University of Kentucky researcher offers solution to coal conundrum on famous pirate shipwreck

A researcher at the University of Kentucky is helping solve a mystery on the coast of North Carolina: Where did coal found on the shipwrecked Queen Anne’s Revenge come from? About 300 years ago, a band of pirates captured a French slave ship. Among those pirates was a man named Edward Thatch (also spelled as Teach) who would be better known as Blackbeard.

Ancient DNA Analysis Sheds Light on the Early Peopling of South America

Using DNA from two ancient humans unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil, researchers have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some surprising results. Not only do they provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast – for the first time. Among the key findings, they also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. The Americas were the last continent to be inhabited by humans.

Human environmental genome recovered in the absence of skeletal remains

Ancient sediments from caves have already proven to preserve DNA for thousands of years. The amount of recovered sequences from environmental sediments, however, is generally low, which difficults the analyses to be performed with these sequences. A study led by Ron Pinhasi and Pere Gelabert of the University of Vienna and published in Current Biology successfully retrieved three mammalian environmental genomes from a single soil sample of 25,000 years bp obtained from the cave of Satsurblia in the Caucasus (Georgia).

National Geographic Society grant to fund research into Easter Island

Binghamton University anthropologists Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo received a $60,280 grant from the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration to explore how ancient populations managed freshwater scarcity.