya, the team concludes. A long-standing idea that Classic Maya civilization, which covered parts of southern Mexico and much of Central America, once contained relatively small city-states ruled by warring kings has drawn increasing skepticism over the last decade (SN Online: 4/17/18). Laser technology shot down that scenario by gazing through forests and vegetation at 10 Maya sites — as well as in two areas with signs of Maya-era activity but no named sites — dating from a couple hundred years before the start of the Classic period to near its end. “Every Maya city was bigger and more populated than we previously thought,” says archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University in New Orleans. [...] views of the ancient Maya’s urban and rural infrastructure are particularly impressive, Estrada-Belli says. Water control was crucial. Much of the unsettled wetlands throughout northern Guatemala contain remnants of crisscrossing drainage channels that form grids within what must have once been agricultural fields....
MORE: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lase...ion?tgt=nr
https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-an...years-ago/
EXCERPT: . . . the arrival of a group of people in Europe known as the Yamnaya. With the newly invented wheel and domesticated horses, they were able to expand like few others. “These people spread over a vast territory from Mongolia to Hungary and into Europe, and are the single primary most important contributors to Europeans today" [...]
About 4,500 years ago they arrived in Britain, replacing 90 percent of the gene pool, possibly as a result of the diseases they brought and climate change. But on the Iberian Peninsula, something more dramatic took place. It appears there was some sort of “violent conquest”, notes New Scientist, where local males were either killed or enslaved and the females claimed by the Yamnaya. This is evidenced by a “complete Y-chromosome replacement,” according to Reich. In other words, Spanish men disappeared completely from the gene pool....
MORE: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-an...years-ago/
Laser mapping shows the surprising complexity of the Maya civilization
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lase...ion?tgt=nr
EXCERPT: . . . Aerial laser maps of northern Guatemala obtained in 2016 and map-guided ground surveys and excavations in 2017 compel a reevaluation of traditional assumptions about the ancient Maya, the team concludes. A long-standing idea that Classic Maya civilization, which covered parts of southern Mexico and much of Central America, once contained relatively small city-states ruled by warring kings has drawn increasing skepticism over the last decade (SN Online: 4/17/18). Laser technology shot down that scenario by gazing through forests and vegetation at 10 Maya sites — as well as in two areas with signs of Maya-era activity but no named sites — dating from a couple hundred years before the start of the Classic period to near its end. “Every Maya city was bigger and more populated than we previously thought,” says archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University in New Orleans. [...] views of the ancient Maya’s urban and rural infrastructure are particularly impressive, Estrada-Belli says. Water control was crucial. Much of the unsettled wetlands throughout northern Guatemala contain remnants of crisscrossing drainage channels that form grids within what must have once been agricultural fields....
MORE: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lase...ion?tgt=nr