Scientists Link Housecats to Wildcat Subspecies

By NICHOLAS WADE
NY TIMES, June 28 2007

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wild cat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats, and the rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey for her.

Seeing she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

At least five females, of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica, accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village, scientists have concluded, based on new DNA research. And from these five matriarchs, all the world’s 600 million housecats are descended.

Carlos A. Driscoll of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues spent more than six years collecting species of wildcat from Scotland to Israel. He then analyzed the DNA of the wildcats, of many ordinary house cats and of the fancy cats that breeders started to develop in the 19th century.

Five subspecies of wildcat spread across the Old World. They are known as the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Their patterns of DNA fall into 5 clusters. The DNA of all house cats and fancy cats falls within the Near Eastern wildcat cluster, making clear that this subspecies is their ancestor, Dr. Driscoll and his colleagues report in today’s issue of Science.

The wildcat DNA closest to that of modern house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say.

The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down solely through the female line. Since the oldest known archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.

Wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated in the Near East by 10,000 years ago, so it seems likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats, and that the settlers would have welcomed the cats’ help in controlling them.

Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, perhaps accounting for the haughty independence of their descendants. “The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side,” Dr. Driscoll said.

Cats are “indicators of human cultural adolescence,” he remarked, since they entered human experience as people were making the difficult transition from hunting and gathering, their way of life for millions of years, to settled communities.

Until recently the cat was commonly believed to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt, where it was a cult animal. But three years ago a group of French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne discovered the remains of an eight-month-old cat buried with what was presumably its human owner at a Neolithic site in Cyprus. The Mediterranean island was settled by farmers from Turkey who brought their domesticated animals with them, presumably including cats, because there is no evidence of native wildcats in Cyprus.

The date of the burial, some 9,500 years ago, far precedes Egyptian civilization. Together with the new genetic evidence, it places the domestication of the cat in a different context, the beginnings of agriculture in the Near East, and probably in the villages of the Fertile Crescent, the belt of land that stretches up through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and down through what is now Iraq.

Dr. Stephen O’Brien, an expert on the genetics of the cat family and a co-author of the Science report, described the domestication of the cat as “the beginning of one of the major experiments in biological history,” because the number of house cats in the world now exceeds half a billion, while most of the 36 other species of cat, and many wildcats, are now threatened with extinction.

So a valuable outcome of the new study is the discovery of genetic markers in the DNA that distinguish native wildcats from the house cats and feral domestic cats with which they often interbreed. In Britain and other countries, true wildcats may be highly protected by law but stray cats are not.

David Macdonald of Oxford University in England, a co-author of the report, has spent 10 years trying to preserve the Scottish wildcat, of which only 400 or so remain. “We can use some of the genetic markers to talk to conservation agencies like the Scottish Natural Heritage,” he said.

Pick Your Poison: Fists or Fireballs

Bruce Willis reprises his character as the super-cop John McClane.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
NY Times Movie Review, June 27 2007

The gasping, grunting and oozing hard-body slab that muscles, and sometimes crawls, through "Live Free or Die Hard" sure looks like John McClane. Older if apparently no wiser, the blue-collar super-cop from the "Die Hard" franchise has lost his hair, his foul mouth and apparently his nicotine itch, but he still has the same knack for trouble, the adrenaline-pumping, cheerfully anarchic kind that causes cars to ignite, bodies to fly, eardrums to pop and hearts to race and gladden. He's also lost his sneer, but sneering is cheap, and movies are expensive, especially when your star has pushed past 50 and slid off the power lists.

A lot has happened in the 12 years since Bruce Willis yippee-kai-yay-ed in "Die Hard With a Vengeance" with a glowering Samuel L. Jackson in tow. During that time Mr. Willis's star has expanded and collapsed through hits and duds and plenty of personal off-screen noise. The world has changed too, of course, and with it the action-flick coordinates: for one, Arnold Schwarzenegger runs California, while the sober, nonwisecracking likes of Matt Damon's Bourne rules the bad-boy roost. For another: Mr. Willis has become an increasingly appealing character actor, the kind who punches up a scene or two ("Alpha Dog," "Fast Food Nation") or an entire movie ("16 Blocks"), mostly by playing it not so nice and very easy.

Life or age or something has mellowed Mr. Willis. He no longer enters a movie like God's gift, as he did almost two decades ago in the first "Die Hard," lips pursed as if he alone were in on the joke — which, given the fat salary he was earning, perhaps he was. In "Live Free or Die Hard" he enters swinging, fist smashing through hard glass and sinking into soft flesh. He's making a point and so is the movie, namely that McClane (and Mr. Willis) is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before. And look, he's not laughing, not exactly, even if the film ends up a goof.

An unexpectedly funny goof, at that, despite everything, including the mayhem and somewhat creepy plot. The screenplay attributed to Mark Bomback, who shares the story credit with David Marconi, has the whiff of multiple writers, as action-driven productions generally do. It originated with a 1997 story (dubiously titled "A Farewell to Arms") by John Carlin in Wired magazine about the potential for a cataclysmic, nation-crippling "information war," which mutated and stalled, picking up new writers and equally doubtful names ("WW3.com," "Die Hard 4.0"). Somewhere along the development line, the real world intruded, which is why the original idea about an information war now includes a plausible-sounding or at least not entirely outlandish hook to Sept. 11 — hence, the creepiness.

In most Hollywood action movies, references to Sept. 11 as well as to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are often tacked on or displaced, used for decorative flag-waving or scenes of torture. "Live Free or Die Hard" tries to engage the real world more directly than most studio-made fantasies, with a logic-defined plot involving a disgruntled government security expert. That would be Thomas Gabriel, who seems partly inspired by the counterterrorism expert Richard A. Clarke and partly informed by Bill Gates and is wholly played by the pretty Timothy Olyphant, dressed in black and wearing Maggie Q on his arm. Mr. Olyphant has many charms, but annihilating menace is not one of them. Mr. Willis nonetheless keeps any incredulity in check along with his sneer.

Despite its jaw-jutting title, with its evocation of revolutionary America and radical individualism, "Live Free or Die Hard" keeps a tighter rein on McClane, dialing down his man-against-the-world attitude to a low hum. He's still more or less alone, at least existentially, though, as per the action playbook, he quickly picks up a sidekick and audience surrogate in the hacker impersonated by Justin Long (flicking between annoyance and amusement).

But McClane is also unequivocally playing for team America, helping the F.B.I. and its no-nonsense, supremely capable deputy director, Bowman (Cliff Curtis), who runs the sillily named cyber division with blinking monitors and scurrying minions. Heroic in deed and in acquaintance, Bowman knows to side with McClane, saving his contemptuous looks for the guy from Homeland Security.

Nothing on Len Wiseman's résumé — he previously directed the two "Underworld" flicks, wherein the Goth kids really are vampires — suggests that he could wrangle both Mr. Willis and this new film's nerve-jangling action to such satisfying effect. At least on the second count he has received terrific help from a sprawling cast of stuntmen and -women (and the stunt coordinator Brad Martin), who do a great deal to advance the film's old-school mayhem. The use of Parkour during several fight scenes is particularly tasty, proving that when cinematic push comes to shove, the French, who originated this ultra-cool rough-and-tumble, which finds performers bouncing like balls from wall to wall, rooftop to rooftop and many hair-raising points in between, are definitely in the coalition of the willing.

"Live Free or Die Hard" is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Extremely brutal violence and mild obscenities.

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Len Wiseman; written by Mark Bomback, based on a story by Mr. Bomback and David Marconi; director of photography, Simon Duggan; edited by Nicolas de Toth; music by Marco Beltrami; production designer, Patrick Tatopoulos; stunt coordinator, Brad Martin; produced by Michael Fottrell; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 130 minutes.

WITH: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Timothy Olyphant (Thomas Gabriel), Justin Long (Matt Farrell), Cliff Curtis (Bowman), Maggie Q (Mai) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lucy McClane).

Think of It This Way, Tony: At Least America Will Miss You

By James Traub
Washingtonpost, June 24, 2007

The people of Britain will shed few tears when Tony Blair steps down as prime minister on Wednesday. But Americans will miss him deeply, the way we do the star of a beloved TV drama that the networks finally cancel. Not since Mikhail Gorbachev has the leader of a great power so utterly outlived his welcome at home while remaining the apple of the American eye.

Why the crush? Just read Blair's speech before Parliament on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion of Iraq. A million Britons had marched in protest the month before; the leaders of Blair's own Labor Party believed that he was making a terrible mistake, and in some cases had publicly said so. And Blair stood in the well of the House of Commons and warned that our equivocation was emboldening our enemies: "That is why this indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use our weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity; when in fact, pushed to the limit, we will act."

Blair's argument was predicated on his certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His speech, in short, was wrong. The British public, which lost patience with Blair years ago, believes that he led them into war in 2003 on a lie. A more charitable, and perhaps less dispassionate, conclusion is that he acted on a conviction that he would not permit troubling evidence to undermine. The same may be true of George W. Bush. I'm guessing, though, that a great many Americans who would never give Bush the benefit of the doubt would do so for Blair. And perhaps that's because of the way they feel about Bush: Our leader was the naif, the showboat, the callow cowboy; theirs was his photographic positive -- steadfast, worldly, eloquent.

And what eloquence! No doubt Americans are too easily impressed by genuine oratory because our own political life is so gassy with the fake, bloated variety. Bush seems to veer between two radically different rhetorical modes: the swelling biblical or Lincolnesque cadences (so obviously, if often splendidly, scripted for him) and the taciturn Texas county sheriff. His language has almost always seemed too big or too small. Blair, by contrast, always found the words that fit even the most solemn moment, as when he united the British people after the death of Princess Diana -- "the people's princess," as he memorably called her. Or in the speech last month announcing his resignation: "Believe one thing if nothing else. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right." After a thousand years of great oratory, Britons may have developed an immunity to such stirring formulations; Americans sure haven't.

I could go on about the particulars of Blair's speaking style: the punchy sentences, the strategic repetition, the homey expressions ("hand on heart") that the British themselves often rolled their eyes at. But all this is technique, which any bright schoolboy could pick up were he so inclined. Blair is worth caring for because of what he stood for.

In April 1999, Blair gave a speech in Chicago framing what he called "a new doctrine of international community." NATO had been bombing Kosovo for the previous month without breaking the will of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. In Chicago, Blair said flatly, "We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand."

Kosovo was the interventionist plank of that new doctrine. Blair called for sustained reform of the system of global finance, a new push on free trade, reform of the decision-making apparatus of the U.N. Security Council and NATO, progress on global warming and a reduction of Third World debt. And, returning to Kosovo, he insisted that the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states must give way in the face of genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Blair soon demonstrated that he took his own doctrine seriously. In May 2000, when a murderous rebel force in Sierra Leone kidnapped 500 U.N. peacekeepers and threatened renewed warfare, Britain answered a desperate call for help from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan by sending an air and naval force that intimidated the rebels and persuaded them to release the peacekeepers. Here, in miniature, was the decisive combination of military force with moral force that world publics had been hungering for since the 1990s nightmares of Rwanda and Bosnia.

At the time, Blair's doctrine of international community sounded less like a visionary scheme than a hopeful summation of an emerging consensus. In retrospect, it represents a might-have-been that's almost too painful to contemplate -- for the world, not just for Blair. Certainly the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, derailed some elements of this optimistic agenda: Humanitarian intervention came to seem like an unaffordable luxury once we had to use force in self-defense. But ultimately, it was the election of Bush, and Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, that doomed Blair's new paradigm -- and Blair himself. But the British leader cannot put all the blame on his American counterpart, who scarcely made a secret of his bellicose worldview.

Remember how, when the two leaders first met, Bush announced that they used the same brand of toothpaste? This detail, at once lame and unnerving, made you think: Poor Tony must really be missing his old pal Bill Clinton. But no: Blair and Bush hit it off in a way that baffled and vexed people on both sides of the Atlantic who admired the one and scorned the other.

Various explanations have been offered: Both were "conviction politicians" who recognized in the other a man whose yea was yea and whose nay was nay. Blair was determined to stamp out the virus of anti-Americanism in the Labor Party. Most plausibly, the British prime minister understood that the new world he sought could not be brought into being without the Americans. (Or maybe it was the toothpaste.) Certainly Blair believed that the United States needed an interlocutor to help deal with an increasingly hostile and suspicious Western Europe, and he fashioned this role for himself. The terrible irony is that a man willing to risk his political career for the sake of his convictions came to be seen as Bush's lapdog.

The insult seemed unfair at the time and still does today. Blair pressed Bush to route Iraq policy through the Security Council, and he succeeded. Blair was willing to let U.N. weapons inspections continue, but the Bush administration was not. By that time, Blair could scarcely have withdrawn his support. He believed that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped. More than that, he believed that forcibly disarming the Iraqi dictator was wholly of a piece with the decision to confront Milosevic, another tyrant who posed a threat to his own people and to the West. The 2001 terrorist attacks may have transformed (or created) Bush's worldview, but they only fortified Blair's.

