A December 3, 2024 (open access) monograph published by the Cambridge University Press comprehensively reviews the historical population genetics of East Asia and its vicinity, with associated linguistic and cultural implications. It is one volume in a larger series about Ancient East Asia.
I'll discuss and analyze this wide ranging 90 page review article as time allows in the future.
Hat tip to Language Log.
Once again, there is no signal of neutrinoless double beta decay, which would indicate that the neutrino has a Majorana mass.
This isn't necessarily decisive, because reasonable models of neutrinoless double beta decay rates for neutrinos with masses in the ballpark of what neutrino oscillation data and cosmology estimates would predict are still a few order of magnitude smaller than the ability of current experiments to detect (the predicted value is on the order of 10^28 years or more), although this due rule out less mainstream models of Majorana neutrinos which would predict much higher rates of neutrinoless double beta decay. But the consensus on non-detection from multiple experiments with different methods around the world does strongly discredit the one Russian experiment that claims to have seen this already many years ago, and it does deny advocates of Majorana mass for neutrinos any positive evidence that it exists.
We report the search for neutrinoless double-beta decay of 136Xe from the PandaX-4T experiment with a 3.7-tonne natural xenon target. The data reconstruction and the background modeling are optimized in the MeV energy region. A blind analysis is performed with data from the commissioning run and the first science run. No significant excess of signal over the background is observed. A lower limit on the half-life of 136Xe neutrinoless double-beta decay is established to be 2.1 × 10^24 ~ yr at the 90% confidence level, with a 136Xe exposure of 44.6 ~ kg⋅year. Our result represents the most stringent constraint from a natural xenon detector to date.
The latest W boson mass measurement from CMS at the LHC using data up to 13 TeV from the year 2016 is that "m(W) = 80360.2 ± 9.9 MeV, in agreement with the standard model prediction." The Standard Model electroweak fit value is 80353 ± 6 MeV.
All recent measurements except a 2022 reanalysis of data from the CDF experiment at the Tevatron experiment are consistent with this value, and this CDF outlier is widely believed to be flawed and incorrect.
We explore toponium, the smallest known quantum bound state of a top quark and its antiparticle, bound by the strong force. With a Bohr radius of 8×10^−18~m and a lifetime of 2.5×10^−25 s, toponium uniquely probes microphysics. Unlike all other hadrons, it is governed by ultraviolet freedom, exhibiting feeble interactions at distances much smaller than 10^−15 m, rather than infrared slavery that characterizes powerful interactions at approximately 10^−15~m. This distinction offers novel insights into quantum chromodynamics.
Our analysis reveals a toponium signal exceeding five standard deviations in the distribution of the cross section ratio between e+e−→bb¯ and e+e−→qq¯ (q=b, c, s, d, u), based on 400~fb−1 {(1 fb = 10^−43 m2)} of data collected at around 341~GeV, driven by quantum interference. This discovery enables a top quark mass measurement with an uncertainty reduced by a factor of ten compared to current precision levels.
Detection prospects at the Circular Electron Positron Collider or the Future Circular Lepton Collider underscore their potential to revolutionize our understanding of quantum mechanics.
A measurement of the K+→π+νν¯ decay by the NA62 experiment at the CERN SPS is presented, using data collected in 2021 and 2022. This dataset was recorded, after modifications to the beamline and detectors, at a higher instantaneous beam intensity with respect to the 2016--2018 data taking. Combining NA62 data collected in 2016--2022, a measurement of B(K+→π+νν¯)=(13.0+3.3−3.0)×10^−11 is reported. With 51 signal candidates observed and an expected background of 18+3−2 events, B(K+→π+νν¯) becomes the smallest branching ratio measured with a signal significance above 5σ.
Over the last decades, tests on the standard model of cosmology, the so-called ΛCDM model, have been widely analysed and compared with many different models for describing dark energy. Modified gravities have played an important role in this sense as an alternative to ΛCDM model. Previous observational data has been always favouring ΛCDM model in comparison to any other model. While statistically speaking, alternative models have shown their power, fitting in some cases the observational data slightly better than ΛCDM, the significance and goodness of the fits were not significantly relevant to exclude the standard model of cosmology.
In this paper, a generalisation of exponential F(R) gravity is considered and compared with ΛCDM model by using the latest observational data. Also some well-known model independent parameterisations for the equation of state (EoS) of dark energy are explored.
These scenarios are confronted with the renewed observational data involving the Pantheon plus datasets of supernovae type Ia, the Hubble parameter estimations, data from the cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations, where the latter includes the data provided by Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration.
