2012
[ News Blog of Survive2012 ]
 
 

Ancient human diets



About 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in what is now southern Mexico started hedging their edible bets by cultivating a baseball-size squash called Cucurbita pepo. That is at least 5,000 years before the first evidence of domesticated beans and corn -- the other two staple cultivars of Mesoamerican prehistory -- and roughly coincident with the dawn of agriculture in Mesopotamia where barley first was raised.


Source: Maricopa Edu

Scientists have uncovered the secret of mankind's soaring intellect - fish. Thanks to our predilection for cockles and mussels, shrimps and the odd bit of cod, our chimp-brained ancestors were transformed into a species so smart it now rules the Earth.

Great news for followers of the Aquatic Ape Theory
Source: Guardian

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Junk DNA....not junk?


...the study is the first to show in mammalian cells that some human LINE-1, or L1, elements can jump to chromosomes with broken strands of DNA, slip into the break and repair the damage...

Until now, everyone thought L1s were just intracellular parasites in our DNA – leftovers from the distant evolutionary past. The big question in the field is: Are they still there because we can’t get rid of them or do they have a function?...

"We are here today either because of, or in spite of, L1s"...

We have more L1s than any other species.

If they repair DNA in an intelligent manner, does mean we are more highly evolved because of the L1 elements? Is evoution a combination of high DNA mutation from radiation, combined with a repair system which leaves alone any beneficial mutations?

Sources: EurekAlert + NewsWise

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Early whales were wolves


Fossils show early whales became agile swimmers in a mere blink of evolution - about 10 million years.
The pictures in this BBC article show how whales once resembled wolves. Obviously they "crawled into the sea to escape predators or seek food", because a global flood never happened!
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Mutations Can Carry Over Generations


The finding is "a complete nightmare," says Dubrova... "I expected to find nothing in the grandchildren" of irradiated mice, he says, "but no, they show exactly the same increase in germ line mutation rate."

"The remarkable finding that radiation-induced germ-line instability persists for at least two generations raises important issues of risk evaluation in humans," the journal report says.

The researchers stated that inherited mutations were subtle and involved DNA that had "no apparent function".

Rays from space cause inheritable good mutations = evolution? - Hundreds of scientists are studying outbursts of mutation causing rays from the Sun, stars and black holes. Other scholars are trying to prove that our DNA repair system can be selective, and leave good mutations unrepaired. And now we have the first evidence of (good?) mutations being passed down through generations.

Washington Post HealthScout


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Eve described


Eve

Scientists may have reconstructed the face of Eve, the mother of modern man.

By combining genetics, archeology, climatology and anthropology, they conclude the offspring of Eve -- who was taller and larger than a modern woman -- migrated out of Africa 80,000 years ago.

After examining DNA passed through the female line, they believe she would have looked like the reconstruction pictured.

Doco "The Real Eve" screened in the USA on Discovery channel last week. Here are some links:

Factor in a global cataclysm and some cosmic rays to speed up the mutation/evolution and this is evidence for a handful of people surviving a pole shift just 12,000 years ago
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New order of insects


Insect Note: new order, not species...

Researchers have discovered a living population of the insects in the southwest African nation of Namibia

The insects, described as a predator that resembles a mix between a stick insect and a preying mantis, were placed in the new category "mantophasmatodea."

The discovery "tells us that there are places on Earth that act as protective pockets, preserving tiny glimpses of what life was like millions of years ago..."

It would of course be naive to think that anything bigger could be found anew...


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12,000-Year-Old Human Hair Not Human


Human hair dating back to the last Ice Age ten to twelve thousand years ago was discovered in 1999 at an archaeological dig in Woodburn, Oregon between Salem and Portland. The Ice Age site is filled with the bones of elephants, sloths, condors and a bird with a 14-foot wingspan. The unidentified human hairs were found perfectly preserved a few feet underground and had enough follicles for DNA analysis...The geneticists found the hair didn't match any Asian hair DNA. It didn't match African, European. It didn't match anything.
The news is from last year, but didn't get the press it deserved, for obvious reasons! It could be a mutant strain of human that failed to survive the last cataclysm.
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Fish evolve to survive dirty river


Elizabeth River, Virginia, USA is contaminated by creosote, pentachlorophenol, and other chemicals used by a nearby wood treatment plant. Normal killifish taken from clean rivers die there, and killifish residents of Elizabeth River die when placed in clean water.

