“Searle looked at two other locations much further to the south: the Azores and
Madeira — and in both places they found mice there carried the same genetic
signature as that carried by the Viking mouse. Crucially, they found very few
mice that carried genetic signatures like those found in mouse populations in
Portugal, whose mariners were also reckoned to be the first to settle on these
islands.”
posted 8/22/2022 8:00pm ∞
“Dunne and her colleagues found traces of 3,000-year-old fatty acids from
ancient milk still clinging to the insides of the vessels. … The amount of
material the archaeologists found suggested that the vessels had seen a lot of
use—or had been filled with milk before being placed in the children’s graves.”
“Translated, the inscription reads, ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair
and the beard.’ … This purpose was confirmed when the authors searched for
evidence of head lice on the comb under a microscope and found some remains on
the second tooth, still in the nymph stage of development.”
(See also the discussion at Language
Hat .)
posted 11/23/2022 8:00pm ∞
“Over the next 1,500 years, during especially hot summers, the remains and
artifacts were partially exposed, which explains the deterioration of the most
exposed parts of the body and additional damage to the artifacts. Eventually,
around 3,800 years ago, snow and ice finally sealed off the gully until the
discovery of the mummified remains in 1991.”
(Ötzi was a recurring interest of my old @sben_links account on Twitter, the
predecessor to this microblog. If I had completed my long walk in
2017 , I would have passed through the next valley east
from where he was found, and would have certainly stopped by his
museum when the trail passed through Bolzano.)
posted 11/22/2022 8:00pm ∞
“[P]eople who were homozygous (had two copies) of this protective gene variant
involved in antigen presentation were 40 percent more likely to survive the
plague than those with two copies of a deleterious variant, which encodes a
broken protein.”
posted 11/3/2022 8:00pm ∞