Results of this analysis suggest that standard exponential F(R) models provide much better fits than ΛCDM model, which is excluded at 4σ. Moreover, the parameterisations of the equation of state suggest a non-constant EoS parameter for dark energy, where ΛCDM model is also excluded at 4σ.
We study the low-energy limit of General Relativity in the presence of stationarity and axial symmetry, coupled to dust. Specifically, we demonstrate that differences between the dynamics of General Relativity and those of Newtonian gravity persist even in the weak-field and slow-motion regime. Notably, these differences are driven by dragging terms that are not necessarily small, as is typically the case in the well-known gravitomagnetic limit. To highlight this distinction, we introduce the concept of strong gravitomagnetism. We provide a pedagogical discussion of how these discrepancies arise and outline a systematic procedure to solve the equations of motion for such systems. Furthermore, we present analytical results for specific cases and also give the general solution for the vacuum case. A particularly notable result is our demonstration of how General Relativity can naturally account for a Tully-Fisher-like relation.
High status families in late Neolithic and Bronze Age Germany kept slaves, genetic analysis reveals.The finding, reported in the journal Science, provides fresh insight into ancient life in Europe, showing that complex slave-owning societies were well established long before those of classical Greece and Rome.The research, centred on genome-wide data gathered from 104 individuals buried in Germany’s Lech Valley between about 2500 BCE and 1700 BCE, was conducted by researchers led by archaeo-geneticist Alissa Mittnik from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany.The scientists gathered nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from each individual and compared it to genetic databases covering ancient and modern humans. They also looked at how the graves were arranged and examined the relationship between the number and type of artefacts buried in each.The picture that emerged was of a surprisingly stable and enduring society that depended on the import of fertile women and menial underlings. The Lech Valley hosted a farming community, Mittnik and colleagues concluded, that persisted for about 700 years.The people of the valley were a mixture of Western Hunter-Gatherers, Anatolian Neolithic farmers and Steppe pastoralists, with the farmers’ genetic heritage becoming more dominant as the centuries passed.Analysis of strontium and oxygen deposits in bone revealed that the men remained in the community across multiple generations – a condition known as patrilocality. The women, in contrast, were largely born outside the area – some, indeed, hailed from a region more than 350 kilometres away, on the other side of the Alps.The absence of women genetically related to the males strongly indicates that they left the community to join other groups.Mittnik and colleagues also looked at grave goods as signifiers of social importance.“Certain types of grave goods, especially weapons – daggers, axes, chisels and arrow heads – in male graves and elaborate body adornments in female graves – large headdresses, massive leg rings – as well as pins in graves of both sexes are likely status-associated,” they write.Among the cohort of corpses examined, they found examples of children and adolescents who were genetically related to adult males and who had been interred with significant artefacts. This suggests that social standing was inherited rather than earned.
The Clovis people (who are not the first indigenous American culture, although they are derived from the Founding population of the Americas whose main wave of expansion came about fifteen hundred years earlier) are known for the spears that they used to hunt big game in North America before the Younger Dryas event wiped out their culture. But to survive in North America, they also needed needles to make clothing so they could function in this relatively cool region.
Tiny artifacts unearthed at a Wyoming site where a mammoth was butchered 13,000 years ago are revealing intriguing details about how the earliest Americans survived the last ice age.Archaeologists found 32 needle fragments made from animal bone buried almost 15 feet (nearly 5 meters) underground at the La Prele site in Converse County. They are not the earliest eyed needles in the archaeological record, but for the first time scientists have been able to identify what the needles were made of by analyzing protein information contained in the bone collagen. The results were not what they expected.“We had assumed they would be made out of bison or mammoth bone, which comprise most of the animal bones found at La Prele and other sites of its age in the High Plains and Rocky Mountains of North America,” said Wyoming state archaeologist Spencer Pelton, lead author of a new study on the needles published November 27 in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.Instead, the needles were created from the bones of red foxes, bobcats, mountain lions, lynx, the now-extinct American cheetah, and hares or rabbits, the study found.“It was extremely surprising that these needles were made out of small carnivores,” Pelton said.
From CNN.
The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious. It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of steppe-related genetic ancestry from the onset of the Bronze Age. However, multiple steppe-derived populations co-existed in Europe during this period, and it remains unclear how these populations diverged and which provided the demographic channels for the ancestral forms of the Italic, Celtic, Greek, and Armenian languages.
To investigate the ancestral histories of Indo-European-speaking groups in Southern Europe, we sequenced genomes from 314 ancient individuals from the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, spanning from 5,200 BP to 2,100 BP, and co-analysed these with published genome data. We additionally conducted strontium isotope analyses on 224 of these individuals.
