Late Pleistocene onset of mutualistic human/canid ( spp.) relationships in subarctic Alaska.

Large canids (wolves, dogs, and coyote) and people form a close relationship in northern (subarctic and arctic) socioecological systems. Here, we document the antiquity of this bond and the multiple ways it manifested in interior Alaska, a region key to understanding the peopling of the Americas and early northern lifeways. We compile original and existing genomic, isotopic, and osteological canid data from archaeological, paleontological, and modern sites.

Correction: Late date of human arrival to North America: Continental scale differences in stratigraphic integrity of pre-13,000 BP archaeological sites.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

A female woolly mammoth's lifetime movements end in an ancient Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp.

Woolly mammoths in mainland Alaska overlapped with the region's first people for at least a millennium. However, it is unclear how mammoths used the space shared with people. Here, we use detailed isotopic analyses of a female mammoth tusk found in a 14,000-year-old archaeological site to show that she moved ~1000 kilometers from northwestern Canada to inhabit an area with the highest density of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska until her death.

Late date of human arrival to North America: Continental scale differences in stratigraphic integrity of pre-13,000 BP archaeological sites.

By 13,000 BP human populations were present across North America, but the exact date of arrival to the continent, especially areas south of the continental ice sheets, remains unclear. Here we examine patterns in the stratigraphic integrity of early North American sites to gain insight into the timing of first colonization. We begin by modeling stratigraphic mixing of multicomponent archaeological sites to identify signatures of stratigraphic integrity in vertical artifact distributions.

Investigation by syringe method of effect of tampons on production in vitro of toxic shock syndrome toxin 1 by Staphylococcus aureus.

A syringe method was designed to test the effect of tampons on the growth of three toxic shock syndrome-associated strains of Staphylococcus aureus and their in vitro production of toxic shock syndrome toxin 1 (TSST-1) under different conditions. Various amounts of TSST-1 were recovered from different tampons inoculated with these strains. Generally, the addition of 10% porcine blood to the growth medium, incubation in the presence of 5% CO2, or the combination of these two factors resulted in the stimulation of TSST-1 production.