They have adapted to the conditions, and their offspring inherit the adaptions - Office of Naval Research press release

“These fish have apparently become acclimated to the contaminants, perhaps through altered expression of certain genes, and their progeny apparently inherit the ability to tolerate these conditions, too. There’s some very interesting science going on here.”


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Mutant snake


Two-headed snake Found in Spain by a farmer:

The two heads can eat at the same time and have actually been noted to fight each other for food.

Via Cosmiverse & Ananova


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Making mutants


In Germany scientists are investigating genes in a huge way...

"...two years ago an international team of scientists decoded the entire genetic recipe of a plant - the Arabidopsis weed. They found that it consists of around 25,000 genes (by way of comparison: bacteria have around 4,000, yeast 6,000 and humans 34,000 genes), each of which makes a protein."

Now they are doing something very painstaking, but very worthwhile - creating new varieties by mutating genes one at a time...

"So far, in excess of 100,000 mutants have been created, said Dr Arno Krotzky, managing director. Some of the lines have a gene turned off while the rest have genes turned on. "Our goal is to investigate the function of all 25,000 genes in plants. This will require several hundred thousand experiments to investigate the complex interactions between genes, their functions and the regulation of these functions."


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Fast-evolving penguins


BBC reports:

"Valuable clues to the pace of evolution have been found in the bones of long-dead penguins recovered from the Antarctic.

DNA samples from these bones, one almost 8,000 years old, have given researchers in New Zealand a better idea of the speed of the "molecular clock" scientists use to investigate the evolutionary history of animals.

...The DNA they extracted from these remains indicated the molecular clock was ticking two to seven times faster than previously thought."


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Pint-Size Triceratops


I'm unsure what this Yahoo report is trying to tell us...

Same features:

"The little creature, about the size of a small dog, had horns under its eyes and a small frill similar to those seen on the giant triceratops that evolved later, the researchers in China and the United States said."

Different purpose?

"It would have grazed on plants, and its horns were almost certainly no good for defending itself.....Its distinctive neck frill may have been a anchor for powerful jaw muscles, rather than a display feature meant to attract or intimidate other liaoceratops..."

It evolved horns before they were useful. This isn't Darwinism, this is intelligent, forward-thinking design.


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Genes double up and dance about


"An endangered monkey has given scientists new insights into evolution. The leaf-eating douc langur, native to East and Southeast Asia, has a "duplicated" gene that started as an extra copy of a gene for a particular enzyme but mutated into a gene for another enzyme with a different purpose...because the new gene is redundant, it is free to mutate until it finds a new job...duplicate gene evolved much faster than would be expected from random change, suggesting that positive selection was at work", reports Daily Inscight.


Darwin was an agoraphobic, yet he wouldn't be happy with this possibly curative discovery:

"nearly every social phobia and panic disorder is rooted in a single stretch of about 60 genes"

"the duplication isn't being passed along according to standard patterns of heredity... (passed down through the generations virtually unchanged)...Not only does its position change along the chromosome, but its sequence is sometimes inverted or otherwise rearranged. Stranger still, those changes sometimes occur from cell to cell in the same individual, not just between parents and offspring...the duplication itself isn't being passed along. Rather, it's the tendency to duplicate that's inherited." reports Discover.

Bast comments: The evidence is accumulating. Junk DNA isn't dormant. It is a breeding ground for evolutionary change. Junk DNA keeps mutating until it becomes advantageous, then it is positively selected and becomes useful DNA. The higher the mutation rate (more cosmic ray collisions), the faster we evolve.


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Missing link just a chimp


Oliver Oliver, now a resident of the Primarily Primates sanctuary in Boerne, walks upright like a human. He also lacks hair on his chest and head, and and has a jawline and ears that are shaped differently from normal chimps. And he prefers human females over the chimpanzee kind!

In Japan, 26 million people paid to view him during a tour in the 1970s. For years after that he was a top draw at several animal theme parks in Southern California.