We find a deep east-west divide of steppe ancestry in Southern Europe during the Bronze Age. Specifically, we show that the arrival of steppe ancestry in Spain, France, and Italy was mediated by Bell Beaker (BB) populations of Western Europe, likely contributing to the emergence of the Italic and Celtic languages. In contrast, Armenian and Greek populations acquired steppe ancestry directly from Yamnaya groups of Eastern Europe. These results are consistent with the linguistic Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian hypotheses accounting for the origins of most Mediterranean Indo-European languages of Classical Antiquity. Our findings thus align with specific linguistic divergence models for the Indo-European language family while contradicting others. This underlines the power of ancient DNA in uncovering prehistoric diversifications of human populations and language communities.
Bronze Age individuals from Italy are grouped into three distinct clusters. The first is the group linked to the Bell Beaker common to individuals from France and Spain. It includes all the ancient individuals from Corsica and central Italy. A second group is more linked to the [first] farmers of Europe. It includes the ancient individuals from the Olmo site in northern Italy. The third group is linked to the Yamnaya group and includes the ancient individuals from the Adriatic coast.
The Adriatic coast group is probably an early precursor of maritime Magna Graecia colonization. The people with first farmer genetics are probably the ancestors of the Etruscans and kindred non-Indo-European ethnicities of the region. These genetics generally support the Italo-Celtic grouping of Indo-European languages.
The spread of the Neolithic to the Caucasus and Iran contributed to the diffusion of Anatolian farmer ancestry into this region, which mixed with local hunter-gatherer ancestry from the Caucasus CHG. In addition, the expansion of the Kuro-Araxes culture during the third millennium BC connected the Caucasus with the Levant and Mesopotamia through trade networks. Interaction between Anatolia and the Caucasus increased during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, leading to the expansion of the CHG component into these regions and beyond into the Mediterranean.
In this study, the authors analyzed the genomes of 25 Bronze and Iron Age individuals from Anatolia. They all originate from a genetic mixture between a local Anatolian farmer component, a Caucasian hunter-gatherer component and a small proportion of the Iranian farmer component. In addition, some individuals have a small proportion of Eastern European hunter-gatherer (EHG) ancestry. Both CHG and EHG components are higher in the Iron Age than in the Bronze Age. Thus, in the Iron Age, the authors observed the arrival of a steppe ancestry in central Anatolia identical to that present in the Balkans and Greece, suggesting a migration from the latter region to Anatolia. The authors hypothesize that this migration is linked to the emergence of the Phrygian state in the second millennium BC.
This suggests Indo-European migration into Anatolia from the west via Greece, rather than the East, via the Caucuses.
The ancient individuals from Cyprus suggest that this island and especially the coastal cities were a genetic melting pot during the Bronze Age. They have a genetic profile close to those of ancient individuals from Lebanon and eastern Anatolia. However, one individual is genetically close to the early farmers of Anatolia, another has a genetic profile close to ancient individuals from the Balkans and Greece.
An ancient individual with the genetic profile of ancient individuals from Scandinavia is also found at this time in a rock-cut tomb at the Vounous Bellapais site dated between 2000 and 1800 BC. Interestingly, this man is also of the Y chromosome haplogroup: I1 typical of Scandinavia. His strontium isotope analysis confirms his foreign origin consistent with Scandinavia. This result suggests very long-distance interactions on the island of Cyprus during the Bronze Age.
In the following period, during the Iron Age, the population of Cyprus has a more homogeneous genetic profile containing a small proportion of Yamnaya ancestry. . . .
In conclusion, this study shows that the results of paleogenetics support the Italo-Celtic and Greco-Armenian linguistic models and disqualify the Indo-Greek and Italo-Germanic models.
Thus, the oldest occurrence of steppe ancestry in Italy comes from two individuals from Latium dated 2100 BC, linked to the Bell Beaker group and not to the Yamnaya group, similarly to the Celtic populations of western Europe.
In Greece, the oldest occurrence of steppe ancestry is dated 2200 BC in individuals directly linked to the Yamnaya group. They do not have a component from the globular amphora culture. This arrival precedes the emergence of the Greek language in the form of Linear B writing.
Greek is thus, more basal, within the Indo-European linguistic family, deriving directly from the Yamnaya people, rather than being mediated through intermediate Corded Ware and Bell Beaker people.
The Armenian language has been attested for about 1550 years in the southern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. At the end of the Iron Age this region was under the control of the Urartian kingdom . This state was culturally diverse and contained Armenian linguistic elements suggested by borrowings between the two languages Urartian and Armenian. Steppe ancestry has been detected in several individuals from this region in the Bronze Age at the end of the third millennium BC coinciding with the fall of the Kuro-Araxes culture. These individuals with steppe ancestry are related to the Yamnaya group, like the ancient Greeks.
