http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14630012

A new study deals a blow to the idea that most European men are descended from farmers who migrated from the Near East 5,000-10,000 years ago.

The findings challenge previous research showing that the genetic signature of the farmers displaced that of Europe's indigenous hunters.

The latest research leans towards the idea that most of Europe's males trace a line of descent to stone-age hunters.

Interesting stuff but can't get the article yet.

Grace wrote:Very interesting. I'd love to see the origins of Native Americans traced because so many Native Americans have Asian features. Another curiosity for me is possible Egyptian influence in Central America. The human profile art, pyramids, and Mayan Calendar hieroglyphs is too much of a coincidence for me. Has anyone done studies on this?

While there may well have been the odd boat over the course of a few centuries that lost its way and somehow managed to make it across the Atlantic via trade winds.... a level of cultural trade and economic exchange significant enough to be considered 'Egyptian influence in Central America' is not even remotely supported by any empirical evidence.

But really, we don't need to propose extraordinary explanations. For example, pyramids.

Go back to days of yore and imagine you are the ruler of a burgeoning kingdom and you decide you want to build a monument to your preferred deity or to stamp your power onto the landscape. You have a bounty of resources and near endless man-power in the form of slaves, serfs, or bondsmen.

What do you build? Well, it's got to be big! You want people to be able to see it from afar. A temple? Pff it's been done! A statue? 'It's possible' some yay-sayers, eager to impress, say. But others worry about it snapping when placing it at the site and forsee their untimely and painful deaths as a consequence of this, so they persuade you that something new, something different might be in order.

Today, we might build a tower (i.e. a skyscraper). It stretches to the sky, it's viewable from far away, it dominates the panorama - it shows off our prowess and gives the engineers something to get their teeth into. However, towers are tricky beasts unless they have a sufficient footprint to stabilise them, or modern engineering methods to strengthen their foundations.

So you spread out the footprint to spread the weight and add stability. Now, what does a tower with a bigger base than its pinnacle look like? A pyramid. It's a kind of an engineering form of convergent evolution between male ruler ego and the laws of physics.

When you actually look at the pyramids made in Central American and in Egypt, they bear very little resemblance other than that they both solve a particular problem of physics in a similar, and in fact rather obvious, way.