HENRY

BBC News is reporting that Oetzi, the 5,300 year old Neolithic corpse found in a glacier, was killed by an  arrow:

A Swiss-Italian team says the arrow that struck him in the left shoulder slit the artery under his collar bone.

Oetzi probably died as the result of a fight: he may either have fled the attacker - who then shot him in the back - or fell victim to an ambush.

Jerry Coyne in Edge:

Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.

Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate.  When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air—those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo. Although I am a biologist who has found himself battling creationism frequently throughout his professional life, I was still mortified.  Because there is just as much evidence for the fact of evolution as there is for the existence of atoms, anyone raising his hand must have been grossly misinformed.

Continued at Don’t know much about Biology.

The finalised programme for the Evolution 2007 conference has been announced. I see that I’ll be talking in the coveted 9.30am-on-Sunday slot! Excellent!

Last week I posted a story about James Watson receiving his genome as a gift. In a fascinating twist, he’s subsequently made it all publicly available - all of it that is, except one gene, apolipoprotein E. Why? -

Watson doesn’t want to know which version of the gene he has, as it is one of the strongest predictors for the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
…
What Watson does understand, however, is that he could work out how likely he is to develop Alzheimer’s disease from the versions of the gene he carries, and it seems he’d rather not live with the knowledge.

Who can blame him? I wouldn’t wish Alzheimer’s on my worst enemy. More over at Mind Hacks: James Watson and the missing gene.

Just a few weeks ago I was ranting about how the spread of Kumara (sweet potato) in Polynesia suggested that Polynesians travelled over to South America to get it. Now there’s a paper out that apparently has hard evidence of Polynesian contact with the New World.

The paper, soon to be released in P.N.A.S. (well, once they lift their embargo), shows that DNA found in ancient chicken remains from Valparaiso and Santiago in Chile, is similar to that found in chickens from the Polynesian triangle. The remains have been dated to 622 years before present, which fits quite nicely with the established chronology of Polynesian settlement (e.g. Easter Island around 800-900BP at earliest), and is at least 100 years before European contact with the New World.

Until the paper actually comes out, here’s a few other sites with more info: University of Auckland News Release, John Hawks Weblog, Alice Storey’s webpage.

Update: the paper is now available: Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile (doi)

Everything about the Triassic period points to divine involvement. Let me ask you this: Could some kind of random genetic chance make the population of shelled cephalopods grow significantly? No, of course not. So the only logical explanation is that there was an infinite and all-knowing cephalopod creator who modified their mollusk foot into a muscular hydrostat that eventually, on the sixth day, became a tentacle.

An Indian tribe that has had no formal contact with Western civilization has been located in a remote Amazon region, federal authorities said Friday.The Metyktire tribe, with about 87 members, was found last week in an area that is difficult to reach because of thick jungle and a lack of nearby rivers some 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) northwest of Rio de Janeiro, said Mario Moura, a spokesman for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai.