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New Genetic Findings Show Women’s Empowerment in Ancient Britain Before Roman Rule

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Late Iron Age Durotrigan burial at Winterbourne Kingston, Dorset, England

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Genetic analysis of people buried in a 2,000-year-old cemetery in southern England supports the idea that Britain’s Celtic communities were dominated by women, finding that while men immigrated from other communities, women indicates that they stayed in their ancestral home. It lasted for centuries.

The study supports growing archaeological evidence that women held high positions in Celtic societies across Europe, including Britain, and that Mediterranean audiences often found it difficult to describe Celtic women as having power. This gives credence to the Roman accounts, which were often thought to be exaggerated.

Since 2009, Durotrygean skeletons have been unearthed during excavations of an Iron Age burial site in Winterbourne-Kingston, Dorset, England. The Durothrigeans occupied the coast of south-central England from about 100 BC to 100 AD, and probably spoke a Celtic language.

Human bones from Iron Age Britain are rare because they were destroyed by common funerary practices such as cremation and burial of bodies in bogs. However, the Durotrige buried their dead in formal cemeteries in the chalk landscape, which helped preserve them. Archaeologists have found that Durotrigan women were often buried with valuables, suggesting a high status and perhaps a female-centered society.

Lara Cassidy Doctors from Trinity College, Dublin, have now analyzed the genomes of 55 Winterbourne-Kingston Durotrigans to determine how they are related to each other and to other Iron Age peoples in Britain and Europe. I found out how they are related.

Cassidy says there were two big “aha” moments. Both were associated with mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is a small loop of DNA that is inherited only through the maternal line because it is passed through the egg cell and is not integrated with other DNA.

Once each individual’s mitochondrial DNA results were obtained, the researchers noticed that the same genetic sequences appeared over and over again. More than two-thirds of the individuals were found to be descended from a single maternal line, descended from a common female ancestor several centuries ago.

“At that moment, my jaw dropped,” Cassidy says. “This was a clear sign of matrilocality, a husband moving to live with his wife’s family, a pattern never before seen in prehistoric Europe.” Father locality moving into the community is the norm.

To find out whether the maternal localization pattern was a phenomenon peculiar to the Durothrigues, or whether it might have been more widespread across Britain, Cassidy uses an earlier large-scale study of Iron Age Britain and Europe. I started looking into genetic research data. Her jaw dropped again. She found that in cemeteries across Britain, most people were maternal descendants of a small number of female ancestors.

Cassidy said there is growing evidence that Iron Age women were relatively powerful. “Nativeness typically co-occurs with cultural practices that benefit women and integrate them into family support networks,” she explains.

In modern societies, matrilocality is associated with increased female involvement in food production, increased paternity uncertainty, and longer periods of male absence. In such societies, it is men who migrate to new communities as relative strangers and become dependent on their partners’ families for their livelihood.

“Although men typically still occupy formal positions of authority, women can wield significant influence through their strong matrilineal kinship networks and central role in local economies,” says Cassidy.

Cassidy’s team also compared the British DNA dataset with data from other European sites, revealing repeated waves of migration from the continent, consistent with archaeological evidence. This is because southern Britain was a hotspot of cultural and genetic exchange during the Bronze Age between 2500 BC and 1200 BC and during the Late Iron Age influx of the previously unknown Durothrigid period. showed that it was.

Previous research had suggested that Celtic languages probably arrived in Britain between 1000 BC and 875 BC, but this new discovery expands that possibility. “Celtic languages may have been introduced multiple times,” Cassidy said.

“This is very exciting new research and will revolutionize the way we understand prehistoric societies,” he says. Rachel Pope from the University of Liverpool, UK, previously found evidence of female-dominated kinship relationships in Iron Age Europe. “What we’re learning is that the nature of pre-Roman European society was actually very different.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Under Roman rule, Britain enjoyed centuries of economic prosperity.

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A pile of Roman gold coins discovered beneath the floor of a Roman house in Corbridge, England

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After the Romans conquered Britain in AD 43, they brought with them technologies and laws that led to centuries of economic growth once thought to be limited to modern industrial societies, according to an analysis of thousands of archaeological finds from the period.

“In about 350 years, about two and a half years [fold] “Improved productivity per person.” Rob Weisman At Cambridge University.

Wiseman says the ancient world long believed that economic growth depended on increases in population and resources — for example, increasing food production required more land and more agricultural workers — a type of growth known as extensive growth.

In contrast, economic growth today is driven primarily by increases in productivity, or intensive growth: for example, mechanization and improved plant and animal breeding enable us to produce more food from the same amount of land with fewer workers.

Several recent studies have challenged the idea that rapid growth only occurred after the Industrial Revolution began, which led Wiseman and his colleagues to look at growth in Roman Britain from 43 to 400 AD.

Wiseman says the team’s research was made possible by British laws that require archaeological investigations when sites are developed. “As a result, tens of thousands of archaeological excavations have been carried out in this country, and the data is available to the public.”

By looking at how the number of buildings changed over time, the researchers were able to get a sense of how the population of Roman Britain grew — and there’s a strong relationship between the number of buildings and population size, Wiseman says.

To get a sense of economic growth, the team looked at three metrics: First, the size of buildings rather than the number of buildings: As people get wealthier, they build bigger homes, Wiseman said.

Another measure is the number of lost coins found at the excavation site: “That fell through the floorboards, that got lost in the bathroom, that sort of thing,” he says.

The idea is that the more coins there are in circulation, the more likely they are to be lost. The team didn’t count hidden hoards of coins because they reflect instability, not growth.

The third criterion is the ratio of cruder pottery, such as cooking and storing pots, to more ornate pottery, such as decorative plates. Economic growth requires people to interact more and socialize more, which means “showing off” when guests are present, Wiseman says.

Based on these indicators, the team found that economic growth exceeded what would be expected from population growth alone. They estimate that per capita growth was about 0.5% between 150 and 250 AD, slowing to about 0.3% between 250 and 400 AD.

“What we’ve been able to show is that there was indeed rapid growth after the Romans arrived,” Wiseman says. The rate of growth, rather than the type of growth, is likely what distinguishes the modern world from the ancient world, he says.

Researchers believe this growth was driven by factors such as roads and ports built by the Romans, laws they introduced that made trade safer, and technology such as more advanced flour mills and animal breeds suited to farming.

The period of rapid growth between AD 150 and 250 could have been the result of Britain catching up with the rest of the Roman world, Wiseman says: “It went from being a small, poorly-connected tribal society to a global economy.”

What’s not clear is whether this economic growth made people happier or healthier. “The fact that productivity rose doesn’t mean that invaded, colonized Britons were better off under the Roman Empire,” Wiseman says. “That’s an open question.”

To investigate this, researchers now plan to examine human remains to determine things like how long people lived.

“I believe they are right, and there was certainly intensive growth in Roman Britain.” Alain Bresson At the University of Chicago, Illinois.

“Many archaeologists have noted the compelling evidence of economic growth in Roman Britain, but this paper adds a welcome formal theoretical dimension to the debate.” Ian Morris At Stanford University, California.

But Morris suspects that the lower average growth rate from A.D. 250 to 400 actually reflected a period of higher growth that declined sharply as the Roman Empire began to collapse. Further research could help find the answer, he says.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Facebook Board Announces Rule Allowing Altered Video Depicting Biden as Pedophile

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Meta’s oversight board determined that a Facebook video falsely alleging that U.S. President Joe Biden is a pedophile did not violate the company’s current rules, but expressed that the rules were “disjointed”. It was acknowledged that the focus is too narrow on AI-generated content.

The board, which is funded by Facebook’s parent company Meta but operates independently, took on the Biden video case in October after receiving user complaints about a doctored seven-second video of the president.


The board ruled that under current policies, the misleading altered video would only be prohibited if it was created by artificial intelligence or made to appear to say words that were not actually said. Therefore, Meta was correct in continuing to publish the video.

This ruling is the first to criticize Meta’s policies against “manipulated media” amidst concerns about the potential use of new AI technology to influence upcoming elections.

The board stated that the policy “lacks a convincing justification, is disjointed and confusing to users, and does not clearly articulate the harms it seeks to prevent.” It suggested updating the policy to cover both audio and video content, and to apply a label indicating that it has been manipulated, regardless of whether AI is used.

It did not require the policy to apply to photos, as doing so could make enforcement too difficult at Meta’s scale.

Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, informed the board that it plans to update its policies to address new and increasingly realistic advances in AI, according to the ruling.

The video on Facebook is a manipulated version of real footage of Biden exchanging “I voted” stickers with his granddaughter and kissing her on the cheek during the 2022 US midterm elections.

The board noted that non-AI modified content is “more prevalent and not necessarily less misleading” than content generated by AI tools.

It recommended that enforcement should involve applying labels to content, rather than Meta’s current approach of removing posts from the platform.

The company announced that it is reviewing the ruling and will respond publicly within 60 days.

