Tea at Trianon: The Mysterious Denisovans

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 24, 2019

The Mysterious Denisovans

From Live Science:

A newfound extinct human lineage that lived in New Guinea interbred with modern humans, a new study finds. This lineage's genetic differences from other humans made it as distinct a group as our closest extinct relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, scientists added.

Although modern humans are now the only living branch of the human family tree, others not only lived alongside modern humans, but even interbred with them, leaving behind DNA in the modern human genome. These archaic lineages not only included the Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, but also the mysterious Denisovans, known only from fossils unearthed in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia.

Previous research found that while Denisovans shared a common origin with Neanderthals, they were nearly as genetically distinct from Neanderthals as Neanderthals were from modern humans. Prior workestimated the ancestors of modern humans split from the common ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans about 700,000 years ago, and the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged from one another about 400,000 years ago. [Denisovan Gallery: Tracing the Genetics of Human Ancestors] (Read more.)