Word: ancestors
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...China's brief but glorious seafaring past. In Nanjing he found it: a direct, 19th-generation descendant of the Grand Eunuch's favorite adopted nephew, named Zheng Zhihai (which means from the sea). This modest 53-year-old, dressed in a rumpled suit, hasn't exactly followed in his ancestor's glorious naval tradition; Zheng works as a toilet engineer in a Nanjing factory. Still, while China had largely forgotten his heroic ancestor, Zheng says family legends kept his exploits very much alive. Tales of his voyages were passed down through the generations like a fragment of silken embroidery. "Zheng...
...Indiana Jones film with handsomer graphics, Atlantis has almost exactly the same plot as the Angelina Jolie film Tomb Raider. Linguist-hero accompanies suspicious expedition to legendary hidden shrine; hero kills rogue male villain, vindicates visionary dead male ancestor. (Can't an action hero ever have a mother fixation?) Atlantis adroitly mixes 2-D and 3-D animation but is short on emotional heft and depth. It would be Disney's rotten luck this summer if its big-budget cartoon loses the tween market to an inferior live-action film with a boy-pleasing secret ingredient. Tomb Raider is Atlantis...
...Nepalese, particularly those who live in the capital, Kathmandu, the bewildering influx of Westerners combined with a new generation of Nepalese who party like Westerners has left them wondering what will become of the formerly elder-respecting, ancestor- worshipping, opposite-sex-avoiding youth. Traditionalists and monarchists lay blame for the nascent dissolution on the liberalism engendered by a 10-year-old democracy that has already seen 10 Prime Ministers. King Birendra ruled Nepal as an absolute monarch until 1990, when he was forced by violent protests to step down in favor of a constitutional monarchy. But critics have assailed...
...dating. "Physical anthropology remains the gold standard for dating," says geneticist Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, a member of the team at the University of California, Berkeley that in 1987 identified "Mitochondrial Eve" as the 140,000- to 280,000-year-old ancestor of all living humans. "But we're getting better at genetic dating all the time...
...Some of Ursula's people, for instance, were among the first modern humans to arrive in Europe, while others of her group came from the Middle East much later. The clan of Helena, the most common matrilineal ancestor of modern Europeans, is thought to have emerged from Ice Age refuges around the Pyrenees and migrated northward as the ice sheets began receding around 13,000 years ago. Velda's people similarly dispersed northward from the Iberian Peninsula, while Tara and Katrine's clans spread northward from present-day Italy. The descendants of Xenia are thought to have spread from...