Enlarge / Excavations at the Upward Sun River site. (credit: Ben Potter) Where did Native Americans come from? Over the years, lots of ideas have been considered, but genetic data eventually came down decisively in favor of one of them. Native Americans are most closely related to East Asians and must have come across a land bridge that was present between Siberia and Alaska during the last glacial period. But that big-picture answer has raised all sorts of additional questions about the details. There has been a long-running argument over their mode of travel, which only recently seems to have been decided in favor of boats . There are still arguments over how many waves of migration took place. And a weak genetic affinity for Eurasian populations, strengthened by an ancient Siberian genome , raises questions about how that DNA ended up in Native American genomes. Now, a large team of researchers is saying they have data that clarifies a lot of these questions. It comes in the form of a genome obtained from a child’s skeleton found in Alaska. The skeleton has been dated to 11,500 years ago, and the genome now suggests it represents a member of a now-lost population that occupied the Beringian land bridge at the peak of the last glacial period—and gave rise to Native Americans. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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11,000-year-old child’s skeleton tells tale of Native American origins
HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that Peruvian authorities say Greenpeace activists have damaged the fragile, and restricted, landscape near the Nazca lines, ancient man-made designs etched in the Peruvian desert when they placed a large sign that promoted renewable energy near a set of lines that form the shape of a giant hummingbird. The sign was meant to draw the attention of world leaders, reporters and others who were in Lima, the Peruvian capital, for a United Nations summit meeting aimed at reaching an agreement to address climate change. Greenpeace issued a statement apologizing for the stunt at the archaeological site and its international executive director, Kumi Naidoo, flew to Lima to apologize for scarring one of Peru’s most treasured national symbols. “We are not ready to accept apologies from anybody, ” says Luis Jaime Castillo, the vice minister for cultural heritage. “Let them apologize after they repair the damage.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past couple of years, Google has implemented some changes to how Android handles SD cards that aren’t very beneficial to users or developers. After listening to many rounds of complaints, this seems to have changed in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Google’s Jeff Sharkey wrote, “[I]n Lollipop we added the new ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE intent. Apps can launch this intent to pick and return a directory from any supported DocumentProvider, including any of the shared storage supported by the device. Apps can then create, update, and delete files and directories anywhere under the picked tree without any additional user interaction. Just like the other document intents, apps can persist this access across reboots.” Android Police adds, “All put together, this should be enough to alleviate most of the stress related to SD cards after the release of KitKat. Power users will no longer have to deal with crippled file managers, media apps will have convenient access to everything they should regardless of storage location, and developers won’t have to rely on messy hacks to work around the restrictions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
