Monday Science Links

Here's this week's Science:

• Martin at Aardvarchaeology tells us the strange fate of the first Christian burials in Scandinavia: In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is convoluted and, in my opinion, quite fascinating.


• Bora at A Blog Around the Clock explains how compared to reptiles, we're practically blind: Apparently, there are actually two classes of melanopsin gene. One class is found in all vertebrates, including mammals. Mammals have one copy of it, while some fish have multiple copies (with some variation in sequence). But all vertebrates EXCEPT mammals (including both placentals and marsupials) also have a melanopsin from a different class.


• Brian at Laelaps looks at a new paper on Australopithecenes and their diet: Ever since the discovery of the hominds we call Paranthropus robustus in 1938 and Paranthropus boisei in 1959, the dietary habits of these "robust australopithecines" have been controversial. With skulls that seem to have more in common with gorillas than with Homo habilis, another hominid more closely related to us that lived during the same time, it has long been thought that Paranthropus was a dietary specialist. The saggital crest, large and thickly-enameled teeth, and huge jaws of these creatures has long been interpreted as a mark of a diet largely made up of tough, fibrous plants, but a new study published in the open-access journal PLoS disputes the "classic" view. Instead, the authors argue that Paranthropus was a dietary generalist that was able to make use of a broader range of foods than the weaker-jawed hominids more closely allied to our ancestors.


• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life posts on the death of Eight Belles and what can be done to make racing safer: This morning, the book, My Guy, Barbaro: A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse co-written by Barbaro's jockey Edgar Prado and John Eisenberg, was presciently announced on National Public Radio. They were interviewing Barbaro's jockey as part of their show about today's upcoming 134th running of the Kentucky Derby, American's most famous horse race. Little did the NPR commentators know, but they were casually talking about the last few hours that another noble horse would have on this planet.


• John at John Hawks Anthropology Weblog on whether humans nearly vanishe 70000 years ago: And the current paper by Behar and colleagues provides exactly the right kind of information to get that more detailed demographic history. So I've put together some notes here on how we can discover whether there was a population bottleneck 70,000 years ago in Africa, using the mtDNA evidence. I'm setting aside for the moment the question of population structure -- the "isolation" story that was also made in the press release for the paper. Population structure and size are not independent of each other, and we will have to consider how they interacted in African prehistory. But the first issue should be size, because our interpretation of size is based on relatively simple aspects of genetic variation (at its simplest, the first moment), while testing hypotheses about population structure requires higher-order comparisons.

Enjoy!