Afarensis

There is all sorts of cool, interesting stuff going on this week.

According to National Geographic Hunting -- Not Ice Age -- Changed European Bear DNA. The article discusses mtDNA research on 20,000 year old bear fossils and implicates humans in shaping the bear genome:

The samples suggest large populations of bears likely roamed throughout the chilly expanses of southern and central Europe during even the worst periods of the Ice Age, according to study lead author Anders Götherström of Sweden's Uppsala University.

Subsequently, the settling of large chunks of Europe combined with hunting has reduced the distribution of brown bears to their current ranges. One important, and frequently unmentioned, aspect of studies like this is how understanding the evolutionary history of a species aids conservation efforts.

Science News Daily's article, Keeping an eye on evolution, reports on recent research on hagfish that increases our understanding of the evolution of the eye:

Professor Collin said the researchers studied a very primitive fish, the hagfish, to discover the missing link.

"This animal diverged from our own line somewhere around 530 million years ago," he said.

Hagfish are simple, eel-shaped jawless and ugly animals, that inhabit the oceans at great depth, and that are renowned for the revolting slime' they exude when disturbed.

They behave as if blind, though they have a primitive eye-like structure beneath an opaque eye-patch on either side of the head. Previously it had widely been thought that the hagfish eye had degenerated from a lamprey-like precursor.

"But our research suggests hagfish did not degenerate from lamprey-like ancestors, but are instead the remnants of an earlier sister group."

Science Daily reports on a Prehistoric Forest Emerges From Farmer's Pond. This story is kind of fascinating:

What he saw amazed him. "We find a lot of trees lying on the forest floor, but this was the first time I've seen so many trees thousands of years old and so well preserved in the soil," he said. Dozens were tangled together, some of them 20 feet long and more than 2 feet in diameter.

"What could bury a whole forest 15 feet underground?" Schmierer wondered. "It had to be a single catastrophic, violent event, and it must have happened a long time ago for 15 feet of soil to build up."

Schmierer and his colleague, Michael Hyslop, a GIS analyst and instructor of geomorphology and vegetation at Michigan Tech, speculate that the trees were either transported or mowed down by the last glacier to move across the Keweenaw, before Lake Superior covered the peninsula. "That would make them more than 10,000 years old," he said.

The trees were found when a local land owner had MDOT dredge his pond.

Science Daily also mentions that Fossils Excavated From Bahamian Blue Hole May Give Clues Of Early Life:

The first entire fossilized skeletons of a tortoise and a crocodile found anywhere in the West Indies were uncovered from Sawmill Sink on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, along with bones of a lizard, snakes, bats and 25 species of birds, as well as abundant plant fossils.

Radiocarbon analyses date the bones at between 1,000 and 4,200 years old with the youngest fossil being that of a human tibia, he said. The fossils are the best preserved of any ever found in the Bahamas because of their unusual location in the deep saltwater layer of the sinkhole that contains no oxygen, which normally would feed the bacteria and fungi that cause bones to decay, Steadman said. Expert diver Brian Kakuk and other skilled scuba divers retrieved the fossils from various places along the floor and walls of the blue hole, which contains salt water covered by a layer of freshwater.

The BBC reports on the Male topi antelope's sex burden:

Females are fertile for a single day only. The topi antelope (Damaliscus lunatus jimela) come together once a year, for just over a month to mate.

Dr Bro-Jorgensen said: "It is not uncommon to see males collapsing with exhaustion as the demands of the females get too much for them."

He observed that each female would mate, on average, with four males, while some reached 12 different partners. And each individual would be mated with approximately 11 times, although one pair was observed together on 36 occasions.

"[The females must] ensure that they become pregnant, and preferably with a hotshot male, so they must focus all their energies on ensuring that males mate with them in that time," Dr Bro-Jorgensen explained.

This is another interesting story, not because of the quote above, but because of what it reveals about sexual selection.

Yahoo News reports on 2 ancient graveyards found near Damascus:

Mahmoud Hamoud said the circular limestone cemeteries that were discovered Monday in the village of Heina, south of the capital Damascus, contained skeletons of both adults and children, more than 120 pieces of pottery, jars and precious stones.

The cemeteries date to the 18th century B. C.

Science News Daily asks Did early Southwestern Indians ferment corn and make beer?:

Dean, researching through her small business Archeobotanical Services, says, "There's been an artificial construct among archeologists working in New Mexico that no one had alcohol here until the Spanish brought grapes and wine. That's so counter-intuitive. It doesn't make sense to me as a social scientist that New Mexico would have been an island in pre-Columbian times. By this reasoning, ancestral puebloans would have been the only ones in the Southwest not to know about fermentation."

Not only does historical evidence for fermented beverages exist for surrounding native groups, but people around the world have found ways to alter their consciousness, she says: "Wild yeast blows everywhere. In the Middle Ages in Europe, Everyone drank ale because the fermentation purified water. Egyptian tombs contained loaves of bread that we used to assume were to eat, but they're actually dry beer: put bread in water, you get beer."

To test this idea Dean got the help of Ted Borek at Sandia National Laboratories. You will have to read the article to find out what their results were.

Science News Daily also has the story on the discovery of a possibly unknown new species of pliosaur:

The fossil, including parts of the skull, was discovered during a dig this past summer in the Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole.

The bones were found near those of a first pliosaur fossil found a year earlier.

Paleontologists had hoped to find the first animal's entire skeleton -- it is believed to have been 10 meters (33 feet) long and weigh between 10 and 15 tonnes (11 and 16.5 US tons) -- but uncovered only large fragments, including its ribcage, a shoulder and leg.

Pliosaurs lived about 150 million years ago, when the Svalbard region was under water, and swam the seas at the same time as dinosaurs dominated the land.

They resembled giant sea lions, with four fins and a snout similar to those of a crocodile, and were the ocean's equivalent of the land-based Tyrannosaurus Rex, according to experts.