How we discovered the world’s largest tropical #peatland, deep in the jungles of #Congo
▻https://theconversation.com/how-we-discovered-the-worlds-largest-tropical-peatland-deep-in-the-
We were increasingly in awe that a remote, almost unknown, wilderness such as this could still be found on Earth today.
Astonishingly, 145,500 km² of peatland – an area larger than England – went undetected on our crowded planet until now. We found 30 billion metric tonnes of carbon stored in this new ecosystem that nobody knew existed. That’s equivalent to 20 years of current US fossil fuel emissions. You can read the important science in Nature. Here we describe how we did it, and our struggles against sabotage, arrest, and losing our own minds.
Europe’s Languages Were Carried From the East, DNA Shows
The new settlers, revealed by a genetic analysis, may solve a mystery swirling around the origins of Indo-European languages.
▻http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150303-human-dna-europe-language-archaeology
New DNA evidence suggests that herders from the grasslands of today’s Russia and Ukraine carried the roots of modern European languages across the continent some 4,500 years ago.
The introduction of farming has often been described as the pivotal event in European prehistory. The new study, published Monday in the journal Nature, suggests that instead of one mass migration of farmers, as long thought, there were two: first an influx from Anatolia, a region of today’s Turkey, and then a second wave of people moving into central Europe from the steppes of modern-day Russia, four millennia later, who would have brought with them the Indo-European languages that became English and many other modern European languages.
Le contenu de l’article est (un peu) plus subtil que l’équation ADN = langage du titre. De même le titre de l’article original de Nature, tout aussi affirmatif, la conclusion du résumé l’étant (un peu) moins.
Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (39 signatories)
▻http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14317.html
We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000–3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000–5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ~8,000–7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ~24,000-year-old Siberian. By ~6,000–5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ~4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ~75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ~3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.
Plein de graphiques, dont
Le résumé cartographique des hypothèses
