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The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals

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   Archaeology The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals Analysis connects Greeks to the famed Mycenaeans and Minoans 2 Aug 2017 By Ann Gibbons A Mycenaean woman depicted on a fresco at Mycenae on mainland Greece. © Yann Forget/Wikimedia Commons Share: Facebook Share on X Linked In Reddit Wechat Whatsapp Email Ever since the days of Homer, Greeks have long idealized their Mycenaean "ancestors" in epic poems and classic tragedies that glorify the exploits of Odysseus, King Agamemnon, and other heroes who went in and out of favor with the Greek gods. Although these Mycenaeans were fictitious, scholars have debated whether today's Greeks descend from the actual Mycenaeans, who created a famous civilization that dominated mainland Greece and the Aegean Sea from about 1600 B.C.E. to 1200 B.C.E., or whether the ancient Mycenaeans simply vanished from the region. Now, ancient DNA suggests that living Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, wit...

Psychology and God

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Religion and implicit and explicit language Matthew Follow 12 min read · Mar 14, 2025 Many of the great psychologists have come to the conclusion that religions are true. Not in a literal sense, since this could hardly be proved or disproved by a psychologist, but true in a heuristic sense: in many people, religious belief is a psychologically integrating phenomenon. This should make a lot of sense, the symbols of religion are only “made up” in the sense that they are cultural symbols that emerge in every society in the history of behavioural modernity, and so they reflect the psychology, conscious and unconscious, from which they come. If we take Richard Dawkins’ claim that religions are simply “memes,” it seems also logical to connect their success or failure with their ability to function as — with another term of Dawkins’ — a kind of extended phenotype, something that provides societal cohesion, individual ordering of experience, and integration between the two. Through the lens of...