But once the prime minister threw in his lot with the Americans, he was trapped. Blair wanted to give the United Nations a central role in running postwar Iraq, as it had in Afghanistan, but Bush refused. Blair sent one of his most seasoned diplomats, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, to Baghdad to try to work out a political settlement among Iraq's squabbling leaders, but L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, ignored him. What is tragic (or perhaps ludicrous) about Blair's situation is that he had placed his fate in the hands of a man who did not share his views. He should have realized it. Perhaps he did.

It has been a long downward spiral for a leader who once seemed a protean figure in British political history. The transformation that Blair had to work to make Labor the overwhelming majority party in England was vastly more wrenching than the operation Clinton carried out on the Democrats. Even the harshest British obituaries -- which is to say, the ones from the left -- concede that today's England is more open, more tolerant, more self-confident and more just than the one Blair inherited. But they blame him for promising much and accomplishing little in the reform of public services, for shamelessly hobnobbing with the rich, for ruling by fiat, for surrendering to the dark arts of spin and above all for lying -- and not only about Iraq. For those of us across the ocean, this is a little bit like hearing that the boss you so admire is a monster at home. They would know, of course; but it's still hard to believe.

Tony Blair leaves office under a cloud darker even than the one that shadowed Bill Clinton. His sad trajectory brings to mind Lyndon B. Johnson, another greatly gifted and even brave leader brought low by a ruinous war from which he could not extricate himself. Blair is still young and energetic, unlike Johnson when he left office, and has many years in which to redeem himself. The news that the Bush administration may tap him to serve as a special envoy to the Middle East suggests that opportunities for redemption could come sooner than imagined. Blair himself has said that he hopes to advance the liberal internationalist credo for which he once served as standard-bearer. But he will have to face the fact that nothing has undermined that credo so much as the war he fought in its name.

Becker still holds court with mind games

Andrew Longmore, The Australian.
June 25, 2007

THERE is a less happy Wimbledon anniversary for Boris Becker to celebrate this time. We have had the reprise of his astonishing victory in 1985 and his defence of the men's singles title the following year, and now we have to remember his first Wimbledon defeat, by an unknown Australian called Peter Doohan all of 20 years ago.
The match was not memorable, but the press conference was. Doohan had done his homework and sensed the young champion, still just 19, might be vulnerable in the early rounds. He took his chance. But in defeat Becker revealed something much greater in himself than the mere winning and losing of tennis matches.

"What did I say?" he asks, sitting in the executive suite of a smart London hotel, looking every inch the successful businessman.

"Oh yes, I remember now. 'It wasn't a war. Nobody died out there. I just lost a tennis match'."

Becker believes it is as true now as it was then, but the innocence of the remark brought a roomful of journalists to confront two further truths: the first was that a teenager from Munich had just educated his elders in the trivialities of sport; the second was that, if we did not know it before, we were in the presence of a real star, on and off the court.

Becker and the press were made for each other. Now he has hopped over the other side of the fence as not only a trenchant and acute critic of the game, but a television reporter, asking difficult and often inappropriate questions to sports stars who want only to seek the comforts of the dressing-room.

When Dirk Nowitzki missed a game-winning jump shot for the Dallas Mavericks in last year's NBA finals, Becker had to ask what happened.

"I spoke to David Beckham after the Ecuador game (England won 1-0) in the last World Cup," he recalls. "He had just been sick at the side of the pitch and it was all over his shirt, but he came over to talk. I didn't need to ask him about it because I knew he would talk.

"Same with Dirk. All he wanted to say was why he missed. I didn't need to ask him why. It helps, though, if there is respect for each other."

Becker was always a skilled post-match interviewee. He said just enough to discourage a follow-up question but not enough to mean much.

He always talked sense and is doing so again now, not so much about the technical aspects of the backhand and forehand or volley, but about gamesmanship and the psychology of matchplay, which he believes is a forgotten art.

"Sometimes you had to interrupt matches, put the other guy out of his rhythm," he says. Becker was the best shoelace tier in the game, and his shoelaces always came undone at critical moments.

"Maybe argue with the umpire, question a call," he says.

"Can you imagine what Ilie Nastase would have done against Roger Federer? Nobody does that to Federer, nobody tries to get inside his head and disrupt his rhythm."

At least, not on the green grass of Wimbledon's Centre Court.

