Wolves out of Beringia!
Do Eurasian and North American wolves come from Beringia? That’s the conclusion of a new preprint, Modern wolves trace their origin to a late Pleistocene expansion from Beringia. The figure above is the main result, using ancient and modern mitochondrial genomes to construct a phylogeny. It’s not surprising that the ancient lineages are basal. Y […]
18,000 years BC (the film)
Alpha, set 20,000 years ago in Europe, was apparently originally titled “Solutrean.” The change is probably for the best. It will come out next spring. I really hope that this movie is good and does well. It isn’t often that you have something which takes place during the Last Glacial Maximum. The plot seems to […]
Dogs are necessary when man is sufficient
Wolf-to-dog transition had little to do with humans, ancient skull suggests. I think the headline here is deceptive. This is the important part: A Canadian researcher who specializes in the biology of ancient dogs co-authored one of the most significant studies of the year in canine science: a paper detailing the world’s earliest evidence of […]
Man is the environment of the rat
The above is a figure from a new paper in PLoS ONE, Multiple Geographic Origins of Commensalism and Complex Dispersal History of Black Rats. Here’s the abstract: The Black Rat (Rattus rattus) spread out of Asia to become one of the world’s worst agricultural and urban pests, and a reservoir or vector of numerous zoonotic […]