Palm Sunday

With Natalie Roser:

YNET News, At the heart of every Medjool date is an ancient palm

Ancient wild date palms cling tightly to the soil of the Ein Shaviv oasis in the Arava (located south of the Dead Sea), and to one another. These are not the elegant, domesticated palms familiar from neatly kept plantations, standing in orderly rows and waiting for harvest. Here, the trees form untamed clusters packed tightly along the streambed, dozens at a time, intertwined in dense braids of branches, crowns, offshoots and shoots, until it is impossible to tell where one tree ends and another begins, which was born and which is dying. The flowing spring water carries a pleasant scent, and the ground is layered with a tough carpet of fronds and leaves shed over thousands of years we call history.

This is no exaggeration. A single date palm lives for about 90 years, but the palm colony as a whole is thousands of years old and, according to new research, deserves to be called the ‘mother of the date palm’, a nod to the ‘mother of wheat’ discovered by Aaron Aaronsohn in Rosh Pina some 120 years ago.

The palms growing here belong to a rare species never before documented in this region. They are the original Land of Israel date palms, as they existed before humans domesticated them about 6,000 years ago. Just as traces of Neanderthal DNA can be found in all of us, part of the genetics of this wild palm appears in every cultivated date. At the heart of every Medjool date we eat is an ancient palm.

Linked at The Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and links. The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Extra Value Meal ready for your clicks at The Other McCain.

Is Global Warming Growing Super Polar Bears?

 Leslie Eastman at LI wonders Why Aren’t Polar Bears Going Extinct Like the “Experts” Said They Would? "Climate cultists are blaming accelerated evolution, which is possibly the most laughable explanation they could have offered."

Back in 2019. I covered a book entitled “The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened” by Dr. Susan Crockford. The University of Victoria professor analyzed the latest data and reviewed the questionable values in official estimates, concluding that polar bears are thriving.

Subsequently, she was fired from her position at the university.

However, it didn’t stop what she wrote from being true, as I demonstrated again in 2024.

 

Climate cultists are scrambling for explanations to explain the increasing numbers. Hilariously, they have alighted upon accelerated evolution to explain
what there are so many fat and happy polar bears in 2025…with the demise of the entire species slated for 2050.

A new study from the University of East Anglia suggests that polar bears are undergoing rapid genetic changes, and scientists believe it’s due to the impacts of climate change.

“It’s kind of the first time that we believe we’ve seen a mammal system such as the polar bear, where temperature has been the lead cause, and environmental stress at increased temperature, is impacting their DNA, their genome in real time,” Alice Godden, the lead author of the study, told ABC News.

Researchers say the discovery of these genetic changes offers a glimmer of hope for the bears’ survival, as two-thirds of the world’s population could perish by 2050.

 

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is one of the core global hubs for climate nonsense and is perhaps best known for its Climatic Research Unit (CRU). According to their report, the researchers compared blood samples from polar bears in northeastern and southeastern Greenland and examined gene activity using RNA sequencing, focusing on “jumping genes” (transposons) that can alter how other genes function.

Lead researcher Dr Alice Godden, from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, asserts that her team’s findings offer some “hope” for the polar bears but efforts to limit global temperature increases must continue.

“DNA is the instruction book inside every cell, guiding how an organism grows and develops,” she said. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the southeastern Greenland bears’ DNA.

“Essentially this means that different groups of bears are having different sections of their DNA changed at different rates, and this activity seems linked to their specific environment and climate.

“This finding is important because it shows, for the first time, that a unique group of polar bears in the warmest part of Greenland are using ‘jumping genes’ to rapidly rewrite their own DNA, which might be a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice.”

You know what else is accelerating? The level of skepticism at climate cult research.

Jumping jelly genes! Polar Bears are a relatively recently evolved species, apparently splitting off from ancestral Brown/Grizzly bears about half a million years or so ago, and the two species still occasionally interbreed to produce hybrid "Pizzly Bears." This makes them only a little older than modern Homo sapiens, which seems to have emerged about 300,000 years ago. They could certainly still be evolving.

The Monday Morning Stimulus

AP, Your morning coffee may be more than a half million years old

That coffee you slurped this morning? It’s 600,000 years old. Using genes from coffee plants around the world, researchers built a family tree for the world’s most popular type of coffee, known to scientists as Coffea arabica and to coffee lovers simply as “arabica.”

The researchers, hoping to learn more about the plants to better protect them from pests and climate change, found that the species emerged around 600,000 years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species. “In other words, prior to any intervention from man,” said Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who co-led the study.

These wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia but are thought to have been first roasted and brewed primarily in Yemen starting in the 1400s. In the 1600s, Indian monk Baba Budan is fabled to have smuggled seven raw coffee beans back to his homeland from Yemen, laying the foundation for coffee’s global takeover.

Arabica coffee, prized for its smooth and relatively sweet flavor, now makes up 60% - 70% of the global coffee market and is brewed by brands such as Starbucks, Tim Horton’s and Dunkin’. The rest is robusta, a stronger and more bitter coffee made from one of arabica’s parents, Coffea canephora.

The Wombat has Rule Five Sunday: Indoor Lounging up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

Ancient Dogs Enjoyed Fish Dinner

Phys.org: Ancient Siberian dogs relied on humans for seafood diets

As early as 7,400 years ago, Siberian dogs had evolved to be far smaller than wolves, making them more dependent on humans for food including sea mammals and fish trapped below the ice, a new study showed Friday.