Source: www.theguardian.com

EU’s AI rule negotiations enter second day with agreement on basic model still under consideration

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European Union legislators take action Over 20 hours of negotiation time Amid the marathon attempt to reach a consensus on how to regulate artificial intelligence, one thorny element remains unsolved: rules for foundational models/general purpose AI (GPAI), according to a leaked proposal reviewed by TechCrunch. A tentative agreement has been reached on how to handle the issue.

In recent weeks, there has been a concerted movement led by French AI startup Mistral to call for a complete regulatory separation of basic models/GPAI. But the proposal still has elements of the phased approach to regulating these advanced AIs that Parliament proposed earlier this year, so EU lawmakers are pushing for a full-throttle push to let the market make things right. seems to be resisting.

Having said that, some obligations of GPAI systems provided under free open source licenses are partially exempted (which is stipulated to mean: weights, information about the model architecture, and information about how to use the model) — with some exceptions, such as “high risk” models.

Reuters also reports on partial exceptions for open source advanced AI.

According to our sources, the open source exception is further limited by commercial deployment, so if such an open source model becomes available in the market or is otherwise provided as a service, the curve Out is no longer valid. “Therefore, depending on how ‘market availability’ and ‘commercialization’ are interpreted, this law could also apply to Mistral,” our source suggested.

The preliminary agreement we have seen maintains GPAI’s classification of so-called “systemic risk,” with models receiving this designation based on a measured cumulative amount of compute used for training. It means that it has “functions that have a large impact” such as. Greater than 10^25 for floating point operations (FLOPs).

at that level Few current models appear to meet systemic risk thresholds – Suggests that few state-of-the-art GPAIs need to fulfill their ex ante mandate to proactively assess and mitigate systemic risk. So Mistral’s lobbying efforts appear to have softened the blow of the regulation.

Under the preliminary agreement, other obligations for providers of systemic risk GPAIs include conducting assessments using standardized protocols and state-of-the-art tools. Document and report serious incidents “without undue delay.” Conduct and document adversarial testing. Ensure appropriate levels of cybersecurity. Report the actual or estimated energy consumption of your model.

Providers of GPAI have general obligations such as testing and evaluation of models and the creation and preservation of technical documentation, which must be made available to regulators and supervisory authorities upon request.

You should also provide downstream deployers of the model (aka AI app authors) with an overview of the model’s capabilities and limitations to support their ability to comply with AI laws.

The proposal also calls on basic model makers to put in place policies that respect EU copyright law, including restrictions placed on text and data mining by copyright holders. It also says it will provide a “sufficiently detailed” overview of the training data used to build and publish the model. Templates for disclosures are provided by the AI ​​Office, the AI ​​governance body that the regulations propose to establish.

We understand that this copyright disclosure summary continues to apply to open source models. This exists as one of the exceptions to the rule.

The documents we have seen include references to codes of practice, and the proposal states that GPAIs, and GPAIs with systemic risks, will demonstrate compliance until a ‘harmonized standard’ is published. It says that you can depend on this.

It is envisaged that the AI ​​Office will be involved in the creation of such norms. The European Commission envisages issuing a standardization request from six months after the entry into force of the regulation on GPAI, but will also ask for deliverables on reporting and documentation on how to improve the energy and resource use of AI systems. It is assumed that standardization requests such as these will be issued and regular reports on their progress will be made. It also includes the development of these standardized elements (2 years after the date of application and every 4 years thereafter).

Today’s tripartite consultations on the AI ​​Act actually began yesterday afternoon, but the European Commission is seeking opinions on this disputed file between the European Council, Parliament and Commission staff. It seems that they are determined to make this the final finishing touch. (If not, as we previously reported, there is a risk that the regulation will be put back on the shelf, with EU elections and new Commission appointments looming next year.)

At the time of this writing, negotiations are underway to resolve several other contentious elements of the file, with a number of highly sensitive issues still on the table (e.g., authentication monitoring, etc.). Therefore, it remains unclear whether the file will cross the line.

Without agreement on all elements, there will be no consensus to secure the law, leaving the fate of the AI ​​law in limbo. But for those looking to understand where their co-legislators have arrived at their position on responsibility for advanced AI models, such as the large-scale language model that underpins the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, this tentative agreement will help lawmakers provide some degree of steering as to where we are going.

In recent minutes, EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton tweeted confirmation that negotiations had finally broken down, but only until tomorrow. The European Commission still intends to obtain the April 2021 proposed file beyond the deadline this week, as the epic trilogue is scheduled to resume at 9 a.m. Brussels time.

Source: techcrunch.com