Established story about how humans came from Africa may be wrong, claims controversial new study

A footprint could re-write the entire narrative of human evolution, according to the researchers that discovered it

Andrew Griffin 

The belief that humans came out of Africa millions of years ago is widely believed. But it might be about to be entirely re-written, according to the authors of a new study.

They claim to have found a footprint in Crete that could change the narrative of early human evolution, suggesting that our ancestors were in modern Europe far earlier than we ever thought.

The accepted story of the human lineage has been largely set since researchers found fossils of our early ancestors in South and East Africa, in the middle of the 20th century. Later discoveries appeared to suggest that those that followed remained isolated in Africa for millions of years before finally moving out and into Europe and Asia.

But the new discovery of a footprint that appears to have belonged to a human that trod down in Crete 5.7 million years ago challenges that story. Humans may have left and been exploring other continents including Europe far earlier than we knew.

"This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate," said Professor Per Ahlberg, who was an author on the study. "Whether the human origins research community will accept fossil footprints as conclusive evidence of the presence of hominins in the Miocene of Crete remains to be seen."

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Major study shakes the roots of dinosaur family tree

March 23, 2017

by Chuck Bednar

The origins and classifications of dinosaurs as we have known them for the past century may be completely wrong, and the first such creatures may have emerged around 15 million years earlier than previously believed, claims research published this week in the journal Nature.

As part of the new study, scientists from the University of Cambridge and the Natural History Museum of London re-examined the lineages of and relationships between the dinosaurs for the first time in 130 years, and found that existing theories of their evolution could be incorrect. In fact, according to BBC News, lead author Matthew Baron of Cambridge and his colleagues looked at fossil evidence and determined that the dinosaurs may have actually originated in the Northern Hemisphere – possibly in a region that is currently part of the UK.

“The northern continents certainly played a much bigger role in dinosaur evolution than we previously thought and dinosaurs may have originated in the UK,” Baron told the media outlet. “We may be looking at the possibility that the very earliest dinosaurs were roaming an area that has become Britain and the group itself could have originated on these shores.”

 
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Dogs 'can trace origins to Central Asia'

By Paul Rincon

Science editor, BBC News website

20 October 2015 

Today's dogs can trace their origins to Central Asia, according to one of the most comprehensive genetic surveys yet.

Dogs are the most diverse animal on the planet - a legacy of thousands of years of selective breeding by humans.

But they derive from wild wolves that were gradually tamed and inducted into human hunting groups - perhaps near Mongolia or Nepal.

The findings come from an analysis of DNA from thousands of pooches, and are published in PNAS journal.

Cornell University's Dr Adam Boyko and his colleagues studied 4,676 purebred dogs from recognised breeds, as well as 549 "village dogs" - free-ranging animals that live around human settlements.

They hitched themselves to us, which was a pretty good gamble as it turned outDr Adam Boyko, Cornell University

This latter group are the least studied, yet represent a crucial piece in the picture of modern dog diversity.

"The fact that we looked at so many village dogs from so many different regions, we were able to narrow in on the patterns of diversity in these indigenous dogs," Dr Boyko told BBC News.

Dog domestication is the kind of event that could have taken place independently in different corners of the globe. But the DNA of modern pooches doesn't provide any support for this idea.

"We looked exclusively to see if there was evidence of multiple domestication events. And like every other group that's looked for that, we found no evidence of it," said Dr Boyko.

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Trail of Red Riding Hood traced

Little Red Riding Hood may be commonly depicted as pale-skinned and blonde but she has distant relatives in Africa and Asia, research has shown.

Scientists traced the folk tale's evolutionary tree and found links with similar stories as far away as China, Japan and Korea.

Just as humans and chimpanzees share an ancient ancestor, all these tales arose from a common source, experts believe.

The Wolf and the Kids, a story dating back to the first century AD and popular in Europe and the Middle East, tells of a wolf that impersonates a nanny goat and devours her offspring.

Some 1,000 years later the wolf was still cast in the role of the villain, but the nanny goat was transformed into Red Riding Hood's grandmother.

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Fossils Clarify the Origins of Wasps and Their Kin: Alderfly Ancestors, Snakefly Cousins

Dec. 4, 2013 — Wasps, bees, ants and relatives comprise the megadiverse insect order Hymenoptera, the third most speciose animal group on Earth, far surpassing the number of known vertebrate species. All the four most diverse orders of animals (beetles, butterflies, wasps, and true flies) belong to the group of insects with complete metamorphosis, i.e. having a dormant pupa, jointly known as Holometabola. Other holometabolans are lacewings, alderflies, dobsonflies, snakeflies, scorpionflies, fleas, and caddisflies. Hymenopterans are currently regarded as a very old lineage, which had been the first to separate from the holometabolan stem, the view supported by molecular evidence.

Eighty years ago the Russian entomologist Andrey Martynov -- well known for naming the two major divisions of winged insects Palaeoptera and Neoptera, stressing the importance of the wing folding pattern for insect evolution -- suggested that wasps had arisen from snakefly-like ancestors.

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Dogs Likely Originated in Europe More Than 18,000 Years Ago, Biologists Report

Nov. 14, 2013 — Wolves likely were domesticated by European hunter-gatherers more than 18,000 years ago and gradually evolved into dogs that became household pets, UCLA life scientists report.

