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 Europe...
All posts tagged with domestication
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 ...
What ancient DNA is telling us about the prehistory and history of the horse
Ludovic Orlando has a great review of recent research into the origins and evolution of domesticated horses: “Ancient Genomes Reveal Unexpected Horse Domesti...
Chicken ancient DNA and natural selection during medieval times
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
Natural areas going to the dogs
Human presence has changed the natural environment in many ways. One of the most important is the spread of species that do well in the presence of humans, m...
The dawn of bread
Archaeologists working at Shubayqa 1, a site in northeastern Jordan, found tiny fragments of an ancient unleavened bread as they were excavating a hearth. Th...
Link: Searching for knotweed and other early North American domesticates
Annalee Newitz has written an article about Natalie Mueller’s search for the ancient food crops of North America: “Hunting for the ancient lost farms of Nort...
Yaks in Mongolia have more than 1 percent cattle DNA despite male hybrid sterility
Last year an interesting paper by Ivica Medugorac and coworkers presented data on introgression in domesticated yaks in Mongolia: “Whole-genome analysis of i...
Link: Peanut origins
Peanuts have an interesting origin: “Modern Peanut’s Wild Cousin, Thought Extinct, Found in Andes”.
Neandertals from a humanist perspective
It happens that I have a book chapter in press that examines Neandertals as a humanistic perspective. This seems to fit the zeitgeist.
Notable: Plant use in Neolithic Nubia
Notable paper: Madella M, García-Granero JJ, Out WA, Ryan P, Usai D (2014) Microbotanical Evidence of Domestic Cereals in Africa 7000 Years Ago. PLoS ONE 9(1...
Selection and lactase persistence
I received a letter about lactase persistence that motivated me to a fairly long reply; I thought I would share the question and answer:
Teosinte before the Holocene
Archaeologists and agronomists have accomplished a lot to understand the relationships of today’s domesticated crops and their wild progenitor species. But t...
Dog domestication complexity
Ewen Callaway covers the active area of dog domestication research in a new Nature News article (“Dog genetics spur scientific spat”) Callaway:dog:2013.
Domestication, plant breeding, and micronutrients
An interesting essay in the New York Times today by Jo Robinson: “Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food”. The theme is that plant domestication selected for...
Was the first dog from the Altaian Upper Paleolithic?
A new paper by Anna Druzhkova and colleagues examines the ancient mtDNA sequence of a putative 33,000-year-old dog from Razboinichya Cave in the Altai region...
Selection is for the dogs
I was really pleased to see the new paper by Erik Axelsson and colleagues Axelsson:2013 on the pattern of recent selection on domesticated dogs. As we began ...
Mailbag: The Eemian: what gives?
I wandered into your site after searching for Eemian and human evolution.
Link parade
Here are some stories to entertain, amuse, or depress:
Warp and woof
James Gorman stirs the pot on dog domestication, by comparing the new review article by Greger Larson and colleagues Larson:dog:2012 with Pat Shipman’s Ameri...
Rapid adaptation to captivity in salmon
I just want to note this study by Mark Christie and colleagues Christie:salmon:2011 because it is such a clear demonstration of powerful selection working on...
Dog won't hunt
Jerry Coyne points to the extreme changes made possible by artificial breeding of dogs within the last 150 years: “Dog breeding: the debasement of the Americ...
Potato sack race
Smithsonian magazine has a very nice article by Charles C. Mann, “How the Potato Changed the World”, focusing on the effects of the Columbian exchange on Eur...
Mailbag: Dogs in Chauvet
Love your blog, which I stumbled across while googling for more detail on the wolf tracks in Chauvet Cave. Have been fascinated by this stuff since 1st grad...
Man's best friend
Here’s a quote you don’t see every day:
Divergent MHC alleles in domesticated sheep
I know, what an exciting headline!
Ridded of rinderpest
Donald McNeil, Jr.::
Mental mismatches
A Primate of Modern Aspect (“The sexuality wars, featuring apes”) writes about some of the reactions to the new book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of...
The Aurignacian dogs
I didn’t see this article when it came out but I ran across it this week: Pat Shipman writes about possible evidence for early dog domestication (“The Woof a...
A horse of a different color
I feel like I’ve been transported into the future to see what science will be like fifteen years from now:
A history of cattle breeding by the book?
Ancient DNA technology may make it possible to test some very interesting hypotheses about recent evolutionary change in human populations.
First dogs in Aurignacian?
I haven’t seen this paper, so can’t comment on the results, but the story is worth passing along:
Independent hybridization of lager yeast
New Scientist reports on the parallel evolution of Budweiser and Heineken:
Chicken introgression
Bees, dogs, and cattle have all provided interesting evolutionary stories this week. Now it goes to the chickens: A study by Jonas Eriksson and colleagues f...
Rat races
Read Nick Wade's article about Siberian rat breeding experiments. Two strains of rat: one tame and one aggressive. Now they're screening their genomes to se...
Where did pigs come from?
A study of pig mtDNA sequences by Greger Larson and colleagues in Science establishes that domesticated pigs originated in multiple geographic locations fro...