anthropology – आवारा मुसाफिर

Human-evolution story rewritten by fresh data and more computing power

May 19, 2023910 Views

Humans did not emerge from a single region of Africa, suggests a powerful modelling study. Rather, our ancestors moved and intermingled for millennia The widely held idea that modern-day humans originated from a single region of Africa is being challenged. Models using a vast amount of genomic data suggest that humans arose from multiple ancestral populations around the continent. These ancient populations — which lived more than one million years ago — would have all been the same hominin species but genetically slightly different. The models supporting this theory rely on new software and genomic-sequencing data from current African and Eurasian populations, as well as Neanderthal remains. Researchers published the results on 17 May in Nature. The study contributes more evide...

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Rare African script offers clues to the evolution of writing

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

January 12, 2022552 Views

The world’s very first invention of writing took place over 5000 years ago in the Middle East, before it was reinvented in China and Central America. Today, almost all human activities—from education to political systems and computer code—rely on this technology. But despite its impact on daily life, we know little about how writing evolved in its earliest years. With so few sites of origin, the first traces of writing are fragmentary or missing altogether. In a study just published in Current Anthropology, a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, showed that writing very quickly becomes ‘compressed’ for efficient reading and writing. The first page of Vai manuscript MS17817 from the British Library. Photo: The British ...