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Musical instruments provide material evidence to study the diversity and technical innovation of music in space and time. We employed a cultural evolutionary perspective to analyse organological data and their relation to language groups and population history in South America, a unique and complex geographic area for human evolution. The ethnological and archaeological native musical instrument record, documented in three newly assembled continental databases, reveals exceptionally high diversity of wind instruments. We explored similarities in the collection of instruments for each population, considering geographic patterns and focusing on groupings associated with language families. A network analysis of panpipe organological features illustrates four regional/cultural clusters: two in the Tropical Forest and two in the Andes. Twenty-five percent of the instruments in the standard organological classification are present in the archaeological, but not in the ethnographic record, suggesting extinction events. Most recent extinctions can be traced back to European contact, causing a reduction in indigenous cultural diversity.

The aim of this study is to determine the species of parasite that infected the population of Brussels during the Medieval and Renaissance periods, and determine if there was notable variation between different households within the city. We compared multiple sediment layers from cesspits beneath three different latrines dating from 14th-17th centuries. Helminths and protozoa were detected using microscopy and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). We identified Ascaris sp. Capillaria sp. Dicrocoelium dendriticum, Entamoeba histolytica, Fasciola hepatica, Giardia duodenalis, Taenia sp. and Trichuris sp. in Medieval samples, and continuing presence of Ascaris sp. D. dendriticum, F. hepatica, G. duodenalis and Trichuris sp. into the Renaissance. While some variation existed between households, there was a broadly consistent pattern with the domination of species spread by faecal contamination of food and drink (whipworm, roundworm, and protozoa that cause dysentery). These data allow us to explore diet and hygiene, together with routes for spread of fecal-oral parasites. Key factors explaining our findings are manuring practices with human excrement in market gardens, and flooding of the polluted River Senne during the 14th-17th centuries., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published