Hasil untuk "Ancient history"

Marc Haber, M. Mezzavilla, Yali Xue et al.

Ancient DNA research is revealing a human history far more complex than that inferred from parsimonious models based on modern DNA. Here, we review some of the key events in the peopling of the world in the light of the findings of work on ancient DNA.

Melinda A. Yang, Xue-chun Fan, Bo Sun et al.

A genetic history of China The history of human movements into and within China has been difficult to determine solely from archaeological investigations or genetic studies of contemporary peoples. Yang et al. sequenced DNA from 26 individuals from 9500 to 300 years ago from locations within China. Analyses of these individuals, along with previously sequenced ancient individuals and present-day genomes representing global populations, show a split between ancient humans in northern and southern China. Neolithic northern Chinese individuals are closest to modern-day East Asians, whereas ancient individuals from southern China are most closely related to modern-day Southeast Asians and show an affinity to modern-day Austronesian populations. These results indicate that there was a southward movement and admixture of peoples during the Neolithic that gave rise to modern-day populations in East Asia. Science this issue p. 282 Ancient human genomes from China demonstrate a north–south Asian separation and that both populations moved southward over time. Human genetic history in East Asia is poorly understood. To clarify population relationships, we obtained genome-wide data from 26 ancient individuals from northern and southern East Asia spanning 9500 to 300 years ago. Genetic differentiation in this region was higher in the past than the present, which reflects a major episode of admixture involving northern East Asian ancestry spreading across southern East Asia after the Neolithic, thereby transforming the genetic ancestry of southern China. Mainland southern East Asian and Taiwan Strait island samples from the Neolithic show clear connections with modern and ancient individuals with Austronesian-related ancestry, which supports an origin in southern China for proto-Austronesians. Connections among Neolithic coastal groups from Siberia and Japan to Vietnam indicate that migration and gene flow played an important role in the prehistory of coastal Asia.

Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Brendan Shillingford et al.

Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy—the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions—for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations1. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian’s workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history. Ithaca—a deep neural network for textual restoration, geographical attribution and dating of ancient Greek inscriptions—collaboratively aids historians’ study of damaged texts.

A. Wohns, Yan Wong, Ben Jeffery et al.

The sequencing of modern and ancient genomes from around the world has revolutionised our understanding of human history and evolution1,2. However, the general problem of how best to characterise the full complexity of ancestral relationships from the totality of human genomic variation remains unsolved. Patterns of variation in each data set are typically analysed independently, and often using parametric models or data reduction techniques that cannot capture the full complexity of human ancestry3,4. Moreover, variation in sequencing technology5,6, data quality7 and in silico processing8,9, coupled with complexities of data scale10, limit the ability to integrate data sources. Here, we introduce a non-parametric approach to inferring human genealogical history that overcomes many of these challenges and enables us to build the largest genealogy of both modern and ancient humans yet constructed. The genealogy provides a lossless and compact representation of multiple datasets, addresses the challenges of missing and erroneous data, and benefits from using ancient samples to constrain and date relationships. Using simulations and empirical analyses, we demonstrate the power of the method to recover relationships between individuals and populations, as well as to identify descendants of ancient samples. Finally, we show how applying a simple non-parametric estimator of ancestor geographical location to the inferred genealogy recapitulates key events in human history. Our results demonstrate that whole-genome genealogies are a powerful means of synthesising genetic data and provide rich insights into human evolution.

Javier Larequi Fontaneda

Yan Benhammou, Erez Etzion, Yuval Gadot et al.

We present a novel underground imaging system that utilizes cosmic-ray muons to explore the subsurface environment at the City of David archaeological site in ancient Jerusalem. This report details the initial findings from measurements conducted at a large cistern, commonly called "Jeremiah's cistern" (referenced in Jeremiah 38:6). The system aims to locate and map hidden voids and structural anomalies within the overburden. Our primary outcome is the derivation of the angular ground depth, which serves as a proxy for understanding the integrated density distribution of the overburden. This work represents a significant interdisciplinary effort to deepen our understanding of this historically important site.

Kiwhan Song, Boyuan Chen, Max Simchowitz et al.

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a key technique for improving conditional generation in diffusion models, enabling more accurate control while enhancing sample quality. It is natural to extend this technique to video diffusion, which generates video conditioned on a variable number of context frames, collectively referred to as history. However, we find two key challenges to guiding with variable-length history: architectures that only support fixed-size conditioning, and the empirical observation that CFG-style history dropout performs poorly. To address this, we propose the Diffusion Forcing Transformer (DFoT), a video diffusion architecture and theoretically grounded training objective that jointly enable conditioning on a flexible number of history frames. We then introduce History Guidance, a family of guidance methods uniquely enabled by DFoT. We show that its simplest form, vanilla history guidance, already significantly improves video generation quality and temporal consistency. A more advanced method, history guidance across time and frequency further enhances motion dynamics, enables compositional generalization to out-of-distribution history, and can stably roll out extremely long videos. Project website: https://boyuan.space/history-guidance

F. Welker, M. Collins, Jessica A. Thomas et al.

Xuemei Tang, Zekun Deng, Qi Su et al.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays a pivotal role in the realm of Digital Humanities (DH) and serves as the cornerstone for advancing the structural analysis of historical and cultural heritage texts. This is particularly true for the domains of named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). In our commitment to expediting ancient history and culture, we present the ``Chinese Historical Information Extraction Corpus''(CHisIEC). CHisIEC is a meticulously curated dataset designed to develop and evaluate NER and RE tasks, offering a resource to facilitate research in the field. Spanning a remarkable historical timeline encompassing data from 13 dynasties spanning over 1830 years, CHisIEC epitomizes the extensive temporal range and text heterogeneity inherent in Chinese historical documents. The dataset encompasses four distinct entity types and twelve relation types, resulting in a meticulously labeled dataset comprising 14,194 entities and 8,609 relations. To establish the robustness and versatility of our dataset, we have undertaken comprehensive experimentation involving models of various sizes and paradigms. Additionally, we have evaluated the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of tasks related to ancient Chinese history. The dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/tangxuemei1995/CHisIEC}.

Robert van Leeuwen

The early history of string theory is marked by a shift from strong interaction physics to quantum gravity. The first string models and associated theoretical framework were formulated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of the S-matrix program for the strong interactions. In the mid-1970s, the models were reinterpreted as a potential theory unifying the four fundamental forces. This paper provides a historical analysis of how string theory was developed out of S-matrix physics, aiming to clarify how modern string theory, as a theory detached from experimental data, grew out of an S-matrix program that was strongly dependent upon observable quantities. Surprisingly, the theoretical practice of physicists already turned away from experiment before string theory was recast as a potential unified quantum gravity theory. With the formulation of dual resonance models (the "hadronic string theory"), physicists were able to determine almost all of the models' parameters on the basis of theoretical reasoning. It was this commitment to "non-arbitrariness", i.e., a lack of free parameters in the theory, that initially drove string theorists away from experimental input, and not the practical inaccessibility of experimental data in the context of quantum gravity physics. This is an important observation when assessing the role of experimental data in string theory.

Pengyu Wang, Zhichen Ren

Automatic analysis for modern Chinese has greatly improved the accuracy of text mining in related fields, but the study of ancient Chinese is still relatively rare. Ancient text division and lexical annotation are important parts of classical literature comprehension, and previous studies have tried to construct auxiliary dictionary and other fused knowledge to improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a framework for ancient Chinese Word Segmentation and Part-of-Speech Tagging that makes a twofold effort: on the one hand, we try to capture the wordhood semantics; on the other hand, we re-predict the uncertain samples of baseline model by introducing external knowledge. The performance of our architecture outperforms pre-trained BERT with CRF and existing tools such as Jiayan.

Doreen Fraser, Maria Papageorgiou

The formulation of a measurement theory for relativistic quantum field theory (QFT) has recently been an active area of research. In contrast to the asymptotic measurement framework that was enshrined in QED, the new proposals aim to supply a measurement framework for measurements in local spacetime regions. This paper surveys episodes in the history of quantum theory that contemporary researchers have identified as precursors to their own work and discusses how they laid the groundwork for current approaches to local measurement theory for QFT.

K. Glatter, Paul Finkelman

During the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague or Black Death killed more than one third of Europe or 25 million people. Those afflicted died quickly and horribly from an unseen menace, spiking high fevers with suppurative buboes (swellings). Its causative agent is Yersinia pestis, creating recurrent plague cycles from the Bronze Age into modern-day California and Mongolia. Plague remains endemic in Madagascar, Congo, and Peru. This history of medicine review highlights plague events across the centuries. Transmission is by fleas carried on rats, although new theories include via human body lice and infected grain. We discuss symptomatology and treatment options. Pneumonic plague can be weaponized for bioterrorism, highlighting the importance of understanding its clinical syndromes. Carriers of recessive familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) mutations have natural immunity against Y. pestis. During the Black Death, Jews were blamed for the bubonic plague, perhaps because Jews carried FMF mutations and died at lower plague rates than Christians. Blaming minorities for epidemics echoes across history into our current coronavirus pandemic and provides insightful lessons for managing and improving its outcomes.

Mark Lipson, I. Ribot, Swapan Mallick et al.

Our knowledge of ancient human population structure in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly prior to the advent of food production, remains limited. Here we report genome-wide DNA data from four children—two of whom were buried approximately 8,000 years ago and two 3,000 years ago—from Shum Laka (Cameroon), one of the earliest known archaeological sites within the probable homeland of the Bantu language group 1 – 11 . One individual carried the deeply divergent Y chromosome haplogroup A00, which today is found almost exclusively in the same region 12 , 13 . However, the genome-wide ancestry profiles of all four individuals are most similar to those of present-day hunter-gatherers from western Central Africa, which implies that populations in western Cameroon today—as well as speakers of Bantu languages from across the continent—are not descended substantially from the population represented by these four people. We infer an Africa-wide phylogeny that features widespread admixture and three prominent radiations, including one that gave rise to at least four major lineages deep in the history of modern humans. Genome-wide ancestry profiles of four individuals, dating to 8,000 and 3,000 years before present, from the archaeological site of Shum Laka (Cameroon) shed light on the deep population history of sub-Saharan Africa.

Frédéric Delsuc, M. Kuch, G. Gibb et al.

Living sloths represent two distinct lineages of small-sized mammals that independently evolved arboreality from terrestrial ancestors. The six extant species are the survivors of an evolutionary radiation marked by the extinction of large terrestrial forms at the end of the Quaternary. Until now, sloth evolutionary history has mainly been reconstructed from phylogenetic analyses of morphological characters. Here, we used ancient DNA methods to successfully sequence 10 extinct sloth mitogenomes encompassing all major lineages. This includes the iconic continental ground sloths Megatherium, Megalonyx, Mylodon, and Nothrotheriops and the smaller endemic Caribbean sloths Parocnus and Acratocnus. Phylogenetic analyses identify eight distinct lineages grouped in three well-supported clades, whose interrelationships are markedly incongruent with the currently accepted morphological topology. We show that recently extinct Caribbean sloths have a single origin but comprise two highly divergent lineages that are not directly related to living two-fingered sloths, which instead group with Mylodon. Moreover, living three-fingered sloths do not represent the sister group to all other sloths but are nested within a clade of extinct ground sloths including Megatherium, Megalonyx, and Nothrotheriops. Molecular dating also reveals that the eight newly recognized sloth families all originated between 36 and 28 million years ago (mya). The early divergence of recently extinct Caribbean sloths around 35 mya is consistent with the debated GAARlandia hypothesis postulating the existence at that time of a biogeographic connection between northern South America and the Greater Antilles. This new molecular phylogeny has major implications for reinterpreting sloth morphological evolution, biogeography, and diversification history.

C. Buck, Koenraad van Doorslaer, A. Peretti et al.

Polyomaviruses are a family of DNA tumor viruses that are known to infect mammals and birds. To investigate the deeper evolutionary history of the family, we used a combination of viral metagenomics, bioinformatics, and structural modeling approaches to identify and characterize polyomavirus sequences associated with fish and arthropods. Analyses drawing upon the divergent new sequences indicate that polyomaviruses have been gradually co-evolving with their animal hosts for at least half a billion years. Phylogenetic analyses of individual polyomavirus genes suggest that some modern polyomavirus species arose after ancient recombination events involving distantly related polyomavirus lineages. The improved evolutionary model provides a useful platform for developing a more accurate taxonomic classification system for the viral family Polyomaviridae.

