Where this timeline comes from

An entry about the machine, because a source that hides its method is asking to be trusted rather than checked. This page is assembled from four things. The corpus: 1,497 files across 124 folders, about 1,053 PDFs and 131 EPUBs, roughly twelve gigabytes of scholarship. The Istwanou archive: 4,236 dated entries, most carrying a Bates number back to the page they came from. The Slave Voyages databases behind Zanzet: 36,108 transatlantic voyages, 11,521 intra-American, and 67,460 named individuals in the African Names Database. And the rasanblaj library: house written summaries of every work, with a verbatim overlap check run against every one of them. Every blurb here is written in house. No publisher abstract is republished, no source text is quoted at length, and every entry names the book it came from so you can go argue with the book yourself.

A recent genetics paper concluded that the ancient Egyptians were of Levantine origin. The DNA behind it came from a single locality in northern Egypt, dating to more than two thousand years after Egyptian civilisation was founded, in a district that had been absorbing arrivals from the Levant for over a millennium by that point. Some came as artisans and makers of valued goods whom Egyptian rulers invited in and settled. The Hyksos invaded out of the Levant in the seventeenth century BCE and governed much of the north for more than a hundred years, adding the same ancestry to that same corner of the country. Christopher Ehret answers the paper with a comparison. Take DNA from a South Boston graveyard filled in the 1890s and the sample will report that Americans are of Irish descent, and that the men who founded the United States a century before that were Irish too. The method fails identically in both cases. A late and heavily settled edge of a country is made to speak for a founding population it never held.