• Ancient mtDNA from Sampula population in Xinjiang
• mtDNA of Tarim mummies

This newly acquired genetic data revealed a number of important advances, including:

• The rich mosaic of African-American ancestry. Among the 365 African-Americans in the study, individuals had as little as 1 percent West African ancestry and as much as 99 percent. There are significant implications for pharmacogenomic studies and assessment of disease risk. It appears that the range of genetic ancestry captured under the term African-American is extremely diverse, suggesting that caution should be used in prescribing treatment based on differential guidelines for African-Americans.
• A median proportion of European ancestry in African-Americans of 18.5 percent, with large variation among individuals.
• The predominately African origin of X chromosomes of African-Americans. This is consistent with the pattern of gene flow where mothers were mostly of African ancestry while fathers were either of African or European ancestry.
• A technique which can reliably distinguish African and European ancestry for any particular region of the genome in African-Americans. This could have implications for personalized ancestry reconstructions, personalized medicine and more effective drug treatments and could aid in developing more effective methods for mapping genetic risk factors for diseases common in African-Americans, such as hypertension, diabetes and prostate cancer.
• The similarity of the West African component of African-American ancestry to the profile from non-Bantu Niger-Kordofanian speaking populations, which include the Igbo and Yoruba from Nigeria and the Brong from Ghana
• A comparison of the West African segments of African-American genomes. This is wholly in line with historical documents showing that the Igbo and Yoruba are two of the 10 most frequent ethnicities in slave trade records; however, most African-Americans also have ancestry from Bantu-speaking populations in western Africa.
• Population structure within the West African samples reflecting primarily language and secondarily geographical distance, echoing the Bantu expansion from a homeland in West Africa across much of sub-Saharan Africa around 4,000 years ago.

Whereas 96% of the individuals with European surnames carried European Y-chromosomes, 50% of the samples from individuals with Amerindian surnames had
European Y chromosomes.

Several genome-wide studies of human genetic diversity have been conducted on European populations. Now, for the first time, these studies have been extended to 73 Southeast Asian (SEA) and East Asian (EA) populations.

In a paper titled, "Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia," published online Science on 10 Dec. 2009, over 90 scientists from the Human Genome Organisation's (HUGO's) Pan-Asian SNP Consortium report that their study conducted within and between the different populations in the Asia continent showed that genetic ancestry was highly correlated with ethnic and linguistic groups.

The scientists also reported a clear increase in genetic diversity from northern to southern latitudes. Their findings also suggest that there was one major inflow of human migration into Asia arising from Southeast Asia, rather than multiple inflows from both southern and northern routes as previously proposed. This indicates that Southeast Asia was the major geographic source of East Asian and North Asian populations.

(A figure illustrating the paper shows plausible routes of pre-historical migration of Asian human populations. According to the study, the PanAsia SNP Initiative, the most recent common ancestors of Asians arrived first in India and later, some of them migrated to Thailand, and South to the lands known today as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The first group of settlers must have gone very far south before they settled successfully. These included the Malay Negritos , Philippine Negritos , the East Indonesians, and early settlers of the Pacific Islands. Thereafter, one or several groups of people migrated North, mixed with previous settlers there and, finally, formed various populations we now refer to as Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Altaic. The figure is titled, "Putative Pre-Historical Migration Routes of Asian Human Populations.")

The researchers noted that the geographical and linguistic basis of genetic subgroups in Asia clarifies the need for genetic stratification when conducting genetic and pharmacogenomic studies in this continent, and that human genetic mapping of Asia has important implications for the study of genetics and disease and for research to understand migratory patterns in human history.

HUGO President Edison Liu, M.D., who is Executive Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), said, "This study was a milestone not only in the science that emerged, but the consortium that was formed. Ten Asian countries came together in the spirit of solidarity to understand how we were related as a people, and we finished with a truly Asian scientific community. We overcame shortage of funds and diverse operational constraints through partnerships, good will, and cultural sensitivity.

"Our next goal is to expand this collaboration to all of Asia including Central Asia and the Polynesian Islands," said Dr. Liu, one of the corresponding authors of the paper. "We also aim to be more detailed in our genomic analysis and plan to include structural variations, as well as over a million single nucleotide polymorphisms in the next analysis."

While HUGO initiated and coordinated the research, Dr. Liu pointed out, "Affymetrix, led by Dr. Giulia C. Kennedy and based in the US, is our primary technology partner in this endeavour. We greatly appreciate their support."

As usual for a Science paper there are voluminous (and free) supplementary materials. The Neighbor-Joining tree shows the clear correlation between linguistic affiliation and genetic identity of individuals.


UPDATE: As to the main thesis of the paper, namely that East Asians are descended from Southeast Asians rather than Central Asians, I have to say that I am not convinced. This thesis is based on two observations: minimum sharing between East Asians and Central/South Asians and south-north reduction of genetic diversity in East Eurasians. However, the high genetic diversity in Southeast Asians can be explained if they are taken to be old hybrids of Mongoloid northerners with "Australoid"-like southerners as physical anthropology suggests, and the seeming absence of influence of present-day Central/South Asians is due to the fact that the latter are largely Caucasoids of western Eurasian origin, and, thus, do not represent any putative ancestral populations to modern Mongoloids.

