A Vanished Dynasty: Ashanti

A Iv Dynasty Portrait Head

At the turn of the century scholars of Egyptian art were startled by the appearance of life-size portrait heads in excavations at Gizeh, the site of a large necropolis of the Old Kingdom. Until their discovery it was considered an almost invariable rule that private sculpture of the period represented types, not individuals. The Sheikh el Beled and several other representations of individuals w...

Rawls’s Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World*

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A vanished history of skeletonization in Cambrian comb jellies

Ctenophores are traditionally regarded as "lower" metazoans, sharing with cnidarians a diploblastic grade of organization. Unlike cnidarians, where skeletonization (biomineralization and sclerotization) evolved repeatedly among ecologically important taxa (for example, scleractinians and octocorals), living ctenophores are characteristically soft-bodied animals. We report six sclerotized and ar...

The Meckel Dynasty in Medical Education *

Archaeogenomic evidence reveals prehistoric matrilineal dynasty

For societies with writing systems, hereditary leadership is documented as one of the hallmarks of early political complexity and governance. In contrast, it is unknown whether hereditary succession played a role in the early formation of prehistoric complex societies that lacked writing. Here we use an archaeogenomic approach to identify an elite matriline that persisted between 800 and 1130 C...