Friday is an MIT holiday for the new year (actually, so is today, but I put in two must-do posts anyway, below). Have a safe and festive (or meditative and reflective)New Year’s eve and January 1.

- Charlie Petit

Over the centuries botanists have found tons of plants and named them. Sometimes one plant gets named several times – and now after major labor a collaboration by the UK’s Kew Gardens and US’s Missouri Botanical Garden has made a master list that includes all it can find and it selects which among various synonyms ought to be the primary name. The overall list has 1.25 million scientific, or Linnaean names. Of those about 300,000 are categorized as verified distinct species, 480,000 are now lumped in with the first  group as synonyms, and about 260,000 names are yet to be resolved.

That means if a researcher is looking for literature on, say, the serpentine hardiness of the California golden poppy Eschscholzia californica, he or she could search under all ten, slight variants on the name (usually the third terms, for subspecies) so as to raise chance of getting pertinent references.

The Associated Press‘s Raphael G. Satter writes it from London as a boon to conservation, trade, and medicine – and solution to a problem wrought by the confounding multiplicity of oft-redundant names in assorted reference works. Solid job, nothing highly remarkable, a few nice style flourishes.

And then there’s Fox News. It’s always notable to see a news agency tackling a story and deciding on the angle itself rather than slavishly following a press release’s guide. Of course, one needs to do so with care. This one has no byline, so one doesn’t know on whom to pin it, but what an angle. It’s plain enough in the headline: World’s Plant Life Far Less Diverse Than Previously Thought. Original angle indeed. It says this lack of diversity is surprising. It says botanists and scientists hail the project “for many different reasons” and implies they are overlooking the absence of diversity discovery as the real news. It has no citation of authority or quote to back up its assertion that the cleaned-up list of names is shorter than botanists expected, that the world has fewer plant species than has been thought, or that anybody is surprised by the general results. If you’re going to go lone ranger on a news story, following a different trail, you ought to include some  evidence of evidence.  Fox calls its approach to news fair and balanced. That’s led some at other news agencies, jealous no doubt of Fox’s domination of 24-hour cable new, to retort that Fox is unfair and unbalanced. You decide.

Other stories:

• Daily Mail (UK) Clarie Bates: Botanical A-Z via Kew: British experts complete database of every plant name on the planet – all 1.25 miillion of them:
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch – Georgina Gustin : Missouri Botanical Garden seeks to name the world’s plants ;
• St. Louis Beacon (newish, nonprofit outlet) Jo Seltzer: One list for all the world’s plants ; Long piece.
• The Australian – Ben Webster: Plant list weeks out mass naming duplications;
• AFP: New botanic database holds a million plant names ;

Grist for the Mill:

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Press Release ; Missouri Botanical Garden Press Release ;  The Plant List ;

- Charlie Petit

Ah, lovely memories arise of years long past, when as a callow reporter at the SF Chronicle one of the joys of the morning was reading in my own publication’s pages the wit of columnist Art Hoppe, gone for nigh on 11 years now. Among his zanier recurring characters: the Harvard-educated gorilla. This comes to mind on reading a tip from friend Rob Irion, head of UC Santa Cruz’s esteemed science communications training shop.

Harvard-educated is a cliche of course. At a guess, it is said about as often with a sneer or rolling of eyes as with awe and respect. But it looks like it pays off big for the school up Mass Avenue from overlooked-by-comparison MIT. Irion tells me that an acquaintance of his, a research scientist who wishes to remain anonymous (which means that this whole post is based on hearsay), mentioned to him a peeve regarding New York Times bias. What bias? Rob asked. Answer: an overwhelming tendency to mention an education pedigree if it happens to be Harvard. No other school gets such lasting gleam off its diplomas. Not just scientists, but across the board those people whose names get in the Times and who went to Harvard get a mention for that fact far more than does similar treatment be accorded the combined number of  runners up: people who merely graduated Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, or Chicago. And it’s not just the Times – the informant and his daughter did some search-engine research and found the same pattern for the AP and the Wall Street Journal – not to mention a generalized Google search of the web.

The unverified, unblinded, un-peer reviewed plots of the results are assembled here. The pic there is cropped from the whole lot.

One concern is whether the search terms themselves were biased toward Harvard. Harvard-educated is a sort of meme, or standard of excellence for use in casual conversation and jokes. It comes off the tongue more easily than Yale-educated or Cornell-educated, thanks to its full-stop d at the end. Felicity of phrasing does not explain of course why Stanford is number four and MIT fifth. So whether a declaration such as “Joe Blow attended Duke before hitting the big time” would show up, while Duke-educated would not, may depend on how thorough the search engine work was.

Overall, the trend looks huge and  rings true. Science writers tend to mention where a professor or other academic is at the moment, but not where he or she went to school. But Harvard? The knee jerks and the fingers type, carried off by  the simultaneous synaptic flood in the cranium urging: Harvard-educated!

- Charlie Petit

The Orlando Sentinel’s space writer Robert Block, who has made the cudgeling of NASA a regular practice, takes an oblique route to deliver another story this week that won’t be so welcome at agency headquarters. It opens with a review of the well-covered, recent success of Elon Musk – internet tycoon, electric car man, and fonder of rocket start-up company Space X. It then asks why can’t NASA be that savvy?

He doesn’t varnish his assessment. His story goes from the private sector’s most glamorous rocket man to remarks such as that Musk’s achievements are “raising some serious questions about NASA,” soon says  “lack of affordability …is killing NASA” eventually declares the agency may “find itself becoming a historical footnote.”

His primary example of NASA ossification v. entrepreneurial energy and efficiency is to compare dollar figures for SpaceX’s experimental cargo capsule Dragon, which recently made a successful test flight and may soon be delivering material to the international space station, to what NASA has been working on, the Orion space capsule.

Dragon has already been to orbit at a cost of about $800 million for design, test, and flight. The Orion program has soaked up $4.8 billion, and will likely reach $6 billion before first flight in another three years or more.

That may be an apples and oranges in that comparison, but it’s effective. Block stops short of writing NASA’s obit in advance. He also reports there are signs it is learning its lesson, cutting red tape and unneeded complexity in its R&D.

- Charlie Petit

A few outlets, chiefly including the AP with its huge reach and the Jerusalem Post and with many other outlets following along from afar, have yet more news of old teeth of humans, or near-humans. A Tel Aviv University team believes that a few teeth it found in a cave near the Israeli community of Rosh Ha’ayin are up to 400,000 years old or so and look very much like they are from early Homo sapiens.

If that’s right, they are older than any such remains found in Africa, which is generally presumed to be where our species first arose. The implications are clear – either we all do date back to that African origin and the evidence just has not been found yet, or it may have been in Middle Eastern Eurasia somewhere.

It is hard from the first rush of news to find any extensive reporting, with info apparently nearly all from the discovery team. Thus there are general pronouncements on possible rewrites in store for the standard story of the evolution of modern humans, but not much on what other scholars think of the evidence. As this comes so shortly after news of another tooth, from more recent near human in Siberia, reporters who don’t put this news in context of that are doing no service to their readers.

Stories (so far):

• Jerusalem Post - Judy Siegel-Itzkovich: Homo sapiens lived in Eretz Yisrael 400,000 years ago ; Is it odd to use the historic term for the land of Israel, dating from before it was a state?  But the story does explicitly say right off that these remains long, long predate the  residence of Jews.
• AP – Daniel Estrin: Researchers: Ancient human remains found in Israel ; Right in the lede: “…could upset theories of the origin of humans.” That theory is pretty robust in general and flexible in detail – Australopithecines and then Homo, mostly in Africa, just us left. To “upset theory” implies something more fundamental than a geographic expansion of the homeland to the nearby Mideast, one thinks. It would appear more sensible to say this could force adjustment of the theory.
• Wired/Laelaps blog – Brian Switek: A Fistful of Teeth – Do the Qesem Cave Fossils Really change Our Understanding of Human Evolution? Hallelujah. Switek, being a paleontology specialist, applied his skeptical expertise. He also provides his own roundup of some of the initial and unmoored coverage of this news. He read the actual paper and reports that its conclusions provide little to merit the sensational coverage this is receiving. It’s not even sure that there teeth are not from a Neanderthal or closely related population. But the angle of rewriting evolution is too good for other reporters to pass up. Back to that, below.
• Adelaide Now / Advertiser: Matthew Kalman: Can a tooth change our history of man? ;
• Pravda - Fossilised tooth changes human history ; Looks like rewrite, and a bold one: “…sends the history book of Homo sapiens out of the window.” Uh huh. One notes that Pravda has the story on a webpage also alerting us to the sudden popularity of southern Russia among aliens. UFOs all over the place.
• Catholic Online: New fossil discovery may change everything known on primitive man ; Yet, the very same story does quote an outside authority who says whether this is modern man is far from clear.
• Daily Mail (UK) Matthew Kalman: Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man ; Fortunately, the Mail provides a map. This site is not so far from Ethiopia, where previous H. sap fossils of great age have been found. Interesting. Paradigms however may not be shaking yet.
• AFP – World’s oldest human remains claimed in Israel ;

