Read reviews of science articles, new research and news reports on ancestry testing, ancient DNA and popular genetics
Originating in the British Isles and Germany, these colonists took part in some of the largest human migrations in U.S. history. They had a gnawing appetite for land and were willing to face great risks to get it. Arriving from Europe, they settled in what was then the Southern Backcountry, east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After the Revolutionary War, they settled throughout Tennessee and Kentucky before moving on to Oklahoma and Texas.
Science organizations are battling an inundating of AI-assisted applications and submissions
As neuroscientist Geraint Rees and social scientist James Wilsdon wrote in Nature last week, funding bodies from Australia to the United Kingdom have seen a sharp rise in applications since 2022 (G. Rees and J. Wilsdon Nature 652, 1119–1121; 2026). This coincides with the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the first AI chatbot to be publicly available worldwide. And there is good evidence to suggest that many of these increases are AI-driven. Researchers are using AI tools not just to scan the literature or summarize studies, but for proposing ideas for projects, drafting the text of grant applications and refining applications on the basis of predictions of how grant review panels might react.
Since the appearance of my book The Countercurrents of Prehistory last year, I hear from more and more of our customers about their Austronesian matches. In almost all cases, mirabile dictu, it is a confirmation of their American Indian ancestry.
James Adair’s History of the American Indians (London, 1775) was one of the first monographs published on the Southeastern Indians in the English-speaking world.
Many customers are surprised to get high matches to South American Indian tribes like Belem Amazonians (n=325) and Ecuadorian Kichwas (n=115). Even if one’s ancestry includes Cherokee or some other type of North American Indian, it is not uncommon to have matches to Central and South American Indians, since all indigenous populations of the Americas are related by origin and came through narrow bottlenecks.
Investigation of DNA Consultants’ Rare Genes from History and autosomal haplotype tests suggests Southern China and Southeast Asia were the home of an archaic matriarchal, maritime high culture that diffused across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans with Austronesian culture and the drowning of the continent of Sundaland.
