Publications by authors named "Silvia Guimaraes"

In Brazil, the health emergency unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic must be understood in the context of the government administration of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro. The new coronavirus was turned into a war machine, something already seen in other moments of the history of indigenous peoples, when epidemics were strategically used to promote indigenous genocide and usurp their territories. The Sanöma, a subgroup of the Yanomami language family, assert that Covid-19 did not leave individualized traces of 'sequelae' but made itself felt in the deaths that could not undergo the traditional funeral rites due to the sanitary measures, generating a cosmological and existential tension for the collective as a whole.

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Article Synopsis
  • The Maghreb region is crucial for studying how cattle genetics evolved after their domestication in the Fertile Crescent over 10,000 years ago.
  • Researchers analyzed DNA from four Iron Age domestic cattle specimens in Althiburos, Tunisia, revealing two maternal lineages: R haplogroups and the more common African-T1 haplogroups.
  • The findings suggest that there was hybridization between domesticated cattle and local aurochs, but there's also a possibility of independent domestication events occurring in North Africa.
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As the effects of global warming become increasingly complex and difficult to manage, the conservation and sustainable use of locally adapted sheep breeds are gaining ground. Portuguese native sheep breeds are important reservoirs of genetic diversity, highly adapted to harsh environments and reared in low input production systems. Genomic data that would describe the breeds in detail and accelerate the selection of more resilient animals to be able to cope with climatic challenges are still lacking.

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There are strong interactions between an economic system and its ecological context. In this sense, livestock have been an integral part of human economies since the Neolithic, contributing significantly to the creation and maintenance of agricultural anthropized landscapes. For this reason, in the frame of the ERC-StG project 'ZooMWest' we collected and analyzed thousands of zooarchaeological data from NE Iberia.

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Unlabelled: Throughout the Western provinces of the Roman Empire, greater economic and political connectivity had a major impact on agricultural production, which grew in scale and specialisation after integration with the Roman state. However, uniquely in Western Europe, farming strategies in Italy began to evolve centuries before the Roman conquest, and many 'Roman' patterns associated with livestock size and the relative proportions of different taxa first emerged during the early and middle centuries of the first millennium BC. These changes imply a significant reorganisation of production strategies well before Roman hegemony, even in relatively marginal areas of Italy.

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Despite the important roles that horses have played in human history, particularly in the spread of languages and cultures, and correspondingly intensive research on this topic, the origin of domestic horses remains elusive. Several domestication centers have been hypothesized, but most of these have been invalidated through recent paleogenetic studies. Anatolia is a region with an extended history of horse exploitation that has been considered a candidate for the origins of domestic horses but has never been subject to detailed investigation.

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This work presents the case of the Yanomami indigenous people from Brazil that were the object of US ethnography initiated in the 1960s. The research brought harmful repercussions to the life of the Indigenous people of Brazil for several decades, and it took more than 40 years until the beginning of a process of reparation involving the Brazilian government and American universities. Objective: to discuss the meaning of the return of Yanomami blood samples, as well as contributions from the epistemologies of traditional Indigenous knowledge to the debate about research ethics and the structuring of means for the social control of researchers and the protection of participants in scientific studies, having as an example the Yanomami indigenous people from Brazil, subjected to noxious ethnography in the 1960s and the 1970s.

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Primary health centers (PHCs) should consider the demographic and epidemiological profile of the health region to respond to population aging and structure service delivery around networks based on macro and micro-level management to ensure the provision of comprehensive services. A normative evaluation of micro-level management in four PHCs in a health region in the Federal District of Brazil was conducted to inform the development of recommendations for enhancing the delivery of comprehensive and integrated long-term care for older persons. A management evaluation matrix was used where management stages were classified as advanced, intermediate and incipient.

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Taxonomic over-splitting of extinct or endangered taxa, due to an incomplete knowledge of both skeletal morphological variability and the geographical ranges of past populations, continues to confuse the link between isolated extant populations and their ancestors. This is particularly problematic with the genus Equus. To more reliably determine the evolution and phylogeographic history of the endangered Asiatic wild ass, we studied the genetic diversity and inter-relationships of both extinct and extant populations over the last 100,000 years, including samples throughout its previous range from Western Europe to Southwest and East Asia.

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Background: Climatic and environmental fluctuations as well as anthropogenic pressure have led to the extinction of much of Europe's megafauna. The European bison or wisent (Bison bonasus), one of the last wild European large mammals, narrowly escaped extinction at the onset of the 20th century owing to hunting and habitat fragmentation. Little is known, however, about its origin, evolutionary history and population dynamics during the Pleistocene.

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Human gastrointestinal parasites are good indicators for hygienic conditions and health status of past and present individuals and communities. While microscopic analysis of eggs in sediments of archeological sites often allows their taxonomic identification, this method is rarely effective at the species level, and requires both the survival of intact eggs and their proper identification. Genotyping via PCR-based approaches has the potential to achieve a precise species-level taxonomic determination.

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The purpose of this study is to discuss how the Sanumá indigenous people, a subgroup of the Yanomami linguistic family, located in northern Roraima State, Brazil, interacts with and relates to the public policy for indigenous people's health