O ccupational guilds have been observed for thousands of years in many economies: ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; medieval and early modern India, Japan, Persia, Byzantium, and Europe; and nineteenth-century China, Latin America, and the Ottoman Empire. Guilds were most prevalent in manufacturing. Almost all urban craftsmen were guilded and, in parts of central and southern Europe, many rural ...

Identifying general patterns of colonization and radiation in island faunas is often hindered by past human-caused extinctions. The insular Caribbean is one of the only complex oceanic-type island systems colonized by land mammals, but has witnessed the globally highest level of mammalian extinction during the Holocene. Using ancient DNA analysis, we reconstruct the evolutionary history of one ...

The recent recovery of ancient DNA from a growing number of human samples shows that mitochondrial DNA haplogroup I was introduced to Europe after the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. This paper provides a spatio-temporal analysis of the various subhaplogroups of mitochondrial DNA I. The study suggests that haplogroup I diversified into haplogroups I1, I2’3, I4 and I5 at specific regions in Eur...