"We found that instead of recent wolves being closest to domestic dogs, ancient European wolves were directly related to them," said Robert Wayne, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in UCLA's College of Letters and Science and senior author of the research. "This brings the genetic record into agreement with the archaeological record. Europe is where the oldest dogs are found."

The UCLA researchers' genetic analysis is published Nov. 15 in the journalScience and featured on the journal's cover.

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Genetic Study Demonstrates Israel's Wild Boars Originated in Europe

Nov. 4, 2013 — Wild boars look more or less the same in Israel as they do anywhere else: stalky and hairy with big heads, long snouts, and beady eyes. So scientists had no reason to suspect Israeli wild boars were any different than their brothers and sisters roaming the Middle East, from Egypt to Iran.

Now, in a new study Prof. Israel Finkelstein and Dr. Meirav Meiri of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near East Civilizations together with Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen from the same department and Dr. Dorothee Huchon of TAU's Department of Zoology have found that, unlike the Near Eastern wild boars in surrounding countries, Israel's wild boars originated in Europe. After a genetic and archaeological analysis, the researchers suggest the wild boars living in Israel are descendants of domesticated pigs brought to Israel starting almost 3,000 years ago by the Philistines and other seafaring raiders.

The findings were published this week in Scientific Reports. Prof. Steve Weiner and Dr. Eilsabetta Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Prof. Guy Bar-Oz of Haifa University, Dr. Greger Larsen of Durham University, Prof. Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University and Dr. Liora Kolska Horwitz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem contributed to the study.

Pillagers and pig lovers

"Our DNA analysis proves that the wild boars living in Israel today are the descendants of European pigs brought here starting in the Iron Age, around 900 BCE," says Prof. Finkelstein. "Given the concentration of pig bones found at Philistine archaeological sites, the European pigs likely came over in the Philistines' boats."

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Flowering plant origins pushed back 100 million years

Flowering plants may have originated more than 100 million years earlier than previously thought, according to scientists in Switzerland and Germany.

The previously oldest known flowering plant-like pollen dates from the Early Cretaceous period.

But the team described six types of fossil pollen grains from older Middle Triassic core samples that closely resemble these earliest examples.

The research is published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

Flowering plants - also known as angiosperms - are the most numerous and diverse group of seed-producing plants on land.

All seed-producing plants make pollen, with each grain enclosing the developing male cell used in sexual reproduction.

"That's why plants developed a very tough and resistant wall of organic matter to protect them," explained Professor Peter Hochuli from the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

"In the fossil record we find only this protective wall of the pollen grains."

Based on the increase in abundance and diversity of flowering plants during the Early Cretaceous - approximately 140 million years ago - it has been assumed that they originated in this period.

In the older Triassic samples, Prof Hochuli and his team used confocal laser scanning microscopy to obtain high resolution, three-dimensional images and identified six distinct types of fossilised flowering plant-like pollen based on size, patterning and structure.

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Mystery solved – Where did Falkland Islands wolves come from?

Ancient DNA solves 320-year-old mystery

March 2013. University of Adelaide researchers have found the answer to one of natural history's most intriguing puzzles - the origins of the now extinct Falkland Islands wolf and how it came to be the only land-based mammal on the isolated islands - 460km from the nearest land, Argentina.

Previous theories have suggested the wolf somehow rafted on ice or vegetation, crossed via a now-submerged land bridge or was even semi-domesticated and transported by early South American humans.

Darwin questions
The 320-year-old mystery was first recorded by early British explorers in 1690 and raised again by Charles Darwin following his encounter with the famously tame species on his Beagle voyage in 1834.

New stuffed specimen found in New Zealand
Researchers from the University's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) extracted tiny pieces of tissue from the skull of a specimen collected personally by Darwin. They also used samples from a previously unknown specimen, which was recently re-discovered as a stuffed exhibit in the attic of Otago Museum in New Zealand.

16,000 years ago
The findings concluded that, unlike earlier theories, the Falkland Islands wolf (Dusicyon australis) only became isolated about 16,000 years ago around the peak of the last glacial period.

"Previous studies used ancient DNA from museum specimens to suggest that the Falkland Islands wolf diverged genetically from its closest living relative, the South American maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) around seven million years ago. As a result, they estimated that the wolf colonised the islands about 330,000 years ago by unknown means," says Associate Professor Jeremy Austin, Deputy Director of ACAD and co-lead author with Dr Julien Soubrier.

Cotninued:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/falklands-wolves.html

'Land not sea' origin for snakes

One of the most primitive snake fossils ever found hints that the slithery reptiles might have originated on land, not in the sea as has been proposed.

The animal, which lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, probably emerged from a line of burrowing reptiles that lost their legs.

Where and how snakes diverged from their legged cousins the lizards has been a mystery.

Details of the find appear in the journal Nature.

The debate over snake origins has been complicated by the scarcity of transitional fossils (those with features in between two groups of creatures).

But new fossils from eastern Wyoming, US, belonging to the ancient snake Coniophis precedens - which lived some 65-70 million years ago - could help clear up the mystery.

According to the analysis by Nicholas Longrich from Yale University and colleagues, Coniophis lived in a floodplain environment and "lacks adaptations for aquatic locomotion".

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18998634