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...
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...
Goat domestication may provide another example in which introgression brought new genetic variations conferring advantages for immunity into a population. A ...
Ludovic Orlando has a great review of recent research into the origins and evolution of domesticated horses: “Ancient Genomes Reveal Unexpected Horse Domesti...
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
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...
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...
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...
Last year an interesting paper by Ivica Medugorac and coworkers presented data on introgression in domesticated yaks in Mongolia: “Whole-genome analysis of i...
Peanuts have an interesting origin: “Modern Peanut’s Wild Cousin, Thought Extinct, Found in Andes”.
It happens that I have a book chapter in press that examines Neandertals as a humanistic perspective. This seems to fit the zeitgeist.
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...
I received a letter about lactase persistence that motivated me to a fairly long reply; I thought I would share the question and answer:
Archaeologists and agronomists have accomplished a lot to understand the relationships of today’s domesticated crops and their wild progenitor species. But t...
Ewen Callaway covers the active area of dog domestication research in a new Nature News article (“Dog genetics spur scientific spat”) Callaway:dog:2013.
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...
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...
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 ...
I wandered into your site after searching for Eemian and human evolution.
Here are some stories to entertain, amuse, or depress:
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Here’s a quote you don’t see every day:
I know, what an exciting headline!
Donald McNeil, Jr.::
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...
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...
I feel like I’ve been transported into the future to see what science will be like fifteen years from now:
Ancient DNA technology may make it possible to test some very interesting hypotheses about recent evolutionary change in human populations.
I haven’t seen this paper, so can’t comment on the results, but the story is worth passing along:
New Scientist reports on the parallel evolution of Budweiser and Heineken:
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...
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...
A study of pig mtDNA sequences by Greger Larson and colleagues in Science establishes that domesticated pigs originated in multiple geographic locations fro...