*UPDATE – As seen in comments, and thank you to reader Michelle Sipics, Carl Zimmer at his The Loom blog has also waded into this news burst, baffled by its existence.

I can find no press release. Switek does provide in his story at Wired a link to the journal and the abstract – I had looked and been unable to locate it, so thank you very much. The abstract, at least, says or so much as hints nothing about upsetting the theory of human evolution.

- Charlie Petit

The Tuesday smörgåsbord of science served from just off Times Square takes the sane and sensible approach to some sensational news, or quasi-news, today. What to do when, in the course of reporting exciting and solid research, one comes across a principal pursuer of the  protocol who simultaneously has a mondo-bizarro secondary agenda that is stunning, weird, and vaguely but enticingly imaginable as doable? NYT’s answer: bury it, like a little treasure. No tabloid nonsense to the play it gets, but it’s there for those who read way past the first paragraphs.

The Times’s Techn0logy reporter Ashlee Vance (he is, it says here, headed for Bloomberg/Business Week), has the second-placed story in the section. The topic is a team of brain researchers handy with sharp blades who are assembling a new neural atlas. It’ll be ridiculously detailed, aimed at charting every connection in brains by slicing them so thin that a 3-D data base will include every twist, turn, and interaction by axons and such. They’ve managed a worm brain, and are working on a mouse brain. Human brains must await better thin-slicing machines, better laser-scanning microscopes, and computer memories and readers able to store and display towers of terabytes.

Then, at the end of a sidebar with no illus and snuggled into the jump on pageD4: immortality. One of the project’s brain-slicing wizards – appropriately tall and ethereally thin  like the death eater Travers in service with Lord Voldemort of Hogwarts infamy – believes it may be possible. He  imagines that with the full interconnected architecture of a human brain in hand, a synthetic hardware version some day might resurrect the mental essence of that brain’s person as he or she existed prior to said cranial content being  sliced into nano-prosciutto. Hmmm. No neurotransmitter broth and other modulators so the personality could be, uh, different. But y’know, hook something like that up and give it a stimulus. Who knows what thoughts may flit? And who knows how many editors, when told of this sidelight to the original assignment, would say hmmmppht, that’s nuts, bury it in the sidebar. But it IS the sane and sensible course.

Other headlines to note:

• George Johnson – Unearthing Prehistoric Tumors, and Debate ; Some say that cancer is mostly a modern disease, amplified by smoke, smoking, fast food, pollution, and other blessings of our big clever brains. Veteran reporter Johnson, an emeritus Times man, returns to the section to say maybe, which means probably not, and explains why it’s likely always been with us. Its frequency may be up, he suggests, but probably not drastically so. An unanswered question is whether cancer in people is markedly higher than in other, wild vertebrates. Such as chimps.
• Claudia Dreifus – Living and Studying Alopecia ; Terrific Q&A elucidating the career and ambition of one scientist whose life changed after a patch of hair disappeared from the back of her head. Clever idea to portray her as she is today, mane arrayed wildly. How’d Dreifus find this fascinating lady for  interview?
• Cornelia Dean: Exploring Our Relationship With the Lonely Moon ; A book review, deftly done, and with a mesmerizing, shall we say lunatizing, gallery of moon-inspired art.
• John Tierney – Economic Optimism? Yes, I’ll Take That Bet ; A bit of triumphalism here. Tierney won a bet with a man now dead, and gets the chance to tell us once more that he was a great admirer of one of the most fascinating, charming, and maddening men of the last century, the late Julian L. Simon, who drove liberals and Malthusians nuts. He will, via this column, do so again.
• Alex Wright: Managing Scientific Inquiry in a Laboratory the Size of the Web ; Wright’s job is “Director of User Experience and Product Research” at the Times. That sounds pretty drab and gray but he’s a good reporter. The story is about scientists who recruit vast public participation in data gathering, and borrow spare processing time from the public as well (think of the old SETI at home project). He has plenty of examples to explore a thematic question – is the public contributing science or, as one source tells him, simply being flesh-and-blood (and willing) instruments of somebody’s else’s science?

