News Snapshot:
Seventeen hundred years ago, a female spider monkey was presented as a treasured gift – and later brutally sacrificed – to strengthen ties between two major powers of pre-Hispanic America, according to a new study. The paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), compared the offering by Maya elites to Teotihuacan to China's panda diplomacy that accompanied the normalization of Sino-US relations in the 1970s. By using multiple techniques – including extraction of ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, and chemical dietary analysis – researchers were able to reconstruct the life and death of the primate,...
