Topic description and stories

The great university land-grab

06 Apr 2020

Over 50 American universities built their fortunes using 11 million acres of Indian land, signed over amid violence, corruption and coercion. A major...

Read more
Two of the four possible combinations of ancient admixture highlighted by the researchers.

First Peoples: two ancient ancestries ‘reconverged’ with settling of South America

31 May 2018

New research using ancient DNA finds that a population split after people first arrived in North America was maintained for millennia before mixing...

Read more

Ancient genome study identifies traces of indigenous “Taíno” in present-day Caribbean populations

19 Feb 2018

A thousand-year-old tooth has provided genetic evidence that the so-called “Taíno”, the first indigenous Americans to feel the full impact of...

Read more

Direct genetic evidence of founding population reveals story of first Native Americans

03 Jan 2018

Direct genetic traces of the earliest Native Americans have been identified for the first time in a new study. The genetic evidence suggests that...

Read more

The fall and rise of Native North America

26 Sep 2016

The story of Native North America – from its vast contribution to world culture, to the often taboo social problems of drinking, gambling and...

Read more

Skulls in print: scientific racism in the transatlantic world

19 Mar 2014

A PhD student’s research at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science has revealed how racist ideas and images circulated between...

Read more

Examples of Clovis tools

Out of Asia: ancient genome lays to rest origins of Americas’ first humans

12 Feb 2014

The genome of a child who died some 12,600 years ago in Montana – the oldest known human remains from North America – has been sequenced for the...

Read more