"I was watching a match sitting next to (Ivan) Ljubicic the other day in Hamburg and a guy, I can't remember the name, was playing Rafael Nadal and, on one point, he came to the net and hit a winning volley. Ljubicic says, 'Ah, that's how you beat Nadal'. I was amazed. He'd only just worked it out."

Ion Tiriac, Becker's first mentor, taught him the psychological subtleties of the game. Tiriac, a gruff Romanian who made Brad Gilbert, Andy Murray's combative coach, seem like an amateur when it came to winning ugly, knew how to manipulate matches, how to win when playing below his best and how to draw an opponent into playing the way he wanted.

During his second Wimbledon, Becker was worked so hard by Tiriac that he recalls screaming "why do I have to serve another hundred balls?" at him in frustration.

"He wanted to know how far I was prepared to go to win. That fighting spirit always came through in my matches," Becker says.

"I always fought to the last point. Too many players, if they lose the first set now, the shoulders drop and the body language is not right. It's what I can bring to commentary at Wimbledon. I understand where the pressure points are in a match and what is going on inside a player's head, what they are doing and, more importantly, what they should be doing."

Even Federer doesn't play so smart sometimes against Nadal, staying back when he should go forward, trying to play him at his own game, a champion's trait recognisable to Becker.

"It's pride," he explains. "'I'm Roger Federer, I'm not going to change for anyone'. But he will never beat Nadal in the French Open if he plays as he did in that last final."

Becker finds the modern professional, with notable exceptions, one-dimensional, too swift to accept fate, whether it's losing the first set or taking a line call. Few players, he says, truly understand the mentality of the game, one of the reasons why Federer has dominated all players bar Nadal and on all surfaces except clay and why, back in Beverly Hills, Pete Sampras believes he could still be a contender for an eighth Wimbledon title.

"Pete would still have a good chance," Becker says. "OK, your feet get slower and your body is older, but Pete had some weapons out there and he would keep coming at you every point. Even if he was playing Federer, Pete would keep coming to the net, coming to the net, making him hurry.

"Wimbledon is about rallying now, everyone stays back, so he'd have a chance."

Becker will find Wimbledon changing 22 years on from his debut. The Centre Court is being fitted for a roof (a good thing) and Hawk-Eye is making its debut (also good). Federer, he believes, is more vulnerable in the first week this year than ever before. "He pulled out of Halle, changed his routine, that's very interesting," he says. "But if he reaches the second Monday, nobody will beat him."

Inca Skull Rewrites History of Conquest

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post
June 20, 2007

The 500-year-old skull, found in a long-forgotten Inca cemetery outside Lima, Peru, had two round holes just across from each other. Nearby was a plug of bone, recovered intact, that carried the distinct markings of an old musket ball.

Archaeologists sensed they had unearthed an important find, but it wasn't until months later that a powerful electron microscope scan confirmed it by finding traces of lead in the skull. The victim, who was between 18 and 22 years old when he died, had been shot by a Spanish conquistador.

Given the age of the remains, as well as the age of other remains buried nearby, the archaeologists came to the conclusion that they had identified the earliest victim of a gunshot wound ever found in the Americas.

"There may have been Incas and other native people killed by Europeans before him, but this is our oldest example so far," said Peruvian archaeologist Guillermo Cock, who has excavated in the area for more than 20 years. "This happened at the beginning of a long and difficult history."

Based on carbon dating, as well as analysis of the hundreds of other bodies buried in the area, Cock believes the man was shot in the 1530s, just a few years after Francisco Pizarro and his small army of conquistadors arrived in Peru.

That arrival led to one of the most disastrous population declines in recorded history -- up to 80 percent of the 12 million people in the Inca empire died within 70 years.

The history of the Incas' rapid defeat and decline, written almost entirely by the Spanish victors, has emphasized the valor and skill of the greatly outnumbered Europeans. Cock said the relatively new field of Inca archaeology is beginning to rewrite some of that story.

For instance, Cock said, there is good reason to believe the young gunshot victim died during the siege of Lima in 1536 -- one of numerous Inca uprisings following the execution of their leader, Atahualpa, by the Spanish. He also said there is archaeological and historical evidence to suggest those insurrections were put down with the help of native peoples who opposed the Incas' rule.

"We are just now starting to really compare what was written with the material evidence being uncovered," Cock said. "There is a lot that was never told before."