Science

The 50 heptatonic scales with the highest mean percentage similarity among the >4×107 possible scales evaluated are shown in Table 3. Three of the seven heptatonic modes (see Figure 1) emerge at the top of this list. The Phrygian mode holds the highest rank followed by the Dorian mode and the Ionian mode (the major scale). The fourth ranked scale is similar to the Phrygian mode but contains a neutral second (12:11) instead of a minor second; this collection is the Husayni scale in Arabic music [27]. The Aeolian mode (the natural minor scale) and Lydian mode are the fifth and sixth ranked scales. The next three scales are similar to the Dorian mode but with slight alterations in one or two scale degrees. The seventh ranked scale may represent the Kafi scale in classical Indian music with an alternative sharp sixth scale degree [22]. The eighth ranked scale is the Kardaniya scale in Arabic music [op cit.]. Although the ninth ranked scale does not represent any well-known musical tone collection, the Mixolydian mode is ranked tenth. The Locrian, which is the least used of the Western modes, is ranked fiftieth. Thus both the five-note and seven-note scales preferred in much music worldwide comprise intervals that conform optimally to a harmonic series.

In humans, vocal stimuli arise in a variety of complex ways, not all of which are harmonic. Harmonic series depend on vocal fold vibrations and are characteristic of the “voiced speech” responsible for vowel sounds and some consonants [1]. Although the relative amplitudes of harmonics are altered by filtering effects of the supralaryngeal vocal tract resonances to produce different vowel phones, the frequencies of harmonics remain unchanged [op cit.]. In consequence, the presence of a harmonic series is a salient feature of human vocalizations and essential to human speech and language. It follows that the similarity of musical intervals to harmonic series provides a plausible biological basis for the worldwide human preference for a relatively small number of musical scales defined by their overall similarity to a harmonic series.

When just the Central/South Asia, Middle East, North Africa, and European groups are analyzed, PC1 (Fig. S4A) distinguishes the Mozabite (North Africa), Middle East, and Europe groups from the Central/South Asian groups, while PC2 separates the Mozabite and Middle East groups from the Europe groups, with no overlap among individuals from the different North Africa/Middle East/Europe groups. By contrast, there is overlap among individuals from the different Central/South Asia groups; in addition, the Makrani and Sindhi individuals identified in the worldwide analysis as having experienced recent sub-Saharan African admixture are clearly differentiated by PC2. The frappe analysis at K = 5 (Fig. S4B) indicates ancestry components corresponding to the Mozabite, Kalash, Hazara/Uygur, other Central/South Asia, and Europe groups. The three Middle East groups have varying amounts of the Europe, Mozabite, and Central/South Asia ancestry components. The three Italian groups are alone among European groups in having low amounts of the Mozabite ancestry component, possibly indicating gene flow across the Mediterranean. The Sardinians differ from continental European groups in lacking any Asian ancestry component, while the Russians and Adygei differ from other European groups in having appreciable amounts of the Hazara/Uygur and other Central/South Asia ancestry components, respectively, indicating more gene flow and/or ancestry with these groups (Fig. S4B).

One reason for the difference in results might be the context of their construction. Temples in Greece were frequently built upon sites that had been sacred for generations, reaching back into the Bronze Age at places like Thermon, where the later classical temples were built over the remains of Mycenaean era megaron. [21] There was the matter of historical tradition which meant that temples built in the archaic and classical periods might be built not only according to the cosmology of the time of construction, but also within the restraints of prior religious thought. The temples in Sicily were built in cities that, at the time of building, saw themselves as immigrants in a distant land. [22] Therefore there was no historical precedent to shape the construction of the temples. They were much more likely to be purely the products of seventh-, sixth- and fifth-century cosmology. The lack of prior foundations gave the Sicilian Greeks more freedom to express current thought in religious practice through their temples.

The self-identification of Sicilian Greeks as Greeks living overseas may have also made adherence to a Greek ideal more of an imperative to reassure both themselves and visitors from the homeland that their location made them no less Greek. It is interesting to note that Greek sanctuaries in Greece could be out in the hinterland tying territory to the city, while Sicilian temples were all built in urban or suburban sites. An ‘astronomical fingerprint’ may, along with other elements such as the architectural form and religious practice, have been part of a drive to prove the Hellenic character of a settlement. Hence, perhaps, the stronger results in Sicily than Greece. This could be testable by comparison with temple alignments in other locations like the Black Sea colonies or Hellenistic Asia. A lack of a similar adherence to astronomical orientation for temples in these regions would be a surprising result given the emphatic nature of the results in Sicily and Greece.

Bones, jewelry and weapons found in Egyptian desert may be the remains of Cambyses' army that vanished 2,500 years ago.

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

"We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus," Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.

According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.

After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an "oasis," which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again.

"A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear," wrote Herodotus.

A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander the Great made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle's confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.