As ever, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

White nose syndrome broke through the avalanche of white Christmas news at the Boston Globe where Beth Daley today writes – while extracting info from the newspaper’s blogs – of urgent efforts by local researchers to get the law behind saving the little brown bats of the Eastern U.S.

That tangled photo is of wing bones and skulls from one cave’s floor.

The basic story’s been floating around for about a week and a half.

Other recent bat decline stories:

• AP: Biologists head to bunkers to fight bat disease ;
• AP: Groups ask feds to say once common bat needs help ;
• Grand Rapids Press – Victor Skinner: Deadly scourge of bats worse than originally thought ;
• Popular Science – Rebecca Boyle: Bat Conference, Day 1: Students Rush To Front Lines In Battle to Save Bats ;  plus Formerly Common Little Brown Bat May Be Headed For Endangered Species List ;

Grist for the Mill: Center for Biological Diversity Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Too bad about that Indian rocket that blew up Saturday with a communications satellite on board. Reuters‘s Krittivas Mukherjee filed a quick report. Most interesting is the video report linked to it. It’s disturbingly like the space shuttle Challenger’s destruction – although as no one was on board one can watch it without utter horror. Whatever went wrong, it’s striking that parts of the disintegrating stack kept accelerating upward even as gigantic blasts billowed.

There is an understandable error in the piece. It, in the version I saw at least, has the head of the country’s space agency ISRO saying the breakup followed a “large altitude error.” The tape of the remarks and the context make clear the distraught fellow said it was an error in attitude, as in direction the nose was pointing, that was the most obvious immediate explanation for what followed.

A few other reports:

• Times of India – Arun Ram: Disaster leaves Isro with 1 cryo engine ; Followup includes a few insights into the int’l trade and its diplomatic complexities on which is mostly indigenous launcher industry depends. The cryogenic hydrogen motor, apparently, is on an upper stage while the failure erupted in the solid fueled first stage or liquid fueled strap-on boosters.
• Daily News & Analysis (India) Nirad Mudu: GSLV failure sparks safety fears for 2016 manned space flight ; Here’s a new word for your techie lexicon: vyomanaut (Vyoma being Sanskrit for sky or space).
• Hindustan Times: Heavier payload caused Indian rocket’s failure: Expert ; Good example of news agency scrambling for a fresh exclusive angle – in this case an outside expert’s pure guesswork on what may have happened.
• Economic Times (India) : Hardware defect suspected for rocket failure ; Wiring for communication and control may have pulled apart.
• The Hindu: T. S. Subramanian: GSLV flights jinxed? ;
• Times of India – Srinivas Laxman: GLSV failure: Future space missions under cloud;
• Space.com – Stephen Clark: Indian Rocket Explodes After Launch ;

Grist (or lack of it) for the Mill: Remarkably, the ISRO site has issued, as far as one can easily tell, no press release or other sort of announcement.

- Charlie Petit

Weather Channel graphic

On Saturday, Dec. 25, the NYTimes got a little bit lucky just as the Atlantic seaboard was about to get whited out by the strongest blizzard in memory, especially so early in winter. One Judah Cohen, id’d only as a forecaster at an atmospheric and environmental research firm, opined on the weather lately under the bold hed: Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming.

