Genetic Archaeology News Archives Page 15

Scientists Search For Genetic Link Between Ancient And Modern Wolves (7/4/2007)

The ancient gray wolves of Alaska became extinct some 12,000 years ago, and the wolves in Alaska today are not their descendents but a different subspecies, an international team of scientists reports in the July 3 print edition of the journal Current Biology. ...> Full Article

Paleobotanist's Reconstruction What 380 Million Year Old Trees Looked Like (7/3/2007)

The prestigious British journal Nature this week published a Binghamton faculty member's new insights into the world's oldest trees. ...> Full Article

Book Makes Case For Using Evolution In Everyday Life (7/3/2007)

Evolution is not just about human origins, dinosaurs and fossils, says Binghamton University evolutionist David Sloan Wilson. It can also be applied to almost every aspect of human life, as he demonstrates in his first book for a general audience, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (Bantam Press 2007). ...> Full Article

Original Human 'Stone Age' Diet Is Good For People With Diabetes (7/3/2007)

Foods of the kind that were consumed during human evolution may be the best choice to control diabetes type 2. A study from Lund University, Sweden, found markedly improved capacity to handle carbohydrate after eating such foods for three months. ...> Full Article

Applied Biosystems Helps Build Egypt's First Laboratory for Ancient DNA Analysis (7/2/2007)

Royal Mummies Tested through Collaboration with Discovery Channel and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities ...> Full Article

Earliest-Known Evidence Of Peanut, Cotton And Squash Farming Found (7/2/2007)

Anthropologists working on the slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming dating back 5,000 to 9,000 years. Their findings provide long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements in the Andes. ...> Full Article

Trade-Offs Between Force And Fit Shape Beetles (7/2/2007)

Large jaws are efficient in crushing hard prey, whereas small jaws are functional in capturing elusive prey. Researchers have suggested that such trade-offs between "force" and "velocity"� could cause evolutionary diversification of morphology in animals such as birds, fish, and salamanders. Junji Konuma and Satoshi Chiba of Tohoku University found that a new trade-off exists in animal feeding behavior. The team suggests that diversification of carabid beetles could be caused by a "force" and "fit" trade-off. ...> Full Article

Which Came First: Primates' Ability To See Colorful Food Or See Colorful Sex? (7/2/2007)

The adaptive significance of the unique ability in many primates to distinguish red hues from green ones (i.e., trichromatic color vision) has always enticed debate among evolutionary biologists. The conventional theory is that primates evolved trichromatic color vision to assist them in foraging, specifically by allowing them to detect red/orange food items from green leaf backgrounds. However, the results from several empirical studies have called into question the extent to which trichromacy functions in foraging and if it provides a performance advantage over dichromatic primates (who lack red-green color vision). Other studies have suggested that trichromacy evolved in primates so that they could use physical traits like red skin in socio-sexual communication, such as a male providing information to a female about his mate quality. ...> Full Article

Gossip An Evolutionary Tool Not A Character Flaw (7/1/2007)

A new study in Journal of Applied Social Psychology suggests that gossip is not a character flaw, but an evolved mechanism for maintaining status in one's social group. "The results of our study confirmed a consistent pattern of interest in gossip that is exploitable for social gain," says study author Francis McAndrew. "Specifically, damaging, negative news about rivals and positive news about friends and lovers was especially prized and likely to be passed on." ...> Full Article

Study Profiles Microbes that Colonize Babies Digestive Tracts (7/1/2007)

For more than 100 years, scientists have known that humans carry a rich ecosystem within their intestines. An astonishing number and variety of microbes, including as many as 400 species of bacteria, help humans digest food, mitigate disease, regulate fat storage, and even promote the formation of blood vessels. By applying sophisticated genetic analysis to samples of a year's worth baby poop, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have now developed a detailed picture of how these bacteria come and go in the intestinal tract during a child's first year of life. ...> Full Article

Fossils Reveal Early Penguins Reaching 5 Ft. Tall Lived Near the Equator During One of Earth's Warmest Periods (7/1/2007)

Giant prehistoric penguins? In Peru? It sounds more like something out of Hollywood than science, but a researcher from North Carolina State University along with U.S., Peruvian and Argentine collaborators has shown that two heretofore undiscovered penguin species reached equatorial regions tens of millions of years earlier than expected and during a period when the earth was much warmer than it is now. ...> Full Article

Anthropologist Researches Monacan Tribe (7/1/2007)

Karenne Wood carries with her a responsibility that most anthropologists never consider. As a Monacan Indian, she brings her people along with her wherever she goes. This includes into the halls of academia, which, when it comes to cultural research, has not always been kind to Native Americans. ...> Full Article

