The researchers, led by Mateja Hajdinjak at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, extracted tiny amounts of bone or tooth powder—sometimes as little as 9mg—and used a chemical process to remove modern genetic contamination. They also checked for the telltale signs of degradation found in ancient DNA.
Source: arstechnica.com
Clues are hard to come by when you’re trying to look back to a time when the continents clumped together like a closed fist. But geologists have found evidence that plants, the most gentle of organisms, may have helped kill most of the life in the oceans 374 million years ago.
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A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under communism’. The results stunned observers: 72per cent of Hungarians, and 62per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47per cent of those surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets.
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