So now, a day and a  half later I’m watching the Weather Channel, NBC and MSNBC morning shows basically explaining why our son’s return to NY flight, scheduled for Sunday evening, was cancelled 24 hours in advance. That’s one ginormous blizzard and the airline obviously knew it was about to get shut down before it even set in. And Cohen’s words I’d read Saturday started to cohere. He talks about the ability of the atmosphere to hold moisture (as things warm overall) going up, the heavier snows that follow when days go short and temperatures go down, and the rising frequency of continental-scale snow cover in northern mid-latitudes such as all across Siberia. It’s just one man’s hypothesis, but Cohen avers that intensified domes of cold air in Asia where whitened plains run up against high country like the Himalayas and Tien Shan  (akin to the Greenland “blocking high” reports posted on last week here at ksjtracker?) are rerouting jet streams. It makes them, so he says, wander way more sinuously than usual, hauling cold air down to great distance from the pole (and filling the gap behind by freighting chunks of warmer southern atmosphere into the suddenly more hyperborean far north).

Once science reporters and editors come off holiday break and get their acts together one expects to read more such conjectures on why, if the stats say global warming is the real deal, it feels in so many big northern cities like an ice age is brewing. This snow cover, albedo, and corkscrewing  jet stream notion feels like one believable agent constructing a confounding new Northern Hemisphere winter regime.

By the way, the NYTimes doesn’t even i.d. the company Dr. Cohen works for. It’s easy to chase that down. It’s Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., with hq outside Boston. That’s an outfit I don’t recall encountering before. It appears to be among the heavier-weight weather and climate analysis and forecasting companies in America. Cohen’s been there 12 years, is now the top seasonal forecaster, was at MIT, went to good schools and has his PhD. Although the name rings no bell with me he’s a regular as a news source. The company’s clients, its site says, include the Pentagon, American Petroleum Institute, NASA, the EPA, DuPont, and the DOE. I bet its private-client newsletters are pricey.

Cohen cites absolutely no authority for his authoritative-sounding guess at an intuitive solution to the weather paradox. But he does seem to be the sort of guy, at a cocktail party if you know his credentials, you’d lean in closer to hear when he’s asked if you’re so smart what’s going on with this crazy winter?

And just so US readers know, the two-pronged march of severe snowy, cold weather on the left and right sides of the Atlantic hasn’t gone away. In today’s Guardian, Andrew McCorkell (among many saying about the same) reports that a fresh round of bitter cold and heavy snow is returning to the UK an expected reprise of last week’s pummeling of it and much of Europe.

LATE ADDITION:

Just noticed that Andy Revkin, Times opinion man and science writer, at his Dot Earth blog provides additional remarks and background on Cohen’s thesis. He also provides a fine YouTube video on the draconian consequences to any lummox who has by now still failed to heed official declarations that weather and climate are not the same and thus and ergo continue to make lame jokes about global warming.

More important, Revkin elicited and shares reactions by a few top climatologists to Cohen’s thesis. They are fairly kind – which is not the same as persuaded.

*UPDATE: Revkin in another post pursues Cohen further, and relays nifty graphics outlining his ideas and why Cohen thinks he’s on to something. The post, with material straight from Cohen, provides formal literature references that were not even hinted at in his Op-Ed on links between Siberian snow and winter weather elsewhere.

- Charlie Petit

Only one post today, just below, and expect none tomorrow for the traditional day off for Christmas.  Back at the desk Monday morning, pre-dawn coffee in hand.

A very large tooth, not quite human

Daja vu in the news.

Back in March a substantial press surge greeted news in Nature that a finger bone from the Denisova cave in Siberia appeared to be as young as 30,000 years old, definitely from a hominin, probably pre-adolescent and, being hominin, justifiably called a child. But it was, they said then,  neither typical Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens. Preliminary DNA analysis plus bone morphology said as much. See previous post for more on that.

A second shoe dropped, again at Nature,  this week when much the same team, including noted paleoanthropologist Svante Pääbo, reported that further testing shows the bone came from a young girl. Not only that, the nearly-complete genome now at hand suggests  it carried a few genes that can also be found today in some modern members of the Malanesian ethnogeographic group. Its traditional homeland is on some  far-western Pacific islands such as New Guinea. A very large molar from the same cave, from a young adult, further adds to evidence of a different species from us, and that this new one was more closely related to Neanderthals while still distinct from them (and us for sure). The tooth is larger not only than any of yours, but of known Neanderthal specimens too.

