Population mixture is an important process in biology. We present a suite of methods for learning about population mixtures, implemented in a software package called ADMIXTOOLS, that support formal tests for whether mixture occurred and make it possible to infer proportions and dates of mixture. We also describe the development of a new single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array consisting of 629,433 sites with clearly documented ascertainment that was specifically designed for population genetic analyses and that we genotyped in 934 individuals from 53 diverse populations. To illustrate the methods, we give a number of examples that provide new insights about the history of human admixture. The most striking finding is a clear signal of admixture into northern Europe, with one ancestral population related to present-day Basques and Sardinians and the other related to present-day populations of northeast Asia and the Americas. This likely reflects a history of admixture between Neolithic migrants and the indigenous Mesolithic population of Europe, consistent with recent analyses of ancient bones from Sweden and the sequencing of the genome of the Tyrolean “Iceman.”
The ancient mural paintings unearthed in China are precious world cultural heritages, which record the historical information of various eras and serve as valuable image materials for studying ancient Chinese society. The elements of the murals include figures, carriages, flowers, birds, and auspicious clouds. The digital research on these elements can better help us understand history and culture. In this paper, we have established a large-scale target detection dataset for mural elements excavated from ancient China, featuring a rich variety of labeled sample categories that span across different historical periods and regions, which provides significant value for the study of ancient Chinese history. Meanwhile, to address the defects present in the mural paintings, we have developed an adaptive random erasing augmentation algorithm, which forces the model to learn more comprehensive feature information, enabling it to adapt to the defective scenarios of the mural paintings. Moreover, we have created a target semantic feature extraction model for elements of ancient Chinese murals, which utilizes contextual information and residual attention mechanism to capture the semantic information, thereby enhancing the accuracy of element target detection. Finally, we have conducted a comparative analysis of the detection results of our proposed method with several other state-of-the-art target detection algorithms on the created mural dataset, and the visualization results validated the superiority of our proposed method.
Este trabalho analisa a recepção das estátuas antigas nas sociedades árabe-islâmicas considerando seis estudos de caso que evidenciam seu valor e vigência, da época medieval até os dias atuais: a construção de uma estátua faraônica, de Ramsés II, no Cairo, durante o governo de Nasser, e sua recente transferência, entre as massas, ao novo museu arqueológico; a descoberta de uma estátua de Dario, em 1972, em Susa e seu papel simbólico como peça de destaque do museu arqueológico de Teerã; a estátua moderna de Zenóbia e sua exibição em Damasco, no ano de 2015, no contexto da guerra civil na Síria; a construção de uma estátua dedicada a Kahina, em 2003, no território argelino de Baghai e seu incêndio, em 2016, resultante de conflitos políticos e religiosos entre comunidades (árabes e berberes) e países (Argélia e França); o vídeo de destruição do Museu Arqueológico de Mossul gravado pelos militantes do DAESH em 2015; a exibição inaugural do Abu Dabi Louvre Museum, em 2017, com uma destacada presença da estatuária clássica. A estátua desempenha um papel determinante na reafirmação identitária de certos coletivos ou regimes políticos, e seu significado se constrói tanto a partir de discursos historiográficos ancorados no suposto rechaço, por parte do Islã, às representações figuradas quanto pelo conjunto de respostas que a estatuária suscita. Venerada ou destruída, a estátua forma parte de uma onda iconoclasta atual e que ressoa sobre os debates globais sobre o patrimônio, as identidades, sua representatividade e a revisão da História.
The marriage of Germanus, nephew of Emperor Justin I (r. 518–527), to Matasuintha, former Gothic queen and granddaughter of Theoderic the Great (r. 475–526), in late 549 or early 550, was a significant yet often overlooked moment in the later stages of the Gothic War. Scholars generally interpret the marriage as a pragmatic alliance shaped by immediate strategic concerns – either a political manoeuvre by Justinian or a personal initiative by Germanus following his appointment as commander in Italy. This article revisits that assumption by exploring three related questions. First, did the marriage and military appointment signal a reconciliation between Justinian and Germanus, or a calculated attempt by the emperor to stabilize a deteriorating political situation? Second, how did their relationship evolve in the years leading up to the union, particularly after Theodora’s death in 548? Finally, more speculatively, was Germanus’ earlier decision to marry his daughter to the general John in 545 connected to his own dynastic ambitions?
Ancient history, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Ancient manuscripts are the primary source of ancient linguistic corpora. However, many ancient manuscripts exhibit duplications due to unintentional repeated publication or deliberate forgery. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, include counterfeit fragments, whereas Oracle Bones (OB) contain both republished materials and fabricated specimens. Identifying ancient manuscript duplicates is of great significance for both archaeological curation and ancient history study. In this work, we design a progressive OB duplicate discovery framework that combines unsupervised low-level keypoints matching with high-level text-centric content-based matching to refine and rank the candidate OB duplicates with semantic awareness and interpretability. We compare our model with state-of-the-art content-based image retrieval and image matching methods, showing that our model yields comparable recall performance and the highest simplified mean reciprocal rank scores for both Top-5 and Top-15 retrieval results, and with significantly accelerated computation efficiency. We have discovered over 60 pairs of new OB duplicates in real-world deployment, which were missed by domain experts for decades. Code, model and real-world results are available at: https://github.com/cszhangLMU/OBD-Finder/.
