Ancient DNA pulls back curtain on the Sahara Desert’s greener past
Picture the Sahara, and an inhospitable landscape of endless sand dunes and barren rock comes to mind.
That’s largely the case today, but 7,000 years ago the vast desert was an altogether different place: a verdant world of trees and анальный секс зрелых rivers and home to megafauna such as hippos and elephants.
Over the past decades, scientists have gleaned details of the "green Sahara." Now, with the help of ancient DNA from mummified remains, geneticists are figuring out who once lived there.
The Takarkori rock shelter — situated in southwestern Libya’s Tadrart Acacus mountains — offers a remarkable glimpse into the Sahara’s greener past.
Archaeologists uncovered the remains of 15 women and children at the site two decades ago.
Initial attempts to extract ancient DNA from the remains fell flat. Cool and constant conditions — the opposite of the extreme temperature swings of today’s Sahara — yield the best preserved DNA.
New techniques made it possible to sequence the genome — a complete set of genetic material — of two mummified women. The analysis revealed intriguing information about the ancestry of the Takarkori people and how they adopted a herding way of life.
Explorations
Dark energy is a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, and it’s thought to represent about 70% of the energy in the cosmos.
New clues from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, known as DESI, suggest dark energy may be behaving in unexpected ways and may even be weakening over time.
The collaboration, now in its fourth year of surveying the sky, has released its latest batch of data. While it’s not the final word, the information has space scientists excited.
"We’re in the business of letting the universe tell us how it works, and maybe the universe is telling us it’s more complicated than we thought it was," said Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which manages DESI.
Picture the Sahara, and an inhospitable landscape of endless sand dunes and barren rock comes to mind.
That’s largely the case today, but 7,000 years ago the vast desert was an altogether different place: a verdant world of trees and анальный секс зрелых rivers and home to megafauna such as hippos and elephants.
Over the past decades, scientists have gleaned details of the "green Sahara." Now, with the help of ancient DNA from mummified remains, geneticists are figuring out who once lived there.The Takarkori rock shelter — situated in southwestern Libya’s Tadrart Acacus mountains — offers a remarkable glimpse into the Sahara’s greener past.
Archaeologists uncovered the remains of 15 women and children at the site two decades ago.
Initial attempts to extract ancient DNA from the remains fell flat. Cool and constant conditions — the opposite of the extreme temperature swings of today’s Sahara — yield the best preserved DNA.
New techniques made it possible to sequence the genome — a complete set of genetic material — of two mummified women. The analysis revealed intriguing information about the ancestry of the Takarkori people and how they adopted a herding way of life.
Explorations
Dark energy is a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, and it’s thought to represent about 70% of the energy in the cosmos.
New clues from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, known as DESI, suggest dark energy may be behaving in unexpected ways and may even be weakening over time.
The collaboration, now in its fourth year of surveying the sky, has released its latest batch of data. While it’s not the final word, the information has space scientists excited.
"We’re in the business of letting the universe tell us how it works, and maybe the universe is telling us it’s more complicated than we thought it was," said Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which manages DESI.