Back then, rumors circulated that Oliver had 47 chromosomes and represented a biological amalgam between man and ape. (Chimps have 48 chromosomes, human beings have 46). But it turns out he has the standard 48 chromosomes after all.


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Ancient humans - love not war


"A study published March 7 in Nature presents genetic evidence that humans left Africa in at least three waves of migration. It suggests that modern humans (Homo sapiens) interbred with archaic humans (Homo erectus and Neandertals) who had migrated earlier from Africa, rather than displacing them.", reports National Geographic.

Previous theories generally stated that the superior strains of human wiped out the lesser ones.

"There are regions of the world, like the Middle East and Portugal, where some fossils look as if they could have been some kind of mix between archaic and modern people," said Rebecca Cann, a geneticist at the University of Hawaii.

This supports my idea that with each global cataclysm, species split into sub-species, which re-combine in the long term. Current humans are a combination of neanderthals, angels, giants, watchers, Atlanteans, gods, nephilim and whatever other nicknames our earlier sub-species had.


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Good mutations


Researchers from the University of Chicago report that about 25 percent of genes mutate in advantageous ways.

"These papers directly conflict with the "neutral theory," which has dominated genetic research since the 1960s. According to the neutral theory, many small genetic changes randomly occur, but the vast majority simply don't matter. Fewer than one percent make enough of a difference that they are either embraced or expunged by natural selection.

By comparing variation within the human genome and divergence from our ape ancestors, the researchers determined that about 35 percent of the accumulated changes were "good."

It means one advantageous substitution has entered the human genome every two centuries since humans separated from monkeys 30 million years ago."

By my reckoning, this could also be a set of 50 mutations occuring at 10,000 year intervals.

Extra: Duplicate monkey DNA evolves


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Cosmic radiation mutated humans


"Two million years ago, just as the Earth's primitive apemen were evolving into big-brained humans, a pair of supernovae explosions occurred near Earth.

Our planet was buffeted with blasts of radiation - with devastating effects. 'These supernovae would have blown away our protective ozone layer,' said Dr Narciso Benítez, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

...for several hundred years the planet would have been battered by intense radiation. All sorts of mutational damage to animals' DNA would have occurred. New species could have emerged as a result. It is possible Homo sapiens may have been one of these."

The theory will be published in Physical Review Letters next week. [Alt. link] More on those supernovae here.


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Mobile phones increase worm fertility


"Until now, regulations designed to protect people from microwave radiation - from mobile phones, microwave ovens and radar systems - have been based purely on avoiding heating from the microwave radiation."

"The safety of mobile phones is under fresh scrutiny following the discovery that their emissions have an unexpected effect on living creatures. The finding throws out the strongest challenge yet to the widely held belief that heating from mobile phone signals is their only potential threat to brain cells."

This is rather serious considering how wireless devices are about to proliferate - and non-heating based research could take many years to show up any dangers to humans. I wouldn't be surprised if this could also affect DNA/evolution.

More info: good article at NetworkMagazine.com, US Gov regulations and research links at Electric-Words.com


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Mutant flies hold evolution answer?


Fly Thanks to Slord, I found a 1998 article at Nature.com about a gene flies have, which can cause non-random mutations.

"First, the kinds of mutations weren't related to the loss of Hsp90, and they weren't totally random – instead, they were related to the 'genetic background' of the stock from which the parents of the mutant flies came. This suggests that the lack of Hsp90 was releasing a Pandora's Box of mutations acquired by particular fly lineages, but which remained hidden until such time as the control exercised by Hsp90 was relaxed.

Second, mutant flies could be bred to maintain the mutations in the population, and the mutations would persist even in progeny in which Hsp90 was, once again, functional. In other words, once the mutations were out of Pandora's Box, they could not always be coaxed back in again. An episode in which Hsp90 was removed from the picture resulted in the irrevocable change of the body form of the fly."

More articles on this research is at the BBC and the Indian Academy of Sciences. Plus, if you have access to offline research papers, there's a huge bibliography


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Macro-evolution: proven


Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals.

This can be achieved by relatively simple mutations in a class of regulatory genes, known as Hox, that act as master switches by turning on and off other genes during embryonic development.


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