Ancient DNA from Neandertals and early modern humans has recently shown that the groups likely interbred somewhere in the Near East after modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago. As a result, all people outside Africa ...
Evolution
Apr 7, 2021
4
109
When a baby puts something from the floor in their mouth, we panic, but the mouth already contains thousands of bacteria. Now a team of researchers is looking at archaeological remains for an example of how Japanese oral ...
Archaeology
Mar 26, 2021
3
175
In a genetic surprise, ancient DNA shows the closest family members of an extinct bird known as the Haitian cave-rail are not in the Americas, but Africa and the South Pacific, uncovering an unexpected link between Caribbean ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 16, 2021
0
92
Scientists have successfully sequenced the genome of an extinct cave bear using a 360,000-year-old bone—the oldest genome of any organism from a non-permafrost environment.
Molecular & Computational biology
Feb 22, 2021
0
2588
Curtin University researchers studying one of the oldest collections of ancient animal bones in the world have used DNA still present in the bones to identify 17 animal species, including two rodents previously not known ...
Evolution
Feb 8, 2021
0
233
Neanderthals' gut microbiota included beneficial microorganisms that are also found in the modern human microbiome. An international research group led by the University of Bologna achieved this result by extracting and analyzing ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Feb 5, 2021
1
435
Researchers at McMaster University have developed a new technique to tease ancient DNA from soil, pulling the genomes of hundreds of animals and thousands of plants—many of them long extinct—from less than a gram of sediment.
Archaeology
Sep 10, 2020
2
998
The extinction of prehistoric megafauna like the woolly mammoth, cave lion, and woolly rhinoceros at the end of the last ice age has often been attributed to the spread of early humans across the globe. Although overhunting ...
Archaeology
Aug 13, 2020
6
1842
New University of Otago research sheds light on guinea pig domestication and how and why the small, furry animals became distributed around the world.
Archaeology
Jun 16, 2020
0
574
The Caribbean was one of the last regions of the Americas to be settled by humans. Now, a new study published in the journal Science sheds light on how the islands were settled thousands of years ago.
Archaeology
Jun 4, 2020
0
268
