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 […]
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,
If you’re well-versed in Pleistocene ecology, you’ve almost certainly heard about the steppe-tundra, also known as the mammoth steppe. During the Last Glacial Period, this biome covered vast parts of three continents: Europe, Asia, and North America. The name “steppe-tundra” refers to the fact that it contained a unique mixture of steppe and tundra species,
One of the most striking things about the glacial cycles of the last 2.5 million years is how species survived the various dramatic shifts in climate. Among the ways plants and animals survived unfavorable climatic phases was retreating to relatively small regions where conditions remained tolerable, and then using those areas as bases from which