The musket victim was one of 72 people who appear to have been hastily placed in a formal Inca burial ground where hundreds of others had been meticulously wrapped, honored and interred in the traditional Inca way. The 72 were barely wrapped, had no ceremonial offerings with them and were in shallow graves.

These signs of a speedy burial, along with tentative evidence that two others may have died of gunshot wounds and that several more had been crushed by swinging maces, led Cock to conclude they died during the little-known siege of Lima. He said relatives probably took them from the battlefield and buried them quickly in the traditional cemetery. The remains of women and children, who most likely traveled with the Inca forces, were also found.

Cock's research was funded by National Geographic and will be the subject of a "Nova" TV special on PBS next Tuesday. The discovery of the lead deep in the bone of the skull was made at the University of New Haven's Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science.

Cock, who is trained as a historian as well as an archaeologist, said about 30 of the 72 bodies had been killed by native weapons -- lending support to his theory that Pizarro succeeded only because he enlisted the help of other tribes who were enemies of the Incas. Pizarro's closest allies are believed to have been the Huaylas, who lived about 100 miles north of Lima, Cock said. Pizarro is known to have taken a prominent Huayla woman to be his mistress, and Huayla forces are believed to have had a decisive impact during the Lima siege.

Richard Burger, a Yale University anthropology professor, said that if the finding holds up, it will indeed represent the first example of a Native American killed by guns. He said Spanish colonists were in the Caribbean and Mexico decades before they came to Peru in 1532, and some native people were probably shot during those years. But their remains have not been unearthed.

"There hasn't been much archaeological evidence in this area, so the finding could be very important," Burger said. "There's a lot of interest now in learning more about the Inca decline from sources other than the victors."

Before the Spanish arrived, the Inca empire controlled the entire Andean region, later earning the designation "Romans of the New World." Highly accomplished builders, the Incas built the city of Machu Picchu on a mountaintop 8,000 feet above sea level.

The fast decline of the Incas has generally been attributed to the far more advanced Spanish weaponry, the spread of European diseases to which native people had no immunity, and malnutrition and illness caused by the harsh working conditions imposed by the colonists.

Cock said all those factors doubtless played a role, but the ability of the Spaniards to establish native allies was also important and has been generally ignored.

"They joined Pizarro in the hope of being rewarded with more independence and freedom," Cock said. "I believe they wanted a more equal, more horizontal relationship with the Spaniards. Clearly, that did not happen."

Secretive Kingdom

North Korea is one of the world's most opaque nations. So how do we decode conflicting reports about Kim Jong Il’s health and choice of successor?

By Christian Caryl
Newsweek Web-Exclusive Commentary

June 4, 2007 - If you're confused by the reports coming out of North Korea, you're probably not alone. Take the recent slew of conflicting reports about the health of the nation's Dear Leader. "U.S. calls Kim Jong Il's health a 'concern,'" ran one headline. The body of the story, quoting a senior U.S. official who was himself referring to reports from other unnamed officials in Seoul, alluded to a "monthlong disappearance" by Kim and noted that the North Korean dictator suffers "from advanced diabetes and heart disease as well as high blood pressure." Around the same time, another analysis claimed that Kim had recovered from these "chronic diseases." The report, which based its account on the usual anonymous senior officials in Seoul and obscure North Korea wonks, also asserted confidently, that "intelligence" in the hands of the South Korean government indicates that Kim will choose his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor.

So what are we to think? Does that mean that everything we read about North Korea is garbage pretending to be authoritative truth? This sort of conundrum is par for the course for anyone who has spent time studying the goings-on at the top of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the North prefers to call itself. The ironic fact of the matter is that we know far more about North Korea than ever before. China and South Korea have both deepened their ties with the Hermit Kingdom in recent years, and that means that much more information is flowing out as well as in. A steady stream of defectors has provided us with often-elaborate detail about the country in general. And there's even a small—exceedingly small—population of foreigners who deal with the North on a regular basis. All of this helps us to build up our picture of what's going on in the country.

Yet when it comes to the most important part of the story—the motives and intentions of North Korea's government—it's always best to be skeptical. Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based Russian academic who has studied the North for decades, says that he refuses to comment when asked by journalists about government reshuffles or coup rumors in Pyongyang. Such reports occasionally do end up getting confirmed by events, he concedes, but estimates that they are successful less than 20 percent of the time. (In other words, you'd usually be much better off judging the account's veracity by flipping a coin.) Lankov notes that the
Kim regime won't even publish the precise number of members in the ruling communist party, much less basic stats on the economy. He describes it as by far the world's most secretive state—far more so than even the old U.S.S.R., where it was common for intellectuals to discuss political topics when they knew they were in like-minded company. In North Korea, by contrast, "People are terrified to death to discuss anything political." And that, he says, is because everything political ultimately comes down to the Kim family, which holds the power of instant life or death over every North Korean—and isn't afraid to use it, as countless tales of the regime's brutality attest. For that reason, Lankov argues, "The most explosive topic, the one that is never discussed, is the topic of succession."

