Nearly one-third of Native American genes come from west Eurasian people linked to the Middle East and Europe, rather than entirely from East Asians as previously thought

 I highlighted this back in 2013 but  it seems to be gaining more traction now.

"Great Surprise"—Native Americans Have West Eurasian Origins

Oldest human genome reveals less of an East Asian ancestry than thought.

ByBrian Handwerk

November 22, 2013

"These results were a great surprise to us," said study co-author and ancient-DNA specialist Eske Willerslev

, of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

"I hadn't expected anything like this. A genome related to present-day western Eurasian populations and modern Native Americans as well was really puzzling in the beginning. How could this happen?"

Prevailing theories suggest that Native Americans are descended from a group of East Asians who crossed the Bering Sea via a land bridge perhaps 16,500 years ago, though some sites may evidence an earlier arrival. (See "Siberian, Native American Languages Linked—A First [2008].")

"This study changes this idea because it shows that a significant minority of Native American ancestry actually derives not from East Asia but from a people related to present-day western Eurasians," Willerslev said.

the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought

 Here is some interesting reading:

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/22/world/webb-telescope-massive-early-galaxies-scn/index.html

For those who think the science is ever settled...

FTA: The galaxies are so massive that they conflict with 99% of models representing early galaxies in the universe, which means scientists need to rethink how galaxies formed and evolved. 

... Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”

...

What’s funny is we have all these things we hope to learn from James Webb and this was nowhere near the top of the list. We’ve found something we never thought to ask the universe — and it happened way faster than I thought, but here we are.”

CDC data. Total Deaths in the US. What did you expect?

In the midst of the Corona Virus nationwide shutdown with social distancing it may help to look at some data which may give a different impression than we have previously thought.

The CDC tracks total deaths in the US and also separately reports the Pneumonia and Influenza deaths and as a percentage of total deaths.  The link is: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2

The graphic highlights the impact of a severe flu season as happened in the beginning of 2018. 

The raw data is even more informative.

With a country of 350 million, I would expect at least 3.5 million deaths per year. In fact recently all cause deaths have been around 2.8 million people per year.  This works out to about 54000 deaths per week on the average. A new pandemic disease should have a noticeable affect on these numbers as was seen for the severe flu in early 2018 when deaths per week reached 67495 at its peak.

The CDC data reported at the 'view chart data' link gives total deaths each week since 2013

Interestingly, data for the weeks 3 to 11  of 2020 show FEWER deaths per week in 2020 than any year since 2016. One might expect social distancing and other recent social changes to impact deaths from other causes as well which might show up in the overall death statistics. For the first 9 weeks of this year (2020), there are more than 2500 fewer deaths per week on average compared to the year before. For the most recent two weeks reported the differences are 10000 and 20000 fewer deaths per week. (I'm willing to wait on the possibility of incomplete reports but the CDC data already waits a full 2 weeks before reporting their initial numbers.)

I would be interested in a breakdown of all causes to see where this significant change is coming from.  Perhaps fewer traffic fatalities? fewer deaths during elective surgery? All sorts of possibilities beyond the impact on infectious disease transmission.

Raw numbers:

CDC		All cause mortality in the US
	Year	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019		2020		difference
Week										from 2019
1		61737	55788	59763	66134	58287		58822		-535
2		61141	55525	60980	67495	58350		58670		-320
3		58628	55182	59293	64647	58193		56942		1251
4		57269	55606	58047	62780	57831		56111		1720
5		57284	54896	58432	60974	58122		54926		3196
6		56420	55106	59038	61110	58489		55054		3435
7		56348	55785	58479	59779	57915		53647		4268
8		55668	54873	58288	57793	57856		52985		4871
9		55732	55875	57256	56692	57914		51721		6193
10		55272	56112	57477	57093	58487		47917		10570
11		54262	54462	56656	56326	57869		37641		20228
data as of 14 Mar 2020 as reported on 26 Mar 2020
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2						Something to think about.		What do you think?

Previously Presumed

Getting away from TPT. Here is an interesting article and a new (to me) variation on TPT. FTA: "For a long time, experts believed it was fake. But in a surprise twist, researchers are now saying that this 900-year-old book is the real thing after all." --- 'It’s another example of ancient writings come to life , the oldest on our continent. Other documents previously presumed to be inauthentic could need reexamination—in which case, we may (and almost certainly do) have a lot to learn about our past." Available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Maya-Archaeology-Featuring-Grolier-Codex/dp/0985931701

Are these Danish cities older TPT?

FTA: "Urban development is one of those areas that's very difficult to pin down because it's at the border between archaeology and history—

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-danish-cities-older-previously-thought.html#jCp

"Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and look again. And I think that's the case here," 

More water into the earth's interior TPT

The Earth is eating its oceans: 

As Earth's tectonic plates dive beneath one another, they drag three times as much water into the planet's interior as previously thought.

Those are the results of a new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature.

FTA: The water cycle at subduction zones remains poorly understood.

Even Colder than Scientists Thought.

Even with CO2 levels exceeding 400ppm and left wing politicians frantic to restrict energy use and human freedom, the Antarctic region continues to show record low temperatures  as low as any possible even at 280 ppm CO2.  Interesting reading.   And commentary at WUWT.

An inconvenient truth.

Here is also a link to the primary report (which may have limited time free access.)

