ANCIENT NATURAL HISTORY LORE

Cannabis in India: ancient lore and modern medicine

India is a land steeped in faith and mysticism. Ayurveda, combining the Sanskrit words for life and knowledge, is a system of medicine intertwined inextricably with these traits. That a core of belief combined with empirical experimentation could produce a viable medical regimen still widely practiced after well over 3000 years is astounding to Western physicians. Cannabis was similarly bound t...

Ancient DNA and human history.

We review studies of genomic data obtained by sequencing hominin fossils with particular emphasis on the unique information that ancient DNA (aDNA) can provide about the demographic history of humans and our closest relatives. We concentrate on nuclear genomic sequences that have been published in the past few years. In many cases, particularly in the Arctic, the Americas, and Europe, aDNA has ...

Ancient History: Resources for Teachers

Ancient admixture in human history.

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 6...

Atomism in Ancient Medical History.

THE history of the development of the atomic theory is usually imagined to be the exclusive province of chemistry and physics, and there is a tendency to suppose that molecular biology is one of the most recent products of twentiethcentury science. For these reasons it is surprising to discover that the paths of the corpuscular world-view and theoretical physiology crossed more than two thousan...