Share DNA With A Medieval Person? Here’s What A Genetic Match Means

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

In 2022, we reported the DNA sequences of 33 medieval people buried in a Jewish cemetery in Germany. Not long after we made the data publicly available, people started comparing their own DNA with that of the 14th-century German Jews, finding many “matches.” These medieval individuals had DNA fragments shared with thousands of people who have uploaded their DNA sequence to an online database, the same way you share DNA fragments with your relatives.But what type of a relationship with a medi ...read more

The Striped Possum May Be One Of Australia’s Best Hide-and-Seek Champs

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Deep in the rainforests and eucalyptus woodlands of Australia and New Guinea lives an enigmatic creature known as the striped possum. Quiet, cute, and nocturnal, its favorite activity is boring holes into the trees and using its elongated fingers to extract ants and termites from the trunks within. While the striped possum is hard to spot in the wilds of Australia, it’s much more common in the lowlands of New Guinea. The Striped Possum: A Curious CreatureThe striped possum is less than a foot ...read more

Stone Age Humans Chose Their Rocks with Care

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Were Stone Age humans the first geologists?Humans living in what is now South Africa 70,000 years ago possessed a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the various kinds of rock that made up their world, indicates a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.Not only did hunter-gatherers of the time know how to make finely crafted stone tools, but they understood exactly which rocks would yield the best combinations of ease of ...read more

Finding Monuments Beyond Stonehenge

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

In the age of air travel, the Calanais Standing Stones (or Callanish, in the anglicized spelling) are not so hard to get to, and yet, the site feels remote.The ancient stone megaliths are perched at the edge of the village that shares their name, on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, part of the Outer Hebrides chain of islands that sits off the northwestern coast of Scotland. Having read of Calanais’ status as the “Stonehenge of the North,” I was determined to make the journey; it had be ...read more

Fire And Rain Affect How Zebras, Wildebeest, and Gazelles Migrate

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Tanzania’s Serengeti ecosystem is like a time machine. As one of the world’s last remaining fully intact grazing ecosystems it provides a glimpse of what others in Australia, Eurasia and the Americas might have looked like when communities of large grazing mammals roamed freely across these continents.During the Late Pleistocene, which spanned from 129,000 to 11,700 years ago and is sometimes referred to as the “ice age”, populations of these grazing animals collapsed all over the world. ...read more

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