Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The first recorded world-historical pandemic took place in the Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran, as well as neighboring areas such as Arabia, 541- 750 CE. It began during the reign of Justinian (r.527 – 565) and continued during the rise of Islam and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in […]
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Genetic History
Ancient Nomadic Scythians Found to be Ethnically Diverse
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The more genetic history that is done, the more it is clear that ancient ethnonyms, the names given supposed ethnicities, put a variety of peoples under a single rubric. I talked recently about how the Phoenicians, long thought to be what we would now call Lebanese, were actually a multi-ethnic […]
Early Farming in Middle East, Sometimes Matriarchal, Spread through Learning, not Conquest
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A new study by Dilek Koptekin et al., a Swiss-Turkish team, has appeared in Science that combines archeological and genetics research to shed new light on the emergence of farming in the Middle East in the transition from hunting and gathering called the Neolithic Revolution. The authors find that big […]
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