With Hurricane Harvey doing the damage it did to Texas and now Hurricane Irma approaching, I'm curious. How did major hurricanes affect native settlements and what did the natives do afterwards to recover?

I've recently started reading Patrick O'brian's Master and Commander and there is a member of the ship's crew who is ostracised due to his previous career. He was a 'Sin-Eater', someone who would take the sins of a dead person into himself and was then stoned and chased off by the family. What were the origins of this tradition and how long did it last? I've heard of scapegoats being sent off into the wilderness but never a human equivalent.

In genetic studies, especially of the data from the Human Genome Diversity Project, Russians appear to have at least 10% East Eurasian, often rising to as high as 15% in many individuals (and then some isolated cases even higher).

East Eurasian primarily describes the admixture seen at near 95+% in Han Chinese and Japanese (EDIT: And Malaysia), and present to high degrees in Mongolians, Siberians and other North Asians, and around half or slightly more than half of Native Americans.

West Eurasian, by contrast, describes admixture seen commonly in Europe and West Asia (Caucasus, Middle East) today.

The labels refer to, I suppose, the ancestor branch from whom modern branches sprang from.

Russians having this much East Eurasian admixture fits the gradient seen today, with other people within Russia (Tatars, Udmurt, Chuvash, etc) having 20% or more. And of course we see it in high proportions across Central Asia, nearing half or more in some communities in places like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. Though it bears mentioning that it's highly variant and you can find people in these countries who have 20% or less, living right alongside their neighbors who have 50% or more.

Ancient genomes from Central Asia and Russia show much less East Eurasian. If we stick to the Bronze Age period, there's almost none. If you go back earlier enough (I refer to the genomes of hunter gatherers from Karelia and Samara), you get a few %, but typically 5% or less. So through the Bronze Age, those genomes are almost entirely derived from West Eurasian genetic branches.

This is, again, not entirely a surprise because we know Central Asia was initially populated by West Eurasian, Caucasian-type people for quite a while through the Bronze Age.

And we know that people from eastern Asia, carrying East Eurasian genetic admixture, swept westwards across the Asian Steppe. Turkic-Mongolic tribes especially. But this happened very recently in history (within the last two millennia).

So, is that indeed where modern Russians got their East Eurasian admixture from? From the various Turkic and Mongolic tribes that came via the Steppe? Did it mostly happen before or after the Mongol Empire? It's hard to imagine it permeating the entire people like that in so recent a timeframe.

Title is pretty self explanatory. I'm asking this because I have not been able to find a definite answer on the Internet about these subjects since there is some conflicting information and different points of view.

I've heard people say they did in the now former spanish colonies. Is this true or is it just a myth that was spread by the colonizers and others?

What was the purpose of the name since they were neither Roman nor holy(considering many emperors pissed off the Pope)?

I'm a self-confessed train nerd, but there remain large gaps in my knowledge, mostly concerning how the railways of the past actually operated on a daily basis. I could tell you all sorts of things about closed lines, old stations, which companies ran trains in which areas, who designed what locomotives, but I've genuinely no idea how the railway itself operated, especially from the point of view of the passenger/customer.

Let's assume it's the 1930s somewhere in England, and I'm a wealthy businessman. I live in town A and I own a small factory in town B. I make regular deliveries to towns A, B, C, and D.

• How do I get my goods to market?
• How do I get raw materials to my factory?
• How do I get to and from the factory every day?
• How do I get to London for meetings with my insurance people?
• How do I organise an annual seaside holiday for my workers?
• How long will these take? How much will they cost?

I realise this may be a tall order, and I apologise if I've broken any rules of the sub, but I'm grateful for any help you can offer.

The Percys were descendants of Edward III through Elizabeth Mortimer. When Henry VII took the crown, he and his son, Henry VIII, seemed quite ready to eliminate anyone with a possible claim to the throne (Pole, Stafford). Yet, I never hear of the Percys, despite being from a powerful noble family and with as good of a bloodline claim as the others, including the Tudors, being considered as possible claimants or heirs to the throne.

I saw it in a video however google isn't giving any results and I am unable to find the video which mentioned it.

Despite getting rid of the Social Democrats and Communists, they should've known that the Enabling Act would mean the death of their parties as well.

I'm reading a book on "Pub Theology", which is a framework for regular philosophical discussions in an informal bar setting.

The author makes the following claim at the start of the book:

Luther kick started the Reformation over a few pints. The Church of England was started in the White Horse Tavern.

Sadly, he doesn't cite any sources. I'm pretty familiar with Lutheran history, but I've not read much about Lutheranism and pubs. Are these claims true? Did pubs (as a gathering point for commoners) play a major role in the early Reformation? What exactly did Luther do at pubs over a few pints to "kick start the Reformation"?

This was taught me in US History during my junior year of high school. My teacher was a major war nut, especially WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. Is any of that statement remotely true?

Tropical cyclones aren't common in Europe, typically having to circle around the Atlantic before coming ashore in Ireland, if they even get that far. Even extra-tropical cyclones or polar vortexes aren't particularly common. The storms encountered by the earliest European explorers of the Caribbean would have been surprising to them. Of course, the natives would be used to them, as people who live in those areas are today.

How did the natives around the time of Contact as well as European explorers understand and deal with cyclonic storms?

According to episode 1 of Ken Burns' Civil War, the Confederate Constitution was almost exactly the same as the US Constitution except for: a presidential line-item veto, 6 year presidential term, and outlawing international slave trade. What was the reason for a pro-slavery "country" to outlaw this?

The great popularity of the Shinsengumi in Japanese popular culture has always struck me as a bit odd. As the police of the Shogunate who fought against the Meiji Restoration, weren't they on the wrong side of Japanese history? Yet they seem to have be given the status of folk heroes were one might imagine another nation would have cast them as villains or consigned them to obscurity.

Is this status a result of their contemporary popularity (if they even had any) with the Japanese public during the Edo period? Or did it come about later? Was it a Meiji period thing, a sort of subversive nostalgia for the underdogs, or is it something that only developed later, maybe in the late Showa era?

Unlike Germany and Hungary, they were on the winning side and didn't have heavy territorial losses and military restrictions. So why did they become fascist despite not having a reason to do so?