The result is a level of mystery that seems almost calculated to drive journalists into a frenzy. Confronted with such opacity, it's hard to resist the temptation to show off even the slightest scrap of seemingly revelatory information garnered from some super-secret privileged source. In November 2004, the Russian news agency Tass reported that official portraits of Kim Jong Il were being taken down in North Korean diplomatic representations and official buildings. Could it be that Kim was on the way out? Respected news outlets jumped on the story, in some cases adding details culled from Chinese or Korean newspapers suggesting that the Dear Leader's days were numbered. It hardly needs adding that he— and his portraits—remain firmly in place today.

Applying a bit more common sense might not be a bad thing. But the fact is that that's far easier said than done. In April 2004, for example, a tremendous explosion took place in the train station in the North Korean city of Ryongchon, killing hundreds of people and rendering thousands more homeless. It happened just hours after Kim's personal train had passed through the same station, spawning fervid speculation about a possible assassination attempt. According to one version the blast was triggered by a mobile phone—a detail that gained credibility a few months later, when the North Korean authorities pulled the plug on the country's 18-month-old cell phone program. Service has never been restored.

Sounds convincing. Yet consider for a moment the important questions left unanswered by this version of events. If the explosion was being triggered remotely, why did the presumed conspirators wait for hours after Kim's passage to send the signal? And why did they decide to kill hundreds of innocents in the process? In retrospect, virtually everything about this incident is still up for grabs. The fact that the North Korean government released casualty figures was actually hailed by some commentators as evidence of North Korea-style glasnost. Suffice it to say that we are still waiting for CNN to open its first Pyongyang bureau. (Skeptics note that the city's proximity to the Chinese border meant that news of the explosion was bound to get out anyway.) In the wake of the disaster one British journalist confidently asserted that North Korea was becoming "more open to international help"—not that that stopped Pyongyang from announcing that it was about to start expelling international aid organizations a year later. And so it goes.

Western intelligence agencies also have a strikingly poor record when it comes to the country. No one in Washington or London predicted the North's invasion of the South in 1950. The Clinton administration signed an agreement that would have supposedly rid the North of its plutonium-based nuclear-weapons program back in 1994—and then delayed fulfilling its own part of the deal because the CIA was assuring it of the North's imminent collapse. (The experts are still sparring over whether the resulting failure of the Agreed Framework led inexorably to the North's first nuclear test last autumn.) In 2002 the Bush administration announced that North Korea had suddenly admitted, in negotiations, its pursuit of a hitherto secret parallel nuclear weapons program based on highly enriched uranium—leading Washington to break off talks in indignation. In recent months, though, administration officials—their reputation already severely tarnished by the Iraq WMD intelligence scandal—have been forced to acknowledge that they can't tell for sure whether the North Koreans still have such a program under way.

Grounds for despair? No, just for a measure of humility. Journalists—and governments—need to do a better job of admitting to the public that any information about North Korea's leadership is to be regarded with profound skepticism. To be sure, a few privileged insiders—former Kim employees, a kidnapped film director—have come forth to tell their stories. That's how we know, for example, details of the Dear Leader's luxury-loving ways. Yet there have been almost no defectors from the upper ranks of the leadership who have been willing to reveal significant details about what makes the regime tick—presumably for fear of retribution against them or their families. Perhaps it's just hard for many of us, wallowing in an age of instant messaging and tell-all blogs, to believe that there are limits to what we can know about other human beings. Consider, for example, this revealing incident involving a North Korean worker (who thus almost certainly doubles as an employee of the North Korean security service) at a European embassy in Pyongyang. The worker was shocked when her brother showed up one day to apply for a visa, because she had no idea that her brother had the right to travel abroad. He, by contrast, had no idea that his sister worked in a foreign embassy. In that respect, perhaps, North Korea can serve as a useful cautionary tale. Is it hard to know what's going on at the top? "It's not just hard," says Andrei Lankov. "It's impossible."