The Guardian view on ancient DNA: a female shaman exposes our flawed assumptions about the past | Editorial
We Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, is at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Photograph: Martin Stacey/Easy Animal StudioView image in fullscreenWe Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, is at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Until very recently it was also believed, on considerably slimmer evidence, that this shaman was a man: it was simply assumed that someone of such status must be male, and the view was barely questioned over the years.
- ▪We Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, is at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
- ▪Photograph: Martin Stacey/Easy Animal StudioView image in fullscreenWe Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, is at the Francis Crick Institute in
- ▪Until very recently it was also believed, on considerably slimmer evidence, that this shaman was a man: it was simply assumed that someone of such status must be male, and the view was barely questioned over the years.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/27/the-guardian-view-on-ancient-dna-a-female-shaman-exposes-our-flawed-assumptions-about-the-past |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:25:15 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T17:31:32.093Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T17:31:32.093Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | MQH0lBLaxZJv |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
We Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, is at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Photograph: Martin Stacey/Easy Animal StudioView image in fullscreenWe Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, is at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Photograph: Martin Stacey/Easy Animal StudioOpinionArchaeologyThe Guardian view on ancient DNA: a female shaman exposes our flawed assumptions about the pastEditorialThanks to new technology we are are acquiring insights into earlier times, and realising how little we truly knowMon 27 Jul 2026 13.25 EDTLast modified on Mon 27 Jul 2026 13.44 EDTShareArchaeologists…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Science.
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