Robert Losey of the University of Alberta, who led the research published in Science Advances, said the findings helped explain the growth in the early dog population, as people put them to work for hunting, herding and sledding.

"The long term changes in dog diet have really been oversimplified," he told AFP, explaining that prior work had focused only on two main ideas to explain how dogs transitioned from wolves, a process that began some 40,000 years ago.

 

The first of these was that friendlier wolves approached human camps during the Ice Age to scavenge for meat, eventually became isolated from their wild counterparts, and were then intentionally bred into dogs.

The second was that some dogs evolved a better capacity to digest starches following the agricultural revolution, which is why some modern dog breeds have more copies of the AMY2B gene that creates pancreatic amylase.

To study ancient dog diets in more depth, Losey and colleagues analyzed the remains of around 200 ancient dogs from the past 11,000 years, and a similar number of ancient wolves.

Not too much need to digest starch in Siberia, not a lot of wheat farming there.

"We had to go to collections all over Siberia, we analyzed those bones, took samples of the collagen, and analyzed the protein in labs," he said.

Based on the remains, the team made statistical estimates for body sizes.

They also used a technique called stable isotope analysis to generate dietary estimates.

They discovered that dogs of 7,000-8,000 years ago "were already quite small, meaning that they just couldn't do the things that most wolves were doing," said Losey.

This in turn led to greater dependence on humans for food, and reliance on small prey and scavenging, rather than prey bigger than themselves, which wolves hunt.

I'm fairly sure some of the process of domestication involved the same process in the Russian fox experiment, where humans tolerated and then adopted and selected for that fraction of wolves that showed some initial toleration of humans.

"We see that dogs have marine diets, meaning they're eating fish, shellfish, seals and sea lions, which they can't easily get themselves," he said.

Ancient dogs were found to be eating fish "in areas of Siberia where the lakes and rivers are frozen over for seven to eight months of the year."

Wolves of the time, and today, were hunting in packs and mainly eating various species of deer.

Interesting, but I'm not sure I see what this is adding to the story.  What I see is that humans around Siberia were subsisting on a primarily fish and seafood diet, and as always, dogs were willing to eat the stuff humans left behind.

The Wombat has Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Olga Alberti out on time. 

Cave Women Found Not Guilty in Decline of Elephants

UPI, Climate change, not humans, fueled decline of prehistoric elephants, mammoths. Because you know smart cave men wouldn't go after elephants with sharp sticks unless there was a good cavewoman behind him pushing him forward.

Sudden and dramatic environmental shifts, triggered by climate change, fueled the decline of prehistoric elephants, mammoths and mastodonts -- and humans likely played only a minor role in their demise -- according to a new study.

For decades, hunter gatherers have served as the primary suspect in the case of the planet's disappeared megafauna.

After all, their descendants, modern humans, have severely degraded Earth's ecosystems and snuffed out dozens of plant and animal species.

But the latest findings -- published Thursday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution -- suggest the emergence of small bands of spear-wielding humans fails to explain the rise and fall of the elephants, prehistoric and otherwise.

Still, there were once many more big animals than there are today.

Thousands of years ago, a wide variety of large proboscideans -- the group of large herbivores that includes mammoths and mastodons -- roamed the planet.

Today, only three species remain, all of them endangered and relegated to the tropics of Asia and Africa.

To better understand the evolutionary history of elephants and their relatives, an international team of paleontologists conducted an exhaustive review of the adaptive characteristics evolved by 185 different proboscidean species.

The review included dental and cranial features, mastication methods, tusk size, body mass and locomotion, among other characteristics.

This analysis allowed scientists to gain a better appreciation for the wide variety of forms and ecologies that proboscideans adopted during the millions of years before the arrival of early humans. . . .

"From approximately 6 million years ago, and especially since 3 million years ago, the ecomorphological diversity of proboscideans started to decrease globally in increments, following events of climatic cooling and harshening," co-author Juha Saarinen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland, told UPI in an email.

According to the authors of the new study, humans fail to explain these periodic declines.

"For instance, in Africa we see the big proboscidean extinction pulse about 2.4 million years ago, when members of the evolving hominin lineage were still very much bipedal chimpanzees in terms of their functional ecology," Zhang said.

"The final proboscidean extinction surges we detected on various continents do not go hand in hand with either enhanced hunting capabilities in archaic hominins or the settlement of Homo sapiens on the different landmasses," Zhang said.

A Gompothere

One of my most prized fossils is a chunk of Gompothere tooth I found at the beach one day, many years ago. It isn't much to look at really; I almost overlooked it as a rock, but where it was broken looked a little crystalline. I had it identified by pros at the Smithsonian. They were clearly in decline long before Amerindian ancestors arrived in the Americas. 

The relationships of gomphotheres to other proboscideans remain unclear, and to some extent the grouping is a wastebasket taxon to refer to proboscideans that cannot be assigned to other groups.Gomphotheres originated in Africa during the Miocene, and arrived in Eurasia after the connection of Africa and Eurasia during the Early Miocene around 19 million years ago, in what is termed the "Proboscidean Datum Event". Gomphotherium arrived in North America around 16 million years ago. Notiomastodon and Cuvieronius dispersed into South America after 2 million years ago as part of the Great American Biotic Interchange due to the formation of the Ismuthus of Panama. 

H/T to Insty.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Natasha Romanova Redux awaiting your digital pleasure.

 

Cause Found for 1980s Chesapeake Bay Oyster Collapse?

An actually interesting article on what may have caused the precipitous decline in Chesapeake Bay oysters during the 1980s. At the Daily Press: A parasite’s rapid evolution devastated Chesapeake Bay oysters in the 1980s, study finds

The study, just published in Scientific Reports, a peer-reviewed research journal, concluded that a highly virulent form of Perkinsus marinus, the parasite that causes the Dermo disease, emerged in the 1980s to devastate oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay.

Researchers had thought drought, which increased the saltiness of the bay, made oysters more susceptible to Dermo.

“The lesson is that pathogens like P. marinus are highly dynamic,” said Ryan Carnegie, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science marine biologist who is lead author of the paper.  “Our disease surveillance must be attentive to any changes that may occur. This includes the emergence of more virulent strains, or variants that may have different forms or life histories than we expect,” Carnegie said.

The researchers found that the change that made the Dermo parasite deadlier wasn’t drought, but rather the arrival of the non-native MSX parasite, first seen in the bay in 1959. Oyster populations plunged to history lows in the 1980s, as the infection took hold. Dermo weakens oysters, often enough to kill them. Infected oysters reproduce less successfully.

“The oysters reached this level of devastation not because they were unable to deal with Dermo after decades, if not centuries or millennia, of exposure,” Carnegie said. “They hit rock bottom because they were challenged with a brand-new form of the parasite and needed time to adapt. And now they are adapting, which is key to the oyster’s recent recovery in the region.”

Before the mid-1980s, the Dermo parasite typically caused a chronic disease that killed about 30% of oysters, mostly older animals that had been exposed to the parasite for several years. “Around 1986, Dermo suddenly became an acute and profoundly destructive disease capable of killing more than 70% of host oysters within months of infection,” Carnegie said. The increased virulence of the Dermo parasite has persisted since then.

While early research showed the parasite’s deadliness increased in saltier and warmer water, Carnegie said, “We began to ask why more protracted and intense droughts in earlier years, before the 1980s, hadn’t produced a similar intensification of disease and why subsequent wet periods didn’t return the parasite to the low levels of infection characteristic of earlier years.”

 

Because VIMS has tissue samples taken from oysters in 1960, the researchers were able to see changes over more than five decades.

They examined more than 8,000 paper-thin slices of tissue and found striking differences over that period, including a shift in where the Dermo parasite attacked, from connective tissue to the lining of oysters’ digestive tract. They also saw sharp decreases in cell size.

The biggest changes came in Chesapeake Bay oysters sampled in 1985 and 1986, when the modern variant increased in frequency from 22% to 99% of observations.

The researchers believe changes on that scale were a response to the devastating impacts of MSX, which killed more than 90% of Virginia’s farmed oysters by 1961, and slashed the harvest of planted oysters from 3,347,170 bushels in 1959 to 361,792 bushels by 1983, an estimated loss of 1.8 billion animals.

“A huge reduction in oyster abundance — like that caused by the arrival of MSX — would severely impact a parasite such as P. marinus that depends entirely on a single host,” Carnegie said.

With fewer hosts to infect, natural selection would favor parasite individuals that spread faster.

So the team found actual changes of the infectiousness, and site of infection of Dermo during the period. So we can call that a fact. They stretch a bit in linking it to the arrival of MSX. It's a reasonable speculation, but I can't really think of scientific way in which to prove the proposed mechanism. The scientific method is a wonderful thing, but sometime it just doesn't work. You can't replay the past with different scenarios.

This is of particular interest to me because, when I arrived in Maryland in 1985, I soon became enmeshed in a number of studies on oysters, including a population survey that was carried out annually in the waters off the nuclear powerplant (and a couple of other "control" areas"). Hence, I was there watching, as the oysters suffered they suffered they're lowest point. (Oysters had already been drastically reduced from their 19th century numbers by "oyster mining" and concomitant oyster reef destruction).

It's a hopeful thing that the team believes that oysters are evolving to adapt to the new version of Dermo, and presumably MSX. 

The Wombat managed to squeeze Rule 5 Sunday: 2D > 3D?  in under the wire.

Jon Snow Will Be So Disappointed

Stuff Ted sends, from Sci Am, Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves

Ever since they were first described in the 1850s, dire wolves have captured modern humans’ imagination. Their remains have been found throughout much of the Americas, from Idaho to Bolivia. The La Brea asphalt seeps famously document how prey animals mired in tar lured many of these ice age predators to a sticky death. The dire wolves’ tar-preserved remains reveal an imposing hunter up to six feet long, with skull and jaw adaptations to take down enormous, struggling megafauna. Though these canids had clearly evolved to handle the mastodons, horses, bison and other large herbivores then roaming the Americas, skeletal resemblances between dire wolves and the smaller gray wolves of today suggested a close kinship. It had long been assumed that dire wolves made themselves at home in North America before gray wolves followed them across the Bering Land Bridge from Eurasia. Now some well-preserved DNA seems to be fundamentally changing the story.

One of the researchers’ questions was how dire wolves were related to other wolves. For decades, paleontologists have remarked on how similar the bones of dire wolves and gray wolves are. Sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart. “My hunch was that dire wolves were possibly a specialized lineage or subspecies of gray wolf,” Mitchell says.

But the new evidence told a different story. Preliminary genetic analyses indicated that dire and gray wolves were not close relatives. “I think I can speak for the whole group when I say the results were definitely a surprise,” Perri says.

After sequencing five genomes from dire wolf fossils between 50,000 and 13,000 years old, the researchers found that the animals belonged to a much older lineage of dogs. Dire wolves, it now appeared, had evolved in the Americas and had no close kinship with the gray wolves from Eurasia; the last time gray wolves and dire wolves shared a common ancestor was about 5.7 million years ago. The strong resemblance between the two, the researchers say, is a case of convergent evolution, whereby different species develop similar adaptations—or even appearances—thanks to a similar way of life. Sometimes such convergence is only rough, such as both birds and bats evolving wings despite their differing anatomy. In the case of dire and gray wolves, lives of chasing large herbivores to catch some meat on the hoof resulted in two different canid lineages independently producing wolflike forms.

In technical terms, the new findings mean dire wolves may need a new genus name to indicate they are no longer part of the genus Canis, to which gray wolves belong. Perri, Mitchell and their colleagues suggest Aenocyon, meaning “terrible wolf.” But the researchers don’t expect their findings to completely overturn tradition, and Aenocyon dirus would likely continue to be called the dire wolf. “They will just join the club of things like maned wolves that are called wolves but aren’t really,” Perri says.

The new findings also add layers to experts’ ruminations on why dire wolves eventually disappeared as the last ice age closed. These predators became specialized in hunting camels, horses, bison and other herbivores in North America over millions of years. As those prey sources disappeared, so did the dire wolves. “In contrast to gray wolves, which are a model for adaptation,” Perri says, “dire wolves appear to be much less flexible to deal with changing environments and prey.”

Nor did dire wolves leave a genetic legacy beyond the decaying DNA in their ancient bones. Although canids such as wolves and coyotes often create hybrids, dire wolves apparently did not do so with any other canids that remain alive today. Perri, Mitchell and their colleagues found no DNA evidence of interbreeding between dire wolves and gray wolves or coyotes. Dire wolves were genetically isolated from other canids, Mitchell notes, so “hybridization couldn’t provide a way out” because dire wolves were probably unable to produce viable offspring with the recently arrived wolves from Eurasia.

Ted's comment with the link was So much for the “Dire Wolf Project”. Not necessarily, while you may not be able to reassemble the actual genes that produced the original Dire Wolf, you could still produce a reasonable simulacrum. And, if you actually have a good sample of the DNA, maybe you can recreate the original, the same way some are trying to recreate the Mammoth from its genes.

The Wombat has Rule Five Sunday: Happy Easter! ready for your amusement at The Other McCain.

Huskies Celebrate 9,500 Years of Bondage

The Husky in our house

Humans have partnered with sled dogs for 9,500 years

To an owner, every dog is special. Maybe your Beagle is brilliant, or your Goldendoodle is hilarious. But some dogs have traits that make them shockingly unique, and not just in their owners eyes—traits that date back thousands of years.

One example is sled dogs, or modern-day huskies and malamutes. These big, fluffy animals make incredible pets and have a history of transporting people across barren, icy landscapes for thousands of years with the help of special heat-regulation and fat-digestion traits. And according to a new study published last month in Science, they may be one of the oldest unique dog types that have sniffed, barked, and run across the earth. The finding could help us better understand all kinds of modern sled dogs, and help keep them from going extinct in our rapidly warming world.

Sled dogs have a rich history alongside groups of people, like the Inuit, that have thrived in the coldest corners of the earth for thousands of years. Mikkel Sinding, the author of the study and an evolutionary geneticist at Trinity College in Dublin, says that up until recently, experts have thought that the sled dog type had co-evolved with the Inuit people two or three thousand years ago. But as it turns out, these pups have a longer history than anyone thought.

To nail down the timeline, researchers sequenced genomes from various dog bones—the oldest being around 9,500 years old, unearthed in the shivery depths of Siberia. They also sequenced DNA from 10 modern-day Greenland sled dogs and a 33,000-year-old Siberian wolf. What they found was that the ancient canine had a lot more in common genetically with the modern-day dogs than the wolf. This hints that this specific group of pup branched off from other dogs around 10,000 years ago, specifically to help usher their human companions all across the globe.

“People used to walk all over the earth until one day, someone got this brilliant idea,” says Sinding. “Somebody can pull me on this [sled], and that is an invention or even technology.”

If we flash back to when that would’ve been, it’d be around the same time that mammoths were dying off, and the ice age was ending. So as the world was changing, humans used their puppy companions to get from point a to point b, sometimes carrying loads as hefty as a polar bear on the sleds behind them.

Another big question answered by the genomic discovery is just how different a modern rough-and-tumble sled dog might be from a pretty poodle or a pouty pug. There are three big genomic adaptations that made sled dogs into transportation powerhouses, says Elaine Ostrander, a comparative geneticist who does research on dog breeds for the NIH.

First off, sled dogs have a high tolerance for eating fats and blubber, whereas our at-home pets mostly munch on carbs. Too much fat for a dog, or person, who lives in temperate climates could mean serious heart disease, she says. Up in the icy wilderness, grains and wheat aren’t exactly common. So sled dogs, much like polar bears, have adapted to eat blubber and fat without the heart health complications.

 OK, I suggest that they have this the wrong way around. Wolves certainly don't have much in the way of carbs in their diets, and until mankind developed agriculture, approximately 10000 years ago, and it spread widely, neither did dogs. Dogs outside the arctic have since evolved to use carbs better than wolves or the dogs in the arctic, where a reliance on wild game or herded animals in their diet remained the dominant food.

The second wild thing about these animals is their ability to control their body temperature in a way that our pups at home might not be able to. If you’ve ever noticed that a husky can be extremely fluffy but still able to keep it’s cool, it’s because its fur is double-coated. That allows it to keep extreme temperatures at bay (which also means, for heaven’s sake, never shave your husky even in the hottest of summers).

If a dog is going to be running in freezing temperatures for long periods of time, regulating their body heat is crucial. But on top of that, sled dogs are also adjusted to hypoxia, says Ostrander. “Their job is to run, and if they run hard enough and long enough they are oxygen-deprived,” she says. That’s where the third adaptation comes in.

After sprinting across a distance, whether it’s in track practice or to catch up with the ice cream truck on a hot day, you’ve probably noticed you’ll need a moment to catch your breath. For dogs that run and run and run, they’ve got to find a solution, which in this case would be developing genes that would allow them to survive even when they are running low on oxygen. People and animals that live at extreme altitudes have adapted to withstanding a low oxygen level that comes along with a mountainous lifestyle. While these dogs aren’t climbing the Himalayas necessarily, they similarly have adapted to a lifestyle where constant strenuous activity doesn’t make them feel as sick or exhausted as it would make other animals who aren’t as used to sledding for hours at a time.

Another recent interesting study regarding the dog/husky relationship: The evolution of puppy dog eyes

New research comparing the anatomy and behavior of dogs and wolves suggests dogs' facial anatomy has changed over thousands of years specifically to allow them to better communicate with humans.

In the first detailed analysis comparing the anatomy and behavior of dogs and wolves, researchers found that the facial musculature of both species was similar, except above the eyes. Dogs have a small muscle, which allows them to intensely raise their inner eyebrow, which wolves do not.

The authors suggest that the inner eyebrow raising movement triggers a nurturing response in humans because it makes the dogs' eyes appear larger, more infant like and also resembles a movement humans produce when they are sad.

The research team, led by comparative psychologist Dr Juliane Kaminski, at the University of Portsmouth, included a team of behavioural and anatomical experts in the UK and USA.

It is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Dr Kaminski said: "The evidence is compelling that dogs developed a muscle to raise the inner eyebrow after they were domesticated from wolves. "We also studied dogs' and wolves' behavior, and when exposed to a human for two minutes, dogs raised their inner eyebrows more and at higher intensities than wolves.

"The findings suggest that expressive eyebrows in dogs may be a result of humans unconscious preferences that influenced selection during domestication. When dogs make the movement, it seems to elicit a strong desire in humans to look after them. This would give dogs, that move their eyebrows more, a selection advantage over others and reinforce the 'puppy dog eyes' trait for future generations

The exception to the rule?

The only dog species in the study that did not have the muscle was the Siberian husky, which is among more ancient dog breeds.

The Beginning of the Dog Days

From David Middleton at WUWT: Start of “Dog-ocene” dated to at least 28,500 years ago

New Study Results Consistent With Dog Domestication During Ice Age
by Matt McGowan | Feb 19, 2020 | Advancing the Data Revolution, Research News

Analysis of Paleolithic-era teeth from a 28,500-year-old fossil site in the Czech Republic provides supporting evidence for two groups of canids – one dog-like and the other wolf-like – with differing diets, which is consistent with the early domestication of dogs.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was co-directed by Peter Ungar, Distinguished Professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.

The researchers performed dental microwear texture analysis on a sample of fossils from the Předmostí site, which contains both wolf-like and dog-like canids. Canids are simply mammals of the dog family. The researchers identified distinctive microwear patterns for each canid morphotype. Compared to the wolf-like canids, the teeth of the early dog canids – called “protodogs” by the researchers – had larger wear scars, indicating a diet that included hard, brittle foods. The teeth of the wolf-like canids had smaller scars, suggesting they consumed more flesh, likely from mammoth, as shown by previous research.

Dog domestication is the earliest example of animal husbandry and the only type of domestication that occurred well before the earliest definitive evidence of agriculture. However, there is robust scientific debate about the timing and circumstances of the initial domestication of dogs, with estimates varying between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, well into the Ice Age, when people had a hunter-gatherer way of life. There is also debate about why wolves were first domesticated to become dogs. From an anthropological perspective, the timing of the domestication process is important for understanding early cognition, behavior and the ecology of early Homo sapiens.
[…]
University of Arkansas

Saved from Facebook:

The Wombat was a day late with Rule 5 Monday: Annabella Sciorra.

A Dog's Life

A pretty good article on the evolution of dogs. I found it on Hot Air. I agree on a big picture level, but disagree with a few of the fact asserted. From Nautilus (I've never heard of them before), Only Street Dogs Are Real Dogs

What is a dog? Many people often think of dogs as kennel club creations. The purebred dog is man’s best friend, not the street dog. Man’s best friends live ubiquitously in the United States, Europe, and other developed countries and, in these countries, are by and large household pets. Man’s best friends only live in areas where people have easy access to vaccines against rabies and distemper. They are the results of certain levels of commercial appeal involving pet stores, breeders, dog food companies, veterinary medicine, magazines, and books.

But could it be that breeds represented as working, hunting, or pet groups don’t represent real dogs? Could it be that the so-called stray dogs, street dogs, neighborhood dogs, village dogs, and even feral dogs of the world are the real, naturally evolved, self-selected dogs?

If his point is that men and dogs co-evolved, and decided to arrange their lives together based on advantages to both species, and not some  deliberate domestication event, I agree. Lets continue.

When watching the dogs in the Mexico City dump, a number of our students would say, “These dogs are different from real dogs—these are mongrels.” The implication is that the kennel club breeds are the ancestors of the village dogs. People seem to believe that if a dog doesn’t look like one of the kennel club recognized breeds then it must be a hybrid or mongrel. People think if you let all the pure breeds go and they interbreed for a few generations, the resulting population of dogs would look like the Mexico City dump dogs.

However, this cannot be true. For instance, dogs on the East African Island of Pemba all look the same, and they have never been anywhere near any breed of dog. Breeds of dogs are a result of what Darwin labeled artificial selection, which he contrasted with natural selection. He was impressed with, even in awe of, people who created breeds of pigeons or dogs or the myriad of farmyard species. Darwinian artificial selection happens when humans select for a particular trait by sexually isolating a male and a female from the general population. Modern humans with their chain-link fences and wire cages find that isolation fairly easy to do, which is why most of the greatest number of breeds of dogs or breeds of anything are relatively recent. Thus, artificial selection enabled the purposeful creation of most of our present breeds of dogs.

I think his view are too much influenced by his observations of village dogs in warm, relatively Wow, street dogs in warm countries have all evolved to a similar shape? Knock me over with a feather. Besides, the way people move around the chances that dogs from Pemba and dogs from other islands, and the African mainland are in at least occasional genetic contact.

Could it be that breeds represented as working, hunting, or pet groups don’t represent real dogs?

Numbering only about 15 percent of the world’s population of dogs, the purebreds, if left to mingle with a free-ranging population, are not going to have any effect on the genetic structure of the world population of dogs. If you released those 150 million purebred dogs into the wild all at once, they would not survive for very long. Why? They aren’t adapted to any ecological niche, and their numbers would be rapidly swamped by the 850 million village or street dogs, either by not finding adequate food or by crossbreeding with the wild dogs.

Our beautiful village dogs are neither the result of artificial selection nor the result of mongrelization of stray pet dogs. The similarity in size and overall design of all the street dogs and village dogs should give you a clue—a clue about natural selection.

For a biologist, that kind of uniformity implies the process of natural selection. Their size and shape (and even color) indicate an adaptation to a niche. The village dog is not a blending of purebreds that was created by artificial selection. The village dog is the animal that evolved on its own, with no reproductive control by humans, and is adapted to the niche in which it makes its living. The message is, those look-a-like dogs have evolved right there in their niche and are uniquely adapted to this niche. They are not escapees from irresponsible dog owners. They are a natural species that lives close to humans, finds its own food, and mates perfectly well without human control.

Our task here is to demonstrate that the dog is a species of mammal that is adapted to its own particular environments. The dog is a shape that has evolved to a new niche that was created when people switched from hunting and gathering to growing grain. The waste products of that activity created a food supply that supports village dogs. Were there dogs before the age of agriculture? Probably not, but if there were, they had adapted to a different niche.

It's pretty well established that dogs were "domesticated", using the word loosely, or at least diverged from the ancestral gray wolf, 20 - 40 thousand years ago, long before the beginning of agriculture, around 10 years ago. So the dog first associated itself with humans of the "hunter gatherer" tradition, and not the farmer. Has the onset of agriculture changed the relationship of some dogs from partners in protection, hunting and gathering (and garbage disposals) to more of a moving garbage disposal with occasional protection duties? Quite likely. But we still have examples of "working dogs" that are hunting and gathering partners in the north. I'll cite the Siberian Husky as one example, which has been only recently been gathered into full domestication, and breed standards regularized after they were imported from Siberia in 1908.

Siberian Huskies have a high prey drive due to the Chukchi allowing them to roam free in the summer. The dogs hunted in packs and preyed on wild cats, birds, and squirrels, but with training can be trusted with other small animals. They would only return to the Chukchi villages when the snow returned and food became scarce. Their hunting instincts can still be found in the breed today.

So until recently the Siberian was a quintessential village dog, only living with their humans in the cold months. And yet, they're very different from the Mexican village dog. Look! Evolution really works!

He then goes off on a long tear about the differing caloric requirements between a wolf (roughly 2500 calories a day, compared to only 1000 for the average "village" dog. Yes, wolves are big, active, and demand a lot of calories, while smaller dogs who raid trash dumps are neither as big or as active. Granted.  But a Siberian on the Iditarod trail can burn 12,000 calories per day, using much less at rest. Let's skip it and get down to the bottom line:

This points us to our original question: What is a dog? It can’t be the purebred, artificially selected by humans and constituting a small fraction of the canine population. Rather it’s the populous village dog. In fact, we have good reason to think of them as the true purebred. They are not mongrels or stray kennel pups let loose on a village, but a species that over time has become finely, beautifully adapted to its niche.

I think that's a very narrow view; both are "true" dogs.

The Wombat, appropriately enough, has Rule 5 Sunday: I Like ‘Em Dumb And Busty ready for your amazement.

The Anti-Science Party

Have We Reached Peak SJW Yet? It's hard to imagine we haven't, but life is full of surprises.

Stacy has one of his weekly anti-feminist rants. I kind of let them go by because, well, they just don't move me that much, but in the middle of this one I found:

I pretty much just call them dicks wherever they appear.

Speaking of “science,” last month an anonymous question was posed in the “Evolution” section of the Internet site Quora.com:

“I got into an argument with my friend because I reject evolution because it’s heteronormative. Are scientists going to make evolution more inclusive or will they replace it with something else?”

Permit me to speak on behalf of the Sane Community in declaring that the person asking this question is deranged, demented, delusional, bonkers, wacky, off her rocker, and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

In short, she is crazy, and it is a waste of time to offer rational arguments in reply to craziness. We do a disservice to the mentally ill when we act as if their delusions deserve to be taken seriously, except as symptoms of their psychiatric pathology, yet this questioner on Quora received a serious reply from Anna Hardin, who recently received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Minnesota:

Because science is just a set of methods we use to observe and report what is happening around us, scientists will not replace the theory of evolution unless another theory that better explains the change we observe in living things is better supported by the evidence. Evolution is well supported and has been for almost 200 years of scientific research, so it is unlikely that a better theory can be discovered.
To the point of heteronormativity, only the evolution of sexually reproducing organisms is heteronormative and only insofar as it requires sexual reproduction. On the other hand, the ways that scientists describe evolution is often very heteronormative, and some confuse sex and gender or ignore variation in sexual behaviors. Other scientists are working to change the ways that we talk about evolution so that it is less anthropocentric and less heteronormative. Heteronormativity is no reason to reject evolution, but it should motivate us to find better ways to discuss evolution and variation that are less biased.

Yeah, I guess so, but shouldn’t an anthropologist point out the basic problem with the jargon term “heteronormativity”? In point of fact, heterosexuality is not only normal, but necessary to reproduction of the species. . . 

Reject evolution because it's "heteronormative"? Evolution doesn't care whether you reject it or not. It only cares whether you have progeny, and raise them to be successfully reproducing  members of the species. Fortunately, it seems unlikely that such feminists will contribute many genes to the next generation. Hopefully their ideas will die with them.

Scientists Create New Shark Species

Well, maybe "create" isn't quite the word we're looking for, but then neither is "discovered." The shark was already known to science, but two species were being considered as one. New DNA technology showed that the sharks, apparently identical in real life, had very different genetics. We call that cryptic speciation, and it's not all that uncommon with small critters.

New shark species discovered by research team led by Florida Tech professor

Toby Daly-Engel, a shark biologist at the Florida Institute of Technology, has helped solve a taxonomic puzzle and spearhead the discovery of a new deepwater species: the Atlantic sixgill shark.

How so? Daly-Engel and a team of researchers determined that bigeye sixgill sharks in the Atlantic Ocean — specifically Belize, the northern Gulf of Mexico and The Bahamas — differ genetically from their counterparts in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

"This is like discovering a brand new living fossil," Daly-Engel said during an interview in her office at Florida Tech's Shark Conservation Laboratory.

"What's exciting about this is that we're still discovering cryptic species of shark. And not just little sharks. And there are lots of little sharks out there. But big sharks — sharks that are 5, 6 even 7 feet long — that have been around for hundreds of millions of years, since before the dinosaurs, and yet have not been identified by science," she said.

Daly-Engel headed a group of shark scientists from the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory, NOAA's Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Panama City, and MarAlliance in Belize. Their findings were published Feb. 13 in the online edition of Marine Biodiversity, a peer-reviewed international journal.
. . .
The Atlantic sixgill (Hexanchus vitulus) is a newly discovered variety of the bigeye sixgill (Hexanchus nakamurai).

The bigeye sixgill shark evaded discovery until 1962 near Taiwan. In the Atlantic, the species was first recorded in 1969 in The Bahamas, Daly-Engel said.

Six Gilled Shark (We call them Cow Sharks) teeth are among the fossils we collect at the beach, and good ones are highly prized as being fairly rare. These date from the Miocene era, approximately 5-23 million years ago. I wonder if this finding will affect their nomenclature?

Great Tits Evolve in Response to Pressure from Man

Birds might be evolving to eat from bird feeders, study says

In a study published Thursday in Science, researchers report that great tits in the United Kingdom evolved to have lengthier bills in a matter of decades. The longer the beak, the easier the access to food in the hanging backyard buffets popular in Britain — and, the data show, the healthier the offspring: Longer-beaked birds produced more chicks that fledged.

The researchers came upon this example of rapid, possibly human-driven natural selection by starting not with the birds’ beaks, but with their DNA. Both Britain and the Netherlands are home to great tit populations that have been studied for many years, and the team suspected that the birds’ genes might hold clues into whether they’ve evolved differently.

So what the heck did you think I meant? Although that might well be true, too.

But after sifting through the genomes of nearly 3,000 birds, the researchers spotted some distinctive sequences. The related genes in humans, they discovered, control face shape. What’s more, the areas where differences popped up were associated with beak shape in Darwin’s famed finches.

“So we’re thinking, ‘Well, this looks like a beak thing here,'” Spurgin said. “What that told us was that the same bits of DNA that control beak length are actually under natural selection.”

Further evidence followed. Measurements dating to the 1970s showed that the U.K. great tits’ beaks had increased in length by about .2 millimeters, Spurgin said — a small but “observable” difference. The birds with the longer-beaked gene variants successfully raised about one more chick every five years than those with the short-billed variants.

0.2 millimeters longer? That's a width known to us weekend carpenters as a "cunthair."

Are we going to tolerate this gross violation of the "Prime Directive?" Don't we need federal bird feeder inspectors to make sure that bird seed is equally available to all birds, regardless of bill length, paid for by nearly prohibitively expensive bird feeding licenses?

Oh, all right, some more Great Tits:

Not That There Was Ever Any Question, But . . .

Science says: Yes, your dog really does love you

 . . .Which brings me to the work of Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the author of “What It’s Like to Be a Dog.”

Berns has, from what I can tell, the best gig in neuroscience. He spends all day taking pictures of dog brains. Don’t worry: He doesn’t remove them. He uses magnetic resonance imaging to study what’s going on in Fido’s head. It’s tougher than it sounds because the dogs have to hold still for Berns to get a good read. But that’s OK. They got the goodest doggos around, as folks on dog-obsessed Twitter might say, to volunteer.

Gotta save characters on Twitter, you know.

And what did Berns discover? Something that almost every dog owner in the world could have told you: Dogs aren’t faking it when they act like they love you. It’s not an act.

Berns and his team confirmed this through a host of tests that looked at different centers of the doggie brain and how they responded to different stimuli. In one test they alternated between giving the pooches hot dogs (the food, not Dachshunds) and offering them praise.

 We call Dachshunds, and other small dogs "mobile kibble."

Looking at the pleasure centers of the dogs’ brains, the researchers found that nearly all the dogs responded to “Who’s a good boy?! You are!” (or whatever they actually said) with at least as much pleasure as when they got a Hebrew National. A fifth of the dogs actually preferred praise to food.

Berns concluded that dogs derive as much pleasure from love as from food. . .

I don't know; Skye sure loves her Dentistix . . .

As a somewhat obsessed dog guy, I’m the first to concede that a central tenet of doggie philosophy is to reject the whole love-vs.-food paradigm as a false choice. Dogs are committed to the idea that there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. But as almost anyone who has come home to their dog after an extended absence will tell you, dogs don’t go bonkers for missing loved ones solely because they think there’s a meal in it for them.

And yet, there are people who argue almost precisely that. There’s what I would call the dumb version and the smart version of that particular school of thought. The dumb version, as the label suggests, is dumb. It can be found in people who say things like, “Dogs just lick you for the salt,” or, “It’s just an animal; you shouldn’t care about its feelings.”

Look in those eyes, and tell me you shouldn't care about it's feelings.

The smart version has more merit. Evolutionary psychologists and other scientists label dogs “social parasites” or, in the words of some, “con artists.” They claim that dogs evolved from wolves to exploit our weakness for cuteness. They also note that dogs evolved an ability found almost nowhere else in the animal world: to read human body language and expressions.

Indeed, Berns found evidence of this in his MRI studies.

Some, rightly, reject the term “parasitism” in favor of “mutualism,” because while dogs certainly benefitted from the warmth of cavemen’s campfires and the tossed scraps from their mastodon kills, they also made important contributions as guard dogs and hunters.

Pat Shipman even speculates in “The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction” that dogs gave us a competitive advantage against our (presumably) hated rivals, the Neanderthals. Dogs — or proto-wolf/dogs — weren’t so much pets as allies in hunting big game, helping us evolve as a cooperative species.

Dogs are GMO wolves. One of those genetic modifications was a change to include people in their social structure. Wolves have a strong social structure, with dominance at the top, and love and support for the pack all around, because they depend on the pack to bring down big prey. The Alpha wolf may rule the pack, but he can't kill a Moose or a Bison by himself. Even the weakest omega wolf contributes to the kill, and get his or her turn at the meal, even if after the good parts are mostly gone.

In the domestication, or maybe co-evolution of wolves and humans, humans were unable to tolerate true alpha wolves, and selected for dogs that accept humans in the role of the top dog. It's not that they don't know the difference between people and dogs, anyone who walks a dog knows that, but they accept the primacy of the humans in their social structure. In return, they evolved an uncanny ability to read our emotions (this was almost certainly a huge selective pressure), and got first crack at all the best garbage.

A few weeks ago, when the news came out about excessive  Huskies coming up for adoption because of "Game of Thrones Effect," someone on Facebook made the statement that Huskies lack a homing instinct, and don't bond with their owners like normal dogs. I responded that they just looked back after 20 miles and thought "Where did they go? I told them to keep up!", and that they were bonded just fine to their owners, but willing to consider a trade up.

Wombat-socho scores a day late with "Late Night With Rule 5 Monday: Coffee, Please".