Looking for the vulture assist with Neolithic burials

The archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, is one of the most significant early Neolithic villages to have been excavated. It was occupied between around 7100 and 6000 BC, and at its height was occupied by more than 3500 people. An array of human skeletal remains have been found at the site. Many of them were buried in the floors...

May 2020

Getting species diagnoses non-destructively from collagen

A neat paper by Naomi Martisius and coworkers in Scientific Reports: “Non-destructive ZooMS identification reveals strategic bone tool raw material selection by Neandertals”. The introduction of the paper presents the problem that the researchers set out to solve. How can we get biological identifications of modified bone fragments without drilling...

May 2020

How mice became house mice

A new paper from Thomas Cucchi and coworkers in Scientific Reports probes the early history of the house mouse: “Tracking the Near Eastern origins and European dispersal of the western house mouse”. A quick taxonomy of house mouse subspecies: Although often overlooked compared with commensal rats (Rattus rattus, R. norvegicus and R. exulans),...

May 2020

Goat immunity modified by introgression during and after domestication

Goat domestication may provide another example in which introgression brought new genetic variations conferring advantages for immunity into a population. A new paper in Science Advances by Zhuqing Zheng and collaborators looks at modern domesticated goats and wild relatives from several species, and also a handful of ancient goat genomes: “The origin...

May 2020

Link: Online learning metaconversation

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about how to help students transition more effectively to online learning. Obviously this is a topic on the minds of many teachers and professors this year. I was pointed to a post where Martin Weller reacts to some conversations he’s seeing in his Ed Techie blog: “It’s forever 1999 for online learning...

May 2020

Twins from an adaptive point of view

The biological anthropologist Rebecca Sear looks at the evolution of human twinning in a post for This View of Life: “Solving the Evolutionary Puzzle of Twinning”. She reviews the results of a recent paper modeling the fitness costs and benefits of multiple ovulation in a cycle, or polyovulation. Twinning is a relatively rare event, varying from...

May 2020

Replicability and archiving of geological samples

In Nature this week, Noah Planavsky and coworkers, including the present director of the National Museum of Natural History, Kirk Johnson, have an opinion piece calling for mandatory archiving of geological samples that underlie published research: “Store and share ancient rocks”. This call is analogous to the work maintaining sequence databases...

May 2020

Tending museums through the crisis

Atlas Obscura has an article by Jessica Leigh Hester looking at how curators and staff are tending museum collections and infrastructure while hallways are empty: “The Strange, Smelly Chores That Keep Natural History Museums Running”. The tapir bones rest in a solution of diluted ammonium hydroxide, which pulls out marrow and fat and arrests bacterial...

May 2020

When will we have concerts again?

Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has an essay in The Atlantic reflecting on our need for live music: “The Day the Live Concert Returns”. In today’s world of fear and unease and social distancing, it's hard to imagine sharing experiences like these ever again. I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs,...

May 2020

Hunting the ghost dogs with camera traps

Cara Giaimo in the New York Times covers a recent research paper that combines camera trap evidence from across a large swath of the western Amazon to examine an elusive canine: “The Ghost Dogs of the Amazon Get a Bit Less Mysterious”. Daniel Rocha, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, and the study’s lead author, became interested...

May 2020