Origin stories.

This thesis is an investigation into the Peruvian pre-Columbian collection at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. The Speed Art Museum acquired this collection in 1934 and it has largely remained unresearched for nearly a century after acquisition into the museum’s collection. This investigation is not an attempt to make broad characterizations of pre-Columbian ceramics. Nor is its goal to fill in all the gaps of the collection’s history. Instead, this thesis follows the evidence the collection presents: the physical attributes of the ceramics, the donor’s history, U.S. history, and information from the collection file provided by the Speed Art Museum. A small subset of this collection is investigated in this thesis due to time constraints. Of this subset, two ceramics can be attributed to the Moche civilization and two ceramics can be attributed to the Chimú civilization. With these attributions, the next step is to authenticate the ceramics. The profuse reproduction of pre-Columbian ceramics has been frequently ignored by opportunistic dealers and overlooked by collectors in private collections and directors and curators in museum collections. It is much simpler to brush aside these concerns of authenticity than actually delving into the origins of the object, as detailed in this thesis. Still, the story of this collection should have been written long ago, as many of the resources relied on for this investigation have been available for the past 30 years or more

The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder