Measuring and testing the teeth of living primates could provide a window into the behavior of the earliest human ancestors, based on their fossilized remains. New research takes us one step closer to understanding the relationship between canine teeth, body size and the lives of primates.
Continue reading about Canine Tooth Strength Provides Clues To Behavior Of Early Human Ancestors
While I was away on holiday the refurbished and redesigned museum opened at Kew. And it is excellent. At its centre lies the Domesday Book – the Archive’s most famous document. There are seven strands or themes, including one on family history displaying a selection of documents that you might use in your genealogical research. They are not the obvious choices either! A few documents have been digitised and made available through "the turning pages" terminals. So for example you can examine a D-Day map in some detail. Another nice touch is a case showing a document which has recently been in the news. At present it is a file about the SOE agent Pearl Cornioley. The Museum is free and is open all the hours the public areas are open.
There are two non-family history sites which show what the internet is becoming capable of achieving. SearchMe http://www.searchme.com is a new search engine (still in beta test form) which produces images of webpages and allows you to flick through them to find the one you want. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the music and video search facilities on the Apple iPhone and iTouch. It’s fun and seems pretty effective as well. You can search by website, video or image. A rough test suggested that it was as good as Google for websites, but less so for photos (it seemed only to search flickr) or videos (utube). Even so give it a try. Combining detective fiction and Google Earth seems a strange mash-up, but Penguin Books have made a brave attempt at http://wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1. Starting at St Pancras station you can follow the hero around the world to solve the mystery. I just read chapter 1, which takes place at St Pancras and got rather bored, but you may get more from it.
"Deceased Online" is a new service providing access to the registers of burials held by crematoria and cemeteries across England and Wales. The idea is that the indexes are free, but users will pay to get copies of the entries in the registers themselves. The first council to have joined up is Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The site is in beta test at http://www.deceasedonline.com and as many pages didn’t open it seems more test than beta, but clearly this is a resource worth watching.
A reminder to complete the survey form found elsewhere on this site. We have had lots of comments back about the magazine already and they have been overwhelmingly positive. Many people have made very sensible comments which we hope to follow up over the next few months. But we would welcome your views, even if you are only an occasional reader of the magazine.
(Duke University) Perhaps judging a man by his cologne isn’t as superficial as it seems. Duke University researchers, using sophisticated machinery to analyze hundreds of chemical components in a ringtailed lemur’s distinctive scent, have found that individual males are not only advertising their fitness for fatherhood, but also a bit about their family tree as well.
Continue reading about Primate's scent speaks volumes about who he is
Male adoptees are using consumer DNA tests to predict the surnames carried by their biological fathers, the BBC has learned.
Scientists have used Iceland’s genealogical database to trace the ancestors of patients suffering from hereditary cystatin C amyloid angiopathy. Analysis shows that the deadly mutation in the cystatin C gene, L68Q, derives from a common ancestor born roughly 18 generations ago, around 1550AD.
(University of California – Berkeley) The ancestor of all chordates, a group that includes humans and other vertebrates, probably looked like a sand-dwelling invertebrate called the lancelet or amphioxus. Its newly sequenced genome confirms that, and shows how vertebrates evolved over the past 550 million years — through a four-fold duplication of the genes of our primitive ancestors. The sequence, generated by the Joint Genome Institute, and analysis by an international group of biologists is reported in Nature.
(University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee) Study shows a version of a human gene appears have completely different effects, depending on one’s environment. It illustrates the complexity of genotype on the expression of behavior.
Continue reading about Did the gene for ADHD help our nomadic ancestors?