And they have a name for the new species, although not a formal Linnean one: the Denisovans. That’s in keeping with Neanderthals, for the valley where their first remains under the light of science.

Last time around, I practically foamed at the mouth at the number of reporters whose writing went faster than their brains and who promptly dubbed the cave’s bone as marking discovery of a new human ancestor. Relative yes, but ancestor no – no more than your uncle Tom is also a direct ancestor (unless, you know, he and your mom or, gad and never mind  …. ). Now it gets complicated on whether to call these things “human ancestors.” They left a genetic trace, via interbreeding, that can still be found in one distinct population of traditional but modern people, but not the rest of us. So it was not part of my ancestral lineage. But it may be a small part of, say,  the deep family tree of Iolu Abil, President of Vanuatu, a lovely archipelago nation northeast of Australia. Most certainly it is not ancestral to the origination of H. sapiens back in southern Africa or wherever that happened 100,000+ years ago. Hmmm. Maybe phylogeny has terms to suit this kind of intermixed gene flow between species in which neither is ancestral to the other.

Some headlines also present the news as though the huge coverage back in March never happened – proclaiming discovery of a recent, new member of our extended family of species. Stories themselves tend to get it straight. Not all, however.

Stories:

• NPR – Joe Palca: Ancient Bone’s DNA Suggests New Human Ancestors ; Savvy piece ties this news to other recent bits of paleo-DNA wizardry, such as other recent news dissecting a Neanderthal site’d DNA as providing evidence for a family and giving insight into the mating patterns among groups of that species. He pronounces the Siberian cave name, presumably correctly:  deNEESova, leading to deNEESovans for its residents, not the deniSOVA I’ve been imagining.  However he treats the news from Denisova Cave as entirely fresh. NPR colleague Christopher Joyce reported the first burst in March.
• AP – Malcolm Ritter : DNA says new human realtive roamed widely in Asia ; Makes clear the essential discovery was announced already (Ritter covered that one too), evades calling these creatures human ancestors in the full sense of the term, and reports that no new species name has been assigned to the Denisovans because it’s not yet clear whether they represent full species, or perhaps a Neanderthal sub-species or similar close relation, or perhaps even an extinct species already named from other fossils.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Gene study shows Neanderthals had eastern cousins; Fox declares it a new species, period. Also a sister group to Neanderthals. Unsure what that means. She gets in the interbreeding, characterized as a dalliance between modern humans and Denisovans somewhere in Asia.
• NYTimes – Carl Zimmer: Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins ; Zimmer composes a story, a tale with narrative muscle, tracing how this latest paper came to be and the dynamics of its authorship. Very nice. He fits the tooth’s morphology in as a clinching piece of evidence even though the DNA was almost all from the insides of the finger bone. The journal paper makes much of the genetic bottleneck evidence in Neanderthal DNA, but not in Denisovans, hinting that the former were a genetically depauperate line while the Denisovans had split away earlier and, to the east, maintained sturdier genetic underpinning. Zimmer misses that bit of implied drama. Even Zimmer can’t get in everything.
• Telegraph: Ancient cousin of humans identified by scientists ;   Jumbled at the top, gets its legs toward the end, but is among the accounts that seem oblivious to earlier announcement of the essential discovery. No byline. Sheer rewrite, without attribution, one supposes. The lively quotes toward the end appear all to be from a UC Santa Cruz press release (in Grist below).
• National Geographic – Ker Than: New Type of Ancient Human Found – Descendants Live Today? ; That’s a hed with the news, and excitement. This, like Zimmer’s in NYTimes, is a solid yarn by a reporter who sees the larger picture and composes a story. He even gets one expert noting the fuzziness of the term species.
• The Australian- Amos Aikman : Meet the Denisovans, indigenous Australia’s Siberian kin ; It’s a stretch, but only a small one, to include Australia’s aborigines as carriers of a few Denisovan genes. A source tells Aikman they and Melanesians are part of a larger clade within H. sapiens, so it’s plausible. Time will tell, and probably soon. One imagines the Max Planck-Harvard gang is already running pertinent tests.
• Sydney Morning Herald: Deborah Smith: Giving accepted prehistoric history the finger – DNA tests reveal new group of ancestors ; Again, the group declaration was made a while ago, this report fills in important detail. She treats it as all new. But she does have a hint of detail nobody focusses on – the modern human migration that picked up Neanderthal genes soon after leaving Africa continued on through Asia, where one column got intimate with a few Denisovans. Ergo, the people of New Guinea and nearby regions may be the world’s only ones with traces of both encounters.
• BBC – Pallob Ghosh:  Ancient human species ‘interbred with us’ ;  The pic with this illustrates the two interbreeding episodes, earlier by Neanderthals, later by their offshoots the Denisovans. Plus in a news clip paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer on this news’s context.
• USA today – Dan Vergano: New extinct species of pre-humans confirmed ; Short, and correct as far as I can tell.
• NatureNews – Ewen Callaway: Fossil genome reveals ancestral link/ A distant cousin raises questions about human origins ; Insider Callaway had, of course, plenty of time and access advantages over other scriveners. Nice job, but the hed’s declaration that this raises questions in not quite backed up. More like it refines the focus, revealing surprises.

*UPDATE: At USA Today, Dan Vergano gathered expert reactions to the news, with considerable analysis and quoted at length, to this news (see comment).

There are more, and perhaps I’ll get a chance to update this with more, substantial stories.

One does wonder – remember the big battles of a decade or two ago on how to envision the rise of modern mankind? On one side were partisans of the pure “Out of Africa” scenario, sometimes called African Eve, spawned by the  DNA work of Allan Wilson and colleagues at UC Berkeley in the early 90s. It posited a single-origin and total replacement story for H. sapiens‘s start and spread. On the other side: the “Regional Hypothesis” pushed by Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan. It supposed a diffuse, nearly simultaneous rise of H. sapiens across the breadth of the Old World via evolution and gene flow among the likes of H. erectus and Neanderthals. Maybe a compromise has been offered by reality. Somebody call Wolpoff, if he’s taking calls, and find out if a truce is in the works.

Grist for the Mill:

Max Planck Society Press Release ; Harvard Med. Sch. Press Release ;  UC Santa Cruz Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Lots of elephant news, for no reason other than that’s stochasm for you:

Most of us who feed omnivorously on science news and tidbits have a vague awareness that African savanna and forest elephants are different – the former are bigger, for one thing. But the trope has been they are at most separate subspecies, and perhaps the same species. So it is news that a study in PLoS Biology asserts that genetically they are as different from one another as an Indian elephant is from a woolly mammoth. Actually, it turns out that those last two species are more closely related to one another than either is to African elephants.

Stories:

• Reuters – Julied Steenhuysen: Africa has two species of elephants, not one ;
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: A discovery to trumpet … a third species of elephant is found using DNA ; Not the best hed. It implies that a third and never before seen species has been found. It was always there in plain sight. It’s the category, not the elephants, that is new.
• Science News (via USNews & world Report): Genes Separate Afirca’s Elephant Herds ; She gets to a good angle right away – the discovery may mean more resources to protect the less common forest elephant from poachers, habitat destruction…
• CNN – Brian Walker: African elephants are two species ;
• LiveScience – Jennifer Walsh: ‘African elephant’ actually two separate species ;
• BBC – Richard Black: African elephant is two species, researchers say ;
• ScienceNow – Virginia Morell: Researchers Split African Elephants Into Two Species ;

Grist for the Mill: Harvard Med. Sch. Press Release ; PLoS article

;

OTHER elephant news:

…..on Nursing and Extinction:

• CBC (Canada) Mammoth’s  nursing habits may have sped demise ;
• Discovery News – Tim Wall: Woolly Mammoth Babies Late Bloomers;
• Vancouver Sun/Postmedia News – Randy Boswell: Infant mammoths fed on mothers’ milk longer ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Western Ontario Press Release ;

FINALLY...on the rare ones of Cambodia, on tape:

• Our Amazing Planet: Elusive Wild Elephants Captured on Film in Cambodia;

- Charlie Petit