Infinitesimals have seen ups and downs in their tumultuous history. In the 18th century, d'Alembert set the tone by describing infinitesimals as chimeras. Some adversaries of infinitesimals, including Moigno and Connes, picked up on the term. We highlight the work of Cauchy, Noël, Poisson and Riemann. We also chronicle reactions by Moigno, Lamarle and Cantor, and signal the start of a revival with Peano.
This paper presents a Logits-Constrained (LC) framework for Ancient Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER), evaluated on the EvaHan 2025 benchmark. Our two-stage model integrates GujiRoBERTa for contextual encoding and a differentiable decoding mechanism to enforce valid BMES label transitions. Experiments demonstrate that LC improves performance over traditional CRF and BiLSTM-based approaches, especially in high-label or large-data settings. We also propose a model selection criterion balancing label complexity and dataset size, providing practical guidance for real-world Ancient Chinese NLP tasks.
Maria Assunta Potenza, M. Montagnani, L. Santacroce
et al.
Ginseng was the most revered of the herbs in ancient times in China, Korea, Japan, America. Ginseng was discovered over 5000 years ago in the mountains of Manchuria, China. References to ginseng are found in books dating back more than two millennia. It is revered by the Chinese people as it is considered a herb for everything use and therefore for a wide range of diseases (currently its Latin name derived from the Greek panacea, meanings, that is, for everything). So, it was used exclusively by the Chinese Emperor's, and they were willing to pay the price without problems. Increasing its fame, ginseng brought a flourishing international trade that allowed Korea to supply China with silk and medicines in exchange for wild ginseng and later along with what grows in America.
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 https://github.com/tangxuemei1995/CHisIEC.
Carlos Alberto Torres Montes de Oca, José Eduardo Rosas Valencia, Oswaldo Aldair Pérez Jarquín
Many historic buildings have symmetry in their geometric configuration. The objective of this research is to denote the application of numerical-vector succession in the structural analysis of historical masonry buildings, with arches and symmetrical systems, including mathematical processes in ancient graphic analysis, emphasizing the importance of loads in the structural stability. We based the analysis on three fundamental stages: recognition of the construction system of the heritage object, geometric discretization of the system and vector analysis under different physical considerations. Hence, the thrust lines are affected by the loads, boundary conditions and history of structural behaviour. Numerical and computational tools offer faster and more accurate graphic analysis processes.
Many historic buildings have symmetry in their geometric configuration. The objective of this research is to denote the application of numerical-vector succession in the structural analysis of historical masonry buildings, with arches and symmetrical systems, including mathematical processes in ancient graphic analysis, emphasizing the importance of loads in the structural stability. We based the analysis on three fundamental stages: recognition of the construction system of the heritage object, geometric discretization of the system and vector analysis under different physical considerations. Hence, the thrust lines are affected by the loads, boundary conditions and history of structural behaviour. Numerical and computational tools offer faster and more accurate graphic analysis processes.
Mirela Džehverović, Amela Pilav, Belma Jusić
et al.
Numerous archaeological sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina represent a historical heritage and testify to the rich cultural, social, and political life of medieval Bosnia. Bobovac, the capital of the Bosnian Kingdom after King Tvrtko I's coronation in 1377, featured a royal complex with a palace, church, and fortification. Recent molecular-genetic research on skeletal remains from Bobovac aims to uncover medieval ancestors' customs and genetic origins. Fifteen well-preserved teeth samples from Bobovac were processed. STR amplification employed PowerPlex® Fusion and Investigator® 24plex QS Kits, with Y-STR profiles generated using the PowerPlex® Y23 System. Fourteen partial autosomal STR profiles were obtained, enabling sex determination and kinship analysis. STR amplification success varied due to ancient DNA degradation, with larger loci showing lower amplification rates. Kinship analysis confirmed appropriate marker selection, demonstrating high reliability for determining close relationships. Integrating aDNA analysis with archaeological research enhances our understanding of historical populations, connecting archaeology and forensic genetics to contribute to the broader narrative of human history.
Dmitry Nikolaev, Jorke Grotenhuis, Haleli Harel
et al.
The complex Ancient Egyptian (AE) writing system was characterised by widespread use of graphemic classifiers (determinatives): silent (unpronounced) hieroglyphic signs clarifying the meaning or indicating the pronunciation of the host word. The study of classifiers has intensified in recent years with the launch and quick growth of the iClassifier project, a web-based platform for annotation and analysis of classifiers in ancient and modern languages. Thanks to the data contributed by the project participants, it is now possible to formulate the identification of classifiers in AE texts as an NLP task. In this paper, we make first steps towards solving this task by implementing a series of sequence-labelling neural models, which achieve promising performance despite the modest amount of training data. We discuss tokenisation and operationalisation issues arising from tackling AE texts and contrast our approach with frequency-based baselines.
