82,000 year old Jewelry, Mammoth DNA and population dynamics, and Synesthesia
Sorry - been lazy recently, here's a roundup of interesting stuff:
Ancient DNA work into woolly mammoths shows that they experienced a fairly drastic population bottleneck:
"In combination with the results on other species, a picture is emerging of extinction not as a sudden event at the end of the last ice age, but as a piecemeal process over tens of thousands of years involving progressive loss of genetic diversity," said Dr. Ian Barnes, of Royal Holloway, University of London. "For the mammoth, this seems much more likely to have been driven by environmental rather than human causes, even if humans might have been responsible for killing off the small, terminal populations that were left."
The paper is in this month's Current Biology: Genetic Structure and Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius(doi)
Next, some archaeologists have found what appears to be the oldest known jewelry. The 13 shells covered in ochre, were found in Morocco, and are a staggering 82,000 years old. National Geographic has more details.
Finally, Deric Bownds over at Mind Blog talks about some new research into the fascinating Synesthesia:
Synesthesia, in which letters or numbers elicit color perception, could be due to increased brain connectivity between relevant regions, or due to failure to inhibit feedback in cortical circuits. Diffusion tensor imaging now provides evidence for increased connectivity in word processing and binding regions of the brain.