Clovis, with its distinctive biface, blade and osseous technologies, is the oldest widespread archaeological complex defined in North America, dating from 11,100 to 10,700 14C years BP (13,000 to 12,600 calendar years BP)1,2. Nearly fifty years of archaeological research point to the Clovis complex as having developed south of the North American ice sheets from an ancestral technology3. However, both the origins and genetic legacy of the people who manufactured Clovis tools remain debated. It is argued that these people ultimately derived from Asia and were directly related to contemporary Native Americans2. An alternative, Solutrean, hypothesis posits that the Clovis predecessors immigrated from Southwestern Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)4. Here, we report the genome sequence of a male infant (Anzick-1) recovered from the Anzick burial site in western Montana. The human bones date to 10,705±35 14C years BP (CAMS-80538; c. 12,707–12,556 calendar years BP) and were directly associated with Clovis tools. We sequenced the genome to an average depth of 14.4× and show that the gene flow from the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic Mal′ta individual5 into Native American ancestors is also shared by the Anzick-1 individual and thus happened prior to 12,600 years BP. We also show that the Anzick-1 individual is more closely related to all indigenous American populations than to any other group. Our data are compatible with the hypothesis that Anzick-1 belonged to a population directly ancestral to many contemporary Native Americans. Finally, we find evidence of a deep divergence in Native American populations that pre-dates the Anzick-1 individual.

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RAPID population growth is commonly depicted as one of the greatest problems facing modern Africa. For decades, the tendency of birth rates to exceed mortality rates has prompted predictions of land shortage, resource depletion and mass starvation. Underlying causes of high fertility are hypothesized to have been an unusually high demand for human agricultural labour, ‘traditional religious pronatalism’ and a ‘horror of barrenness’, while in some areas the later colonial period saw a shortening of the durations of post-partum sexual abstinence and lactation. Mortality decline from the 1920s is commonly linked to the establishment of cash crop economies, networks of roads and railways, and the diffusion of western medicine, maternity facilities, missionary activity and primary education. Yet the empirical evidence supporting this model of population growth is contradictory. Areas such as Buhaya, Buganda and Bunyoro should have experienced rapid demographic expansion by natural increase in the colonial period according to dominant theories but instead experts in the early decades of this century feared the extinction of the Haya, Ganda and Nyoro. This paper will attempt to explain why population decline among the Nyoro was more severe than anywhere else in colonial Uganda, and probably East Africa.

Summary This article sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda’s earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A data set of 18,600 admissions permits analysis of patients’ age, sex, residence, religion, diagnoses, duration of hospitalisation and treatment outcomes. We document Toro Hospital’s substantial geographic reach, trace evolving treatment practices and highlight significant variation in hospital-based disease incidence between the early colonial and early postcolonial periods. We observe no relationship between numeracy and health outcomes, nor religion-specific effects concerning hygiene-related infections. Christian conversion was associated with superior cure rates and shorter length of stay and with lower incidence of skin diseases and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). However, our findings indicate that STI incidence was linked to morality campaigns and that clinicians’ diagnoses were influenced by assumptions around religious groups’ sexual behaviour.

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