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Current
Topics in Ancient DNA Research
Sluggish tuatara fastest in DNA evolution
From The New Zealand Herald
4 March, 2008
Tuatara, often
referred to as living dinosaurs, have largely not changed physically
over very long periods of evolution going back millions of years.
But analysis of their
old bones in New Zealand has shown that their DNA has evolved faster
than any other animal species yet studied.
Read more...
What's the story with...eye color?
From The Herald
11 February, 2008
It
has been a staple of countless cheesy discos and weddings for more than
30 years but now researchers have discovered that Crystal Gayle's song
Don't It Make
My Brown Eyes Blue was on to something after all: brown
eyes did, indeed, turn blue sometime between 6000 and 10,000 years ago.
A
single mutation in an individual probably living in the region
north-west of the Black Sea is now thought to be the origin of blue
eyes. According to scientists in Denmark, the trait then spread with
the large migrations of people seeking new agricultural land at the end
of the last Ice Age.
Read more...
Mystery: Who left the bones in the woods?
From CNN.com
10 January 2008
The
woods off Arcadia Street in Fort Myers for years concealed an unmarked
graveyard, police say. Eight sets of human remains were found in
these woods last March.
While rumors
and speculation swirled in Fort Myers, several people looking for
missing relatives submitted DNA to find out if their loved ones were
among the eight. The DNA samples -- swabs taken from the inside of the
cheek -- were analyzed at the University of North Texas in Fort Worth
and compared to DNA extracted from the bones.
Read more...
Red-haired Neandertals? 
From CNN.com
26 October, 2007
The
image of Neandertals may need a revision: scientists say at least some
of these extinct hominids could have had fair skin and red hair.
Researchers
studying the DNA of Neandertals found a mutation in two individuals
that can affect skin and hair pigmentation, they reported in Thursday's
online issue of the journal Science. Read more...
Probing Ancient Shipwrecks with DNA
From World Science
15 October, 2007
Studying an ancient Greek shipwreck, scientists
say, they’ve found they can decode ancient DNA to learn about the original
contents of jars sunken for over 2,000 years.
It’s a feat “no one thought was even possible,”
wrote Maria Hansson of Lund University in Sweden,
one of the researchers,
in an email. The discovery “opens up a whole new
field of molecular
archaeology,”
she added, as scientists could could use the technique
to gain insights into
ancient agriculture and trading networks.
Read more...
Pig DNA Reveals Farming History
From BBC News
4 September, 2007
The first domesticated pigs in Europe were introduced from
the Middle East by Stone Age farmers, a new
study shows.
The international research project examined DNA in the
jawbones or teeth of modern and 7,000-year-old pigs.
The genetic investigation provides fresh insight into the
immigration of ancient peoples and ideas. Read more...
Dinosaur
Hunter Seeks More Than Just Bare Bones
From The Wall Street Journal Online
August 24, 2007
Prospecting in Montana's badlands, rock ax in hand,
paleontologist Jack Horner picks up a piece of the jawbone of a
dinosaur. He examines the splinter, then puts it back and moves on. It
isn't the kind of bone he is looking for.
Prof. Horner is searching for something that many
scientists believe no longer exists: dinosaur bones that harbor blood
cells, protein and, perhaps, even DNA. Read more...
Ancient Chewing
Gum Yields DNA
From ScienceNOW
Daily News
22
August 2007
Steven
LeBlanc has been dreaming about ancient DNA for
several decades, but he never had any luck extracting it from museum
artifacts.
Then, a few years ago, LeBlanc, an archaeologist and collections
manager at Harvard
University's Peabody Museum
in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, had a brainstorm. He
was
staring at drawers full of quids--wads of plant material chewed by
ancient
Native Americans--when he realized, "Quid ... saliva ... DNA ...
DING!"
In the
September Journal
of Field Archaeology, LeBlanc and several
co-authors report that they have recovered DNA from 2000-year-old
quids, as
well as from aprons worn by Native Americans. Read
more...
English
Less Diverse Than 1,000 Years Ago, DNA Study Finds
From National
Geographic News
August
8, 2007
English
people
are less genetically diverse today than they were in the days of the Vikings,
possibly due to two deadly plagues that swept their country centuries ago, a
new study
says.
The study
compared DNA from ancient and modern Englanders and found that the country
has
a smaller gene pool than it did a
thousand
years ago. Read
more...
Life
From the Oldest Ice?
From ScienceNOW Daily News
6 August 2007
When
Captain
Robert Falcon Scott discovered the Dry Valleys as
part of the
British Antarctic Expedition in 1905, he described them as "valleys of
the
dead." But beneath their desolate, icy surface life goes on, according
to
a new study suggesting that microbes can remain alive for millions of
years
when frozen. Read more...
The
Lost Queen
From Egypt
Today
August
2007
Much of the
search for Hatshepsut’s mummy was the stuff of Indiana Jones
films: descending
into tombs reaching hundreds of meters into the ground, deciphering
hieroglyphs, and finding lost burial places. What made this expedition
unique
was the reliance on forensic technology to identify previously unknown
mummies. Read more...
Mastodon Genome Sheds Light on Human Evolution
From
NewScientist.com
24
July 2007
An
analysis of genetic material
painstakingly retrieved from an ancient mastodon tooth has pushed back
the date
that mammoths diverged from elephants by about 2 million years.
The
finding pegs the mammoth and
elephant split to sometime around 6 million to 7 million years ago,
when humans
and our primate relatives may have last shared a common ancestor.
Researchers
say this makes it more likely that environmental changes at the time
caused a
massive period of speciation in Africa.
Read more...
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