Genetics

Archeology, Ecology, Genetics, Geography

Out of the Arctic: The Initial Settlement of the Americas

Tony Olson / November 1, 2024

One of the most contentious debates in all of archeology is when and how the Americas were first settled. For a while, it was claimed that the first people in the Americas were the “Clovis”. They were a group of big-game hunters with distinctive hunting tools that allegedly bypassed formidable glaciers through an inland ice-free […]

Genetics, Paleoecology

Late Pleistocene Phylogeny of Black and Short-Faced Bears

Tony Olson / October 26, 2024

Genetic analysis can provide incredible and often counterintuitive discoveries about the relationships between and within species and their unique ancestral histories. A study was published 3 years ago which explored the genomes of three Pleistocene black bear genomes found in eDNA in central Mexico and compared them to genomes of black bears in the eastern,