LLMs have revolutionized the landscape of information retrieval and knowledge dissemination. However, their application in specialized areas is often hindered by factual inaccuracies and hallucinations, especially in long-tail knowledge distributions. We explore the potential of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models for long-form question answering (LFQA) in a specialized knowledge domain. We present VedantaNY-10M, a dataset curated from extensive public discourses on the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. We develop and benchmark a RAG model against a standard, non-RAG LLM, focusing on transcription, retrieval, and generation performance. Human evaluations by computational linguists and domain experts show that the RAG model significantly outperforms the standard model in producing factual and comprehensive responses having fewer hallucinations. In addition, a keyword-based hybrid retriever that emphasizes unique low-frequency terms further improves results. Our study provides insights into effectively integrating modern large language models with ancient knowledge systems. Project page with dataset and code: https://sites.google.com/view/vedantany-10m
Description Sources from Mesopotamia contextualize the emergence of kissing and its role in disease transmission Recent studies maintain that the first known record of human romantic-sexual kissing originates in a Bronze Age manuscript deriving from South Asia (India), tentatively dated to 1500 BCE (1). Yet, a substantial corpus of overlooked evidence challenges this premise because lip kissing was documented in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt from at least 2500 BCE onward. Because this behavior did not emerge abruptly or in a specific society but appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia, the kiss cannot be regarded as a sudden biological trigger causing a spread of specific pathogens, as recently proposed (2). Further understanding of the history of kissing in human societies—and its secondary effect on disease transmission—can be gained from a case study of sources from ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria).
Description Recent advancements in DNA sequencing technologies and laboratory preparation protocols have rapidly expanded the scope of ancient DNA research over the past decade, both temporally and geographically. Discoveries include interactions between archaic and modern humans as well as modern human population dynamics, including those coinciding with the Last Glacial Maximum and the settlement history of most world regions. This new type of data allows us to examine the deep past of human population dynamics and sharpen the current understanding of our present. The continued development in the ancient DNA field has transformed our understanding of human genetic history and will keep uncovering the further mysteries of our recent evolutionary past.
Članek se ukvarja z analizo grobov, izkopanih pri Župni cerkvi v Kranju, ki so bili na podlagi dosedanjih raziskav opredeljeni kot najstarejši na tem grobišču. Za takšne so bili do zdaj opredeljeni grobovi (večinoma) brez pridatkov, ki so bili globoko vkopani v prostorne in med seboj pravilno razmeščene grobne jame, obložene s kamni oz. lesom in orientirane proti vzhodu. Posamezne skupine takšnih grobov, izkopanih do leta 1984, so bile na podlagi arheoloških primerjav datirane v konec 7. in v 8. st.
Analiza stratigrafije grobov celotnega grobišča, v katero smo vključili tudi ugotovitve poznejših izkopavanj in pregled zgodovine raziskav, pokažejo, da pri grobovih, do zdaj opredeljenih kot najstarejših, ni šlo vselej za stratigrafsko najstarejše grobove in da so bile med nekaterimi tudi superpozicije.
V prispevku skušamo ugotoviti čas začetka pokopavanja na podlagi starih in novih kronoloških podatkov (relativna kronologija grobov in tipokronologija). Za izbrane stratigrafsko najstarejše grobove na tem grobišču prvič prinašamo radiokarbonske datacije (14C), ki smo jih časovno zožili z datacijami stratigrafsko mlajših grobov s predmeti. Obravnavani grobovi se po gradnji groba ločijo na dve skupini. Pokopavanje se je začelo najverjetneje v 8. st., pred letom 774/775 (14C) s prvo skupino, z možnim trajanjem vse do začetka pokopavanja druge skupine. Druga skupina grobov ni starejša od leta 774 in se je začela že pred začetkom 9. st. ali najpozneje takrat.
Alexa S. Tyszka, Eric C. Bretz, Holly M. Robertson
et al.
Chloroplasts and mitochondria each contain their own genomes, which have historically been and continue to be important sources of information for inferring the phylogenetic relationships among land plants. The organelles are predominantly inherited from the same parent, and therefore should exhibit phylogenetic concordance. In this study, we examine the mitochondrion and chloroplast genomes of 226 land plants to infer the degree of similarity between the organelles’ evolutionary histories. Our results show largely concordant topologies are inferred between the organelles, aside from four well-supported conflicting relationships that warrant further investigation. Despite broad patterns of topological concordance, our findings suggest that the chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes evolved with significant differences in molecular evolution. The differences result in the genes from the chloroplast and the mitochondrion preferentially clustering with other genes from their respective organelles by a program that automates selection of evolutionary model partitions for sequence alignments. Further investigation showed that changes in compositional heterogeneity are not always uniform across divergences in the land plant tree of life. These results indicate that although the chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes have coexisted for over 1 billion years, phylogenetically, they are still evolving sufficiently independently to warrant separate models of evolution. As genome sequencing becomes more accessible, research into these organelles’ evolution will continue revealing insight into the ancient cellular events that shaped not only their history, but the history of plants as a whole.
Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry is a radio astronomy technique distinguished by a record-high angular resolution reaching single-digit microseconds of arc. The paper provides a brief account of the history of developments of this technique over the period 1960s-2020s.