Taj Mahal

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• American Express Travel® released its annual Trending Destinations list for 2024 today, featuring the 10 must-visit vacation spots based on global American Express® Card Member travel bookings and recommendations from Amex Travel’s team of 6,000 expert Travel Consultants.
• This year’s list – 2024 Trending Destinations: Off the Beaten Path – goes beyond the traditional, well-known vacation spots to uncover hidden gems and new experiences that travelers, particularly Millennials and Gen-Z, are looking for.
• View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231114575637/en/
  American Express Travel's 2024 Trending Destinations (Graphic: Business Wire)
  “People are looking for new experiences and to immerse themselves in the local culture when they travel,” said Audrey Hendley, President of American Express Travel.
• Below is the full list of the Top Trending Destinations for 2024:
  The Trending Destinations list offers a trip for all kinds of travelers.

• Recently renovated, it is dedicated to the memory of Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana’s independence struggle and its first president.
• Marking the spot of his final resting place at the park is a massive statue.
• The statue has been continuously contested since its original commission in 1956 and its unveiling at the first anniversary of independence in 1958.
• Attitudes have shifted from straightforward veneration to confrontation and destruction and, finally, to more subtle forms of remembrance.

The birth of a monument

• After his overthrow, several of his statues and images had been destroyed by the military government.
• Acheampong discussed the possibility of creating a mausoleum, adorned with an imposing new statue, on the grounds where the ex-president had declared independence.
• The statue was commissioned in Italy but before it could be erected the Acheampong government was toppled by Flight Lieutenant Jerry J. Rawlings in 1979.
• The memorial project was finally realised in 1992 based on the design of Ghanaian architect Don Arthur.
• This proliferation of historical monuments can be read as an attempt to neutralise the commemoration of Nkrumah.

Strong memories remain

• It has been reproduced over and over again on thousands of private photographs, and is marketed on postcards, posters, calendars, T-shirts, bags, towels, tea cups and similar souvenirs.
• National heroes, as the case of Nkrumah shows, can divide people just as much as they can unite.

• Our new results, published today in Nature, show a group of prehistoric farmers who lived within a network of other communities.
• This group even brought with them the bones of a “founding father”, establishing a lasting, male-dominated lineage.

Difficulties looking into the past

• Ancient burials can tell us a lot about how prehistoric people treated their dead.
• But figuring out how these societies behaved on a day-to-day basis has always been challenging for researchers.
• These challenges are due to a lack of written records, and physical data that can be hard to interpret.
• But only a few, much smaller burials have been found that would likely represent the everyday people of the region.

A network of communities

• Using specialised ancient DNA techniques and several sources of evidence from the burials, we reconstructed two of the largest ever family trees from a prehistoric cemetery.
• Interestingly, some of the “new incoming” female individuals were distantly related to each other, meaning they may have come from a network of nearby communities, and even from the same communities.
• Lastly, we also observed the adult daughters from Gurgy were not buried at the site, meaning they had likely left Gurgy to join other nearby communities themselves (once they had reached a certain age).

A founding father

• We observed an entire group, made up of several generations (children, parents and grandparents), arrived at Gurgy together from the beginning.
• This group must have left a previous site, leaving behind any previously deceased children (but yet still brought and reburied the founding father).
• Hence, like the founding group, these last generations abruptly departed Gurgy together, leaving behind their own buried children.