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From approximately 3,000 to 1,000 years ago, between 700 and 3,400 people lived on the island of Samoa. Roughly 1,000 years ago, the island's population exploded from a few thousand to 10,000 individuals. By analyzing the genomes of 1,197 individuals living in Samoa, scientists were able to gain new insights into one of the last major migrations of humans into previously uninhabited territories. The results of the genomic analysis -- published this week in the journal PNAS -- could also help researchers explore links between early human history in Samoa and the modern health problems, including obesity, hypertension and Type...

PORTLAND, Ore. — A team of retirees who scour the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct — the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the nonprofit Lost Apple Project. The Vietnam veteran and former FBI agent who make up the nonprofit recently learned of their tally from last fall’s apple sleuthing from expert botanists at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon, where all the apples are sent for study and identification. The apples positively identified as previously “lost” were...

Leo McKinstry says the current craze for genealogy reflects an unhealthy combination of snobbery and inverse snobbery, and is a poor replacement for national history When I visited the National Archives at Kew last week the place was full of them, scurrying about with their plastic wallets in hand, a look of eager concentration on their faces. It was impossible to escape their busy presence as they whispered noisily to relatives or whooped over the discovery of some new piece of information. These were the followers of one of Britain’s fastest-growing craze, the mania for researching family history. Studying bloodlines...

Tens of thousands of years ago, two gigantic ice sheets smothered the northernmost parts of what has since been named North America. They towered more than two kilometers high and contained 1.5 times as much water as Antarctica does today. They were daunting, impassable barriers to the early humans who had started moving east from Asia, walking across a land bridge that once connected the regions now known as Russia and Alaska. But once the ice started to melt, these peoples—the ancestors of the Americas’ Indigenous groups—spread southward into new lands. What happened next? Genetic studies, based on ancient remains,...

Palaeontologists have announced the discovery of organic material in 75-million year old dinosaur fossils. The team claims to have found evidence of cartilage cells, proteins, chromosomes and even DNA preserved inside the fossils, suggesting these can survive for far longer than we thought. The researchers, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and North Carolina State University, made the discovery in skull fragments of Hypacrosaurus, a duck-billed herbivore from the Cretaceous period. These particular specimens were “nestlings”, meaning that at time of death they weren’t yet old enough to leave the nest. Inside the skull fragments, the team spotted evidence of...

Woolly mammoths' last stand before extinction in Siberia wasn't made by natives - rather, the beasts had American roots, researchers have discovered. Woolly mammoths once roamed the Earth for more than a half-million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. These Ice Age giants vanished from mainland Siberia by 9,000 years ago, although mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until roughly 3,700 years ago. "Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no...

In 2015, researchers reported that cod caught off the North American coast around 6,500 years ago by Stone Age hunter-gatherers contained more than 20 times the levels of mercury recommended for humans today... They analyzed the chemical composition of bones of animals, like Atlantic cod and harp seals, disposed of in ancient garbage pits, and so preserved to this day. Both species were among the main ingredients in the diet of the local people, even if the early hunter-gatherers, based on cut marks found on the bones, also successfully hunted for haddock, whale, dolphin, reindeer and beaver. The analyzed bones...

In the increasingly urbanized world, few people still ride horses for reasons beyond sport or leisure. However, on horseback, people, goods and ideas moved across vast distances, shaping the power structures and social systems of the premechanized era. From the trade routes of the Silk Road or the great Mongol Empire to the equestrian nations of the American Great Plains, horses were the engines of the ancient world. Where, when and how did humans first domesticate horses? Tracing the origins of horse domestication in the prehistoric era has proven to be an exceedingly difficult task. Horses -- and the people...

Gene sequencing, from which scientists can gather hereditary data of organisms, has revealed that the Black Death, often referred to as The Plague, which reduced the world’s total population by about 100 million, originated from China over 2000 years ago, scientists from several countries wrote in the medical journal Nature Genetics. Genome sequencing has allowed the researchers to reconstruct plague pandemics from the Black Death to the late 1800s.Black Death and The Plague – the plague is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. The Black Death is one huge plague event (pandemic) in history. The Black...

A new study of the genetic history of Sardinia... tells how genetic ancestry on the island was relatively stable through the end of the Bronze Age, even as mainland Europe saw new ancestries arrive. The study further details how the island's genetic ancestry became more diverse and interconnected with the Mediterranean starting in the Iron Age, as Phoenician, Punic, and eventually Roman peoples began arriving to the island. The people of Sardinia have long been studied by geneticists to understand human health. The island has one of the highest rates of people who live to 100 years or more, and...

Nearly a decade into his life sentence for murder, Lydell Grant was escorted out of a Texas prison in November with his hands held high, free on bail, all thanks to DNA re-examined by a software program. "The last nine years, man, I felt like an animal in a cage," Grant, embracing his mother and brother, told the crush of reporters awaiting him in Houston. "Especially knowing that I didn't do it." Now, Grant, 42, is on a fast-track to exoneration after a judge recommended in December that Texas' highest criminal court vacate his conviction. His attorneys are hopeful a...

Scientists examining the genomes of West Africans have detected signs that a mysterious extinct human species interbred with our own species tens of thousands of years ago in Africa, the latest evidence of humankind's complicated genetic ancestry. The study indicated that present-day West Africans trace a substantial proportion, some 2% to 19%, of their genetic ancestry to an extinct human species – what the researchers called a "ghost population." "We estimate interbreeding occurred approximately 43,000 years ago, with large intervals of uncertainty," said University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) human genetics and computer science professor Sriram Sankararaman, who led the...

I know a couple of people who are going to be in trouble with the Woke Science Community. Colin M. Wright, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State, and Emma N. Hilton, a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, have collaborated on an article published in the Wall Street Journal this week. They put forth the revolutionary and highly controversial theory that human beings are born as one of two distinct sexes, male and female. And no amount of philosophical meandering is going to change the incontrovertible medical fact that sex is binary and does not exist on some sort...

Updated: Suspect fatally shot in Virginia Beach was wanted in 1992 killing near Sugarloaf Mountain Montgomery County police confronted man Wednesday during attempt to arrest him BY DAN SCHERE | Published: 2020-02-13 17:45 Montgomery County police said on Thursday that authorities had fatally shot Hans Huitz, 51, who was a cold case homicide wanted for killing 57-year-old James Essel in 1992 near Sugarloaf Mountain. Essel, police said, owned the Sugarloaf Mountain Market. PHOTO VIA MONTGOMERY COUNTY POLICE In Virginia Beach, Va., on Wednesday, Montgomery County police detectives confronted a man wanted in connection with a 1992 killing of a store...

Israeli researchers revealed Wednesday that they successfully grew extinct date plants from ancient seeds found at archaeological sites in the Judean Desert. Dozens of seeds were gleaned from archaeology collections gathered at locations in the dry Dead Sea area, including the Masada hilltop fortress built by King Herod the Great in the first century BCE and the ancient site of Qumran, famous for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s. Six saplings grew from 32 seeds sown and the plants have been dubbed Adam, Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith, and Hannah... Radiocarbon dating revealed the seeds used for...

(Michael Brace/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) _____________________________________________________________ Deep inside our DNA lurks a legacy of lust and romance between estranged human bloodlines reconnecting on an epic journey around the globe. It now seems we might have been misreading key details in this erotic tale. A new method for analysing our genomes for traces of Neanderthal genes has revealed modern African populations – long assumed to be Neanderthal-free – also have a mixed heritage after all. "This is the first time we can detect the actual signal of Neanderthal ancestry in Africans," says geneticist Lu Chen from Princeton University in the US. "And...

Full title: Four ancient skulls unearthed in Mexico suggest that North America was a melting pot of different peoples and cultures 10,000 years ago The first humans to settle in North America were more diverse than previously believed, according to a new study of skeletal fragments. US scientists analysed four skulls recovered from caves in Mexico that belonged to humans that lived sometime between 9,000 to 13,000 years ago. The researchers were surprised to find a high level of diversity, with the skulls ranging in similarity to that of Europeans, Asian and ...

As I said in a BreakPoint commentary last month, gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR and what’s being called “Prime Editing” are “existential threats.” We have no idea what our attempts to play god with the human genome will unleash on humanity. Yet, we insist on charging ahead despite our imperfect knowledge with an unbounded confidence in our abilities.Coming from a concerned non-scientist like me, these concerns can be easily dismissed as alarmist, but what if the concern comes from the Director of the National Institutes of Health?It turns out that Francis Collins is also concerned. In a recent article in...

Called BAZ1B, it may also help explain why domesticated animals look cuter than their wild kin Domestic animals’ cuteness and humans’ relatively flat faces may be the work of a gene that controls some important developmental cells, a study of lab-grown human cells suggests. Some scientists are touting the finding as the first real genetic evidence for two theories about domestication. One of those ideas is that humans domesticated themselves over many generations, by weeding out hotheads in favor of the friendly and cooperative (SN: 7/6/17). As people supposedly selected among themselves for tameness traits, other genetic changes occurred that...

As infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists race to contain the outbreak of the novel coronavirus centered on Wuhan, China, they’re getting backup that’s been possible only since the explosion in genetic technologies: a deep-dive into the DNA of the virus known as 2019-nCoV. Analyses of the viral genome are already providing clues to the origins of the outbreak and even possible ways to treat the infection, a need that is becoming more urgent by the day: Early on Saturday in China, health officials reported 15 new fatalities in a single day, bringing the death toll to 41. There are now...