A genetic study is interested in the survivors of the Ice Age. The ice age is the last ice age, the coldest phase of which took place about 25,000 years ago. It is known that homo sapiens have already been to Europe and of course survived there. Only we know very little about population movements: who moved where and, most importantly, which group of *’Homo Sapiens* gave birth?
Ice Age Survivors: Same Genetic Population?
We know that these populations, despite the distance and over a long period of time, have shared common cultures: a similar way of making tools, certain sculptures such as the statuettes of Palaeolithic Venus for the Gravettian, etc. This raises the second question: did these populations come from, sharing a common culture, from the same genetic population?
To fill in these chronological and geographic gaps, these researchers extracted the DNA from 356 individuals living between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago to establish the genetic history of hunter-gatherers in Europe. The peculiarity of this study is that the genomes of a hundred of these individuals had never been analyzed before, and these new fossils are, in a way, the key to the puzzle.
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They reveal the existence of a new population that lived just before glacial maximum, the so-called Fournol group, named after the cave where the remains were discovered in the Lot. Further east, in Central and South-Eastern Europe, it joins the Vestonice Group.
The first result obtained confirms the fact that only the Fournol group leaves descendants after the last glacial maximum. The second result indicates that when these two populations of Fournol and Vestonice shared the same culture, they are genetically distinct.
Interview with Isabelle CrevecoeurCNRS Research Director at the University of Bordeaux Passéa laboratory and co-author of this study published in Nature.
CULTURAL MORNING – 852 JDS /02 ITW Isabelle CREVECOEUR
1 minute
Boreal wildfires break records
It is a forest also called taiga. It crosses Alaska and Canada in the Americas and Scandinavia and Siberia in Eurasia. This forest somehow surrounds the North Pole. As with fires in other regions of the world, climate change has a lot to do with it: heatwaves and heatwaves even increase the risk of fires.
Scientists publishing in Science have tracked carbon monoxide emissions using satellite data to specifically identify carbon coming from fires in these forests. Result: boreal wildfires have been increasing since 2020, reaching a new record in 2021. That year, boreal wildfires emitted nearly 480 million tons of carbon, or 1.7 billion tons of carbon CO2. To get an idea of what that means, it’s twice the emissions associated with aviation in the same year.
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And it’s a vicious cycle: fires, in turn, increase the presence of atmospheric CO2 and thus climate change. The authors complain that insufficient attention has been paid to these forests, even though they represent the world’s largest wilderness area and are experiencing faster global warming than anywhere else.
Young mice born to two males in the laboratory
A birth without a woman. This would be a world first, but for now it’s just an announcement and presentation of the results during the third international summit on human genome editing, taking place in London on March 8th.
To do this, these Japanese researchers took skin cells from male mice and reprogrammed them to become stem cells again. So far it is a known method. The Y chromosomes would then have been removed and the X chromosome would have been duplicated. They then recreated ovarian organoids, a kind of mini laboratory ovaries, to fertilize their reprogrammed cell with sperm to create embryos before transferring them into surrogate mice. A final efficiency that reaches 1%.
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The post is being proofread and will be published soon. And while the idea of transposition in humans is tempting, it’s far too early to envision possible applications in the fight against infertility.
An asteroid heading towards our planet
It’s called DW-2023. As with any discovery of a new asteroid, astronomers calculate the risk of collision with Earth. Result: a 560 chance that it will hit there on February 14, 2046 – a risk of collision that is considered highly unlikely.
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At the moment we know that this asteroid is 10 million kilometers away and measures a little less than 50 meters. But just like NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) says that when they are discovered, asteroids appear riskier than they actually are. This risk should therefore be corrected downwards by more precise calculations of its course.
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Thanks to Isabelle Crevecoeur for her valuable explanations
For further…
The Study of Ice Age Survivors (Nature)
The survivors of the Ice Age (press release, CNRS)
The Boreal Fire Study (Science)
Mice produced in the laboratory from two males (Courrier international)
2023 DW, the 50-meter asteroid that threatens to hit Earth in 2046 (Le Parisien)