Modern Brains Have An Ancient Core (7/1/2007)

Multifunctional neurons that sense the environment and release hormones are the evolutionary basis of our brains ...> Full Article

How Fish Punish 'Queue Jumpers' (6/30/2007)

Fish use the threat of punishment to keep would-be jumpers in the mating queue firmly in line and the social order stable, a new study led by Australian marine scientists has found. ...> Full Article

Domestic Cats 'Five Lives' Could Help Save Wild Relatives (6/30/2007)

All domestic cats are descended from at least five common ancestors from the Near East, Oxford University scientists and their collaborators have discovered. The new research, published in this week's Science, also suggests that the domestic cat's ancestors diverged from the ancestors of other populations of today's wildcats around 130,000 years ago, far earlier than previously suspected. ...> Full Article

Students Dig Into Iroquois Culture (6/30/2007)

The hot, dirty and exacting conditions of fieldwork can be a love-it-or-hate-it proposition for archaeologists and anthropologists. ...> Full Article

Study Shows Successful Fathers Have Less Successful Daughters (6/30/2007)

he strongest and fittest of a species might be expected to produce the best offspring, but this is not always the case, researchers at the University have found. ...> Full Article

Invertebrate Immune Systems Are Anything But Simple (6/29/2007)

A hundred years since Russian microbiologist Elie Metschnikow first discovered the invertebrate immune system, scientists are only just beginning to understand its complexity. Presenting their findings at a recent European Science Foundation (ESF) conference, scientists showed that invertebrates have evolved elaborate ways to fight disease. ...> Full Article

Courting Electric Fish Play 'Electric Duet' (6/29/2007)

Cornell researchers have discovered that in the battle of the sexes, African electric fish couples not only use specific electrical signals to court but also engage in a sort of dueling "electric duet." ...> Full Article

Entomologist On International Team That Identified Mosquito's Immune System Genes (6/29/2007)

Understanding how the immune system evolved in insects can help scientists gain new insight into human response to infection, says an Iowa State University entomologist. ...> Full Article

Study Shows Genes Play An Unexpected Role In Their Own Activation (6/28/2007)

Investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered how a single molecular "on switch" triggers gene activity that might cause effects ranging from learning and memory capabilities to glucose production in the liver. ...> Full Article

Tasmanian Tiger Extinction Mystery (6/28/2007)

A University of Adelaide project led by zoologist Dr Jeremy Austin is investigating whether the world-fabled Tasmanian Tiger may have survived beyond its reported extinction in the late 1930s. ...> Full Article

Laboratory Experiments Take The Express Route To Evolution (6/28/2007)

Laboratory experiments have enabled researchers to bypass half a billion years of evolution, giving one protein the ability to function like a distantly related protein with just a few simple changes. The elegant experiments illustrate a powerful way to probe the structure of proteins and may open a way to making more effective pharmaceuticals. ...> Full Article

Human-like Altruism Shown In Chimpanzees (6/27/2007)

Experimental evidence reveals that chimpanzees will help other unrelated humans and conspecifics without a reward, showing that they share crucial aspects of altruism with humans. ...> Full Article

Ice Age Extinction Claimed Highly Carnivorous Alaskan Wolves (6/27/2007)

The extinction of many large mammals at the end of the Ice Age may have packed an even bigger punch than scientists have realized. To the list of victims such as woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats, a Smithsonian-led team of scientists has added one more: a highly carnivorous form of wolf that lived in Alaska, north of the ice sheets. ...> Full Article

Studying Genes Of Desert Fruit Flies (6/25/2007)

Researchers at the University of Arkansas and University of Nevada-Las Vegas will study the genetics of fruit flies in desert habitats to determine how they developed the ability to survive under stressful conditions. ...> Full Article

Daddies' Girls Choose Men Who Look Like Their Fathers (6/25/2007)

Women who enjoy good childhood relationships with their fathers select partners who resemble their dads research suggests. ...> Full Article

Ancient Retrovirus Sheds Light On Modern Pandemic (6/25/2007)

Human resistance to a retrovirus that infected chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates 4 million years ago ironically may be at least partially responsible for the susceptibility of humans to HIV infection today. ...> Full Article

Giant Bird-like Dinosaur Revealed From Inner Mongolia (6/24/2007)

Teaming up with local scholars, CAS paleontologists recently discovered a giant bird-like dinosaur from Erlian, one of the world-famous graveyards of "terrible lizards" in Inner Mongolia. ...> Full Article

Fossil Find Helps Pinpoint Origin Of Mammals (6/24/2007)

The discovery of a 65-million-year-old fossil in Mongolia offers new evidence that mammals began to thrive only after the dinosaurs died off. ...> Full Article