S. Marciniak, G. Perry

مجید طامه

Introduction One of the most important tools for studying the history and culture of any nation or tribe is to recognize the language and linguistic materials of that nation. Linguistic data can be divided into written and unwritten or oral. The amount of written data has constantly fluctuated in different historical periods for various reasons, and it is sometimes much and sometimes very little. Unwritten linguistic data, although much more than written data, do not receive much especial attention because they are not written down. For the unwritten linguistic data, we can mention songs, poems, proverbs, stories and in general what is related to oral literature. Place names or geographical names are other linguistic data that are often unwritten and usually older than others. Apart from being historically and culturally valuable, these place names can also be considered in linguistic studies, and by examining them, various information from different linguistic and non-linguistic aspects can be obtained. The science that examines place names from a historical, geographical, and especially linguistic point of view is called toponymy. The study of toponyms is important since it can provide valuable information in recognizing the anthropological and cultural characteristics of ethnic groups and it can also explain the role of social, geographical, ethnic, political, religious, etc. observations in naming places.  In general, there are three main characteristics in any toponym or geographical name: 1) geographical location, 2) historical background, 3) linguistic structure and concept. Thus, toponymy interacts with other sciences such as geography, history, archeology, linguistics and anthropology. In general, based on the type and species, the place names are divided into the following categories: 1) oykonyms or place names that refer to residential areas. 2) hydronyms or place names that are used to name geographical features related to water, such as rud ‘river’, čašme ‘spring’, daryâ ‘sea’, etc.  3) uronyms or place names that are used to name the elevation of the earth, such as kuh ‘mountain’, tappe ‘hill’, dašt ‘plain’, etc. (Refahi Alamdari, 2015, p. 98; Ahdian and Bakhtiari, 2009, p. 185).   Methodology In the study of languages and dialects, place names are of special importance, because these names are usually taken from the local languages of the same region and are part of the spiritual and cultural heritage of the people living in those areas. Undoubtedly, their scientific study, in addition to their linguistic value, is very effective in recognizing the historical identity of the ethnic groups living in those areas and in understanding the way of thinking and view of the people who coined and used these names. Most of the toponyms are oykonyms or the names of residential areas. Some researches have been published about oykonyms so far, but most of these studies are dedicated to the etymology and derivation of these words and the basic words seen in the complex oykonyms structure have been less studied. In this article, it is tried to study and analyze similar basic words in oykonyms which are related to nature and natural phenomena. Certainly, the analysis of common words in oykonyms is as valuable as the study of affixes and topoformants used in these words, but so far they have not been properly studied. So far, no independent work on the subject of this article, i.e., words related to nature and natural phenomena in Iranian oykonyms, has been published.   Discussion From the very beginning of creation, man has been in close contact with nature and its phenomena and components, and this deep connection and the impact that nature has on human life, and sometimes it is beyond his understanding, has led him to sanctify some components of nature. This sacredness is mainly focused on the sky and what is happening in it on the one hand, and on the other hand it is concentrated on the earth and its related issues. The earth and its natural features were also sacred in the human mind, and sometimes the inaccessible or lesser-known parts of the earth were known as the place of the gods. From the beginning, these attributes led to the use of the words related to heaven and earth in naming new places where human beings lived. Although the earth and the sky did not have that initial sanctity in the human mind, because human life was completely dependent on them, the use of the words of these two areas in new names continued and is still common today. In Zoroastrianism, the sky is the first tangible creature of Ohrmazd. In most Zoroastrian texts it is stated that the sky is made of stone, but due to the brightness of the sky, it is also said it was made of metal. The sky was mostly considered to have four bases or divisions, as follows: the star, the moon, the sun, and the infinite light bases. Of course, under the influence of Babylonian astronomy, Zoroastrians have sometimes considered seven levels for the sky (Tafazzoli, 2004, p. 365). In the Islamic era, the sky has been considered as a kind of sanctity and in some verses of the Quran, the sky has been used to mean the spiritual world and the kingdom of heaven (Mojtahed Shabestari, 1995,p. 363). The most important feature of the earth attracted human attention is its fertility, which is why it is sanctified in human thought. In Zoroastrianism, the earth was divided into seven parts or countries and apparently had three floors. Also, in various parts of Bundahiš, various topics have been mentioned about the creation of the earth, mountains and rivers and their duties (Afifi, 2004, p. 545-547). In naming modern Iranian oykonyms, both the name of the sky and the names of the objects and phenomena seen in the sky have been used, as well as the name of the earth and the natural features on it. Of course, the use of words related to earth is much more common in oykonyms. This kind of naming has a long history, and it should not be considered as a new topic. In ancient Iran, naming places with the names of words related to nature was common, but because we do not have many texts, we have little evidence in this regard. In the Zoroastrian beliefs of ancient Iran, nature and its components were sacred and were under the protection of God. Naturally, such beliefs could influence the naming of their places of residence. Unfortunately, due to the shortage of written materials from ancient Iran, this can not be sufficiently and thoroughly studied, but the few oykonyms left in the written sources, both primary and secondary, show that such names were common in ancient Iran. Unfortunately, in the surviving texts from ancient Iran, there are very few oykonyms in which the words related to the sky are used. Meanwhile, the name of the sky has no evidence in the oykonyms, but there is evidence of the name of celestial bodies. One of the oykonyms in which the name of one of the celestial bodies is mentioned is the word pātišuvari- ‘the people of Pātišuvar’. The oykonym Pātišuvar is composed of the two components pātiš ‘towards, in front of’ and uvar- ‘sun’ and on the whole it means ‘lying towards the sun’ (Tavernier, 2007, p. 29). Apparently, the place name Padišxwārgar in the Sassanid era is a remnant of this form of Old Persian (Schmitt, 2014: 233). In modern Iranian oykonyms, the use of words related to the field of nature is quite common, but even today, words related to land and natural features on it have a higher frequency in making toponyms. These words are used both in derivation and in combination with topoformants in Iranian oykonyms. This research examined the oykonyms made with words related to nature in two parts: words related to the sky, celestial bodies and phenomena, and words related to the earth and natural features on it.    Conclusion In Iranian oykonyms, both complex and derivative, there are common basic words that can be divided into different categories. Among the common basic words in Iranian oykonyms, we can mention the words of the field of nature. The use of the natural words in toponyms have a long history, and it can generally be classified into two areas: sky and earth. The frequency and use of these words in oykonyms are different and in addition to Persian words, they also include words from local languages. These words are used in different ways in oykonyms and different features are seen in their construction. One of the interesting features in these oykonyms is the accompanying of two words from the field of nature next to each other, which sometimes may even belong to two different languages in Iran. For example, in the oykonym Âsmân-Bulâghi, the word Âsmân ‘sky’, which is a Persian word related to the field of the sky, is accompanied by the word Bulâghi ‘spring’, which is a Turkish word from the field of words related to the earth. In general, words related to the two fields of sky and earth are morphologically associated with a lot of names, adjectives, and numbers, and semantically with different categories, and can form a single oykonym.

Gustavo Rodrigues Rocha, Dean Rickles, Florian J. Boge

It will be presented in this chapter a historical account of the consistent histories interpretation of quantum mechanics based on primary and secondary literature. Firstly, the formalism of the consistent histories approach will be outlined. Secondly, the works by Robert Griffiths and Roland Omnès will be discussed. Griffiths' seminal 1984 paper, the first physicist to have proposed a consistent-histories interpretation of quantum mechanics, followed by Omnès' 1990 paper, were instrumental to the consistent-histories model based on Boolean logic. Thirdly, Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle's steps to their own version of consistent-histories approach, motivated by a cosmological perspective, will then be described and evaluated. Gell-Mann and Hartle understood that spontaneous decoherence could path the way to a concrete physical model to Griffiths' consistent histories. Moreover, the collective biography of these figures will be put in the context of the role played by the Santa Fe Institute, co-founded by Gell-Mann in 1984 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Hartle is also a member of the external faculty.

Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Noah A. Smith

We introduce a technique for improving document-level language models (LM) by leveraging "ancient history": text that is outside the LM's current context window. We learn an auxiliary function to select spans from the ancient history which can help the LM to predict future text. The selected text spans are then copied directly into the LM's context window, replacing less predictive spans. This method can improve perplexity of pretrained LMs with no updates to the LM's own parameters. We further observe that an auxiliary function trained in a specific textual domain like Wikipedia will also work in a substantially different domain such as scientific publications. With this technique we see a 7 percent perplexity reduction on Wikipedia articles, and a 12 percent perplexity reduction on scientific texts.