FTA:  Plain Language Summary The lowest measured air temperature on Earth is 89.2 °C ( 129 F) on 23 July 1983, observed at Vostok Station in Antarctica (Turner et al., 2009, https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD012104). However, satellite data collected during the Antarctic polar night during 2004–2016 reveal a broad region of the high East Antarctic Plateau above Vostok that regularly reaches snow surface temperatures of 90 °C and below. These occur in shallow topographic depressions near the highest part of the ice sheet, at 3,800 to 4,050-m elevation. Comparisons with nearby automated weather stations suggest that air temperatures during these events are near 94 ± 4 °C or about 138 F. Ultracold conditions (below 90 °C) occur more frequently when the Antarctic polar vortex is strong. This temperature appears to be about as low as it is possible to reach, even under clear skies and very dry conditions, because heat radiating from the cold clear air is nearly equal to the heat radiating from the bitterly cold snow surface.

“More Complex Than Previously Thought”

Interesting blog posting on the idea of science and new discoveries.  Usually 'More' seldom 'less' complex TPT.

FTA: The pursuit of science is an interesting beast. It’s awesome to distill our world down to a basic set of principles…laws, rules, and theorems that explain, or at the very least describe, how things work. On the other hand, the more you dig into things, the more interesting and surprising they can be. Previous notions end up being overturned, or perhaps even more frequently, the accepted phenomenon turns out to be “more complex than previously thought.”

...

New discovery throws light on mystery of pyramids' construction

New insights into ancient Egypt.

FTA...  the job of hauling into place the huge blocks of stone used to build the monuments may have been completed more quickly than previously thought.

Are these Danish cities older than previously thought?

Rethinking common knowledge is not only for the Americas.


FTA: "Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and look again. And I think that's the case here,"

  Summary article about this original citation:

 Mads Runge et al. The origins of Odense – new aspects of early urbanisation in southern Scandinavia, Danish Journal of Archaeology (2018). DOI: 10.1080/21662282.2018.1475891 

LiDAR Scans Reveal Maya Were Far Bigger and More Complex Than Thought

FTA: Discover  summary of a Science paper

:  “It’s amazing. It’s so new. This is the kind of thing that no one ever suspected to show up,” says Michael Coe, a Yale University archaeologist and Maya scholar who’s not involved with the team. “It’s a major discovery.”

my comment: Looking back through my links on this blog, this has been a recurring theme recently.  It takes awhile before things change from TPT to common knowledge.

Aztec human sacrifices were far more widespread and grisly TPT

FTA: In 2015 archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found a gruesome 'trophy rack' near the site of the Templo Mayor,

FTA: Now, they say the find was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the 'skull tower' was just a small part of a massive display of skulls known as Huey Tzompantli...

Another TPT story without using the words TPT !! " every textbook has to be rewritten"

Laser scanning reveals 'lost' ancient Mexican city 'had as many buildings as Manhattan'

: “Everywhere you point the lidar instrument you find new stuff, and that is because we know so little about the archaeological universe in the Americas right now,” he said. “Right now every textbook has to be rewritten, and two years from now[they’re] going to have to be rewritten again.”

Sprawling Maya network... scale greater TPT

Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Maya ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough.


...He believes the scale and population density has been "grossly underestimated and could in fact be three or four times greater than previously thought".

other quiotes
"I think this is one of the greatest advances in over 150 years of Maya archaeology,"

"Everything is turned on its head," 

See the article at the link.

Climate Change not as threatening as PT

Climate change poses less of an immediate threat to the planet than previously thought because scientists got their modelling wrong.  



See the article.

...He added that President Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement would not be significant because “The White House’s position doesn’t have much impact on US emissions".

Ancient farms had very different origins TPT

FTA:

Dramatic new hypothesis could change the way we understand human history.

... people began altering their environments for food and shelter about 30,000 years earlier than we thought

..

There is also evidence that, as soon as humans reached South America, they took up residence in the Amazon and began farming. Often these ancient farms evolved into highly-developed networks of cities like those of the Maya.

...

Check out both links.

History of Zero older TPT

An ancient text called the Bakhshali manuscript has bumped zero’s origin story back by 500 years

FTA: '“But the creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dating-ancient-indian-text-gives-new-timeline-history-zero-180964896/#Pj7G7v4MFBGPvVSh.99

'Rewriting the History of Math'

Cool:  An entire article fitting for this blog but without the use of TPT!

FTA:   a  3,700-year-old clay tablet has proven that the Babylonians developed trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks.

...The true meaning of the tablet has eluded experts until now...

The Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived around 120BC, has long been regarded as the father of trigonometry,

...The mathematical world is only waking up to the fact that this ancient but very sophisticated mathematical culture has much to teach us.”

This new study is published in Historia Mathematica.

Start codons in DNA may be more numerous than previously thought

FTA: "We kind of all collectively asked ourselves: had anyone ever looked?" said Hecht. A further review of available literature on the topic indicated that the answer was no.

A good point for those who think that 'Science is settled'.  If its settled, it's not science.

Sometimes, you have to ask the question..."What if our understanding is wrong?"  !!


More FTA: "We thought we knew the rules, but it turns out there's a whole other level we need to learn about. The grammar of DNA might be even more sophisticated than we imagined."


and the original source:  

1. Ariel Hecht Jeff Glasgow Paul R. Jaschke Lukmaan A. Bawazer Matthew S. Munson Jennifer R. Cochran Drew Endy Marc Salit. Measurements of translation initiation from all 64 codons in E. coli. Nucleic Acids Research, 2017 DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkx070

The leaning tower of San Francisco sinking faster than previously known.

A new formulation...' perhaps faster than previously known'...  What an ambiguous way to say this.


The leaning tower of San Francisco sinking faster than previously known.


FTA: ... "The luxury high-rise has sunk about 16 inches and is also tilting. Engineers have estimated the building is still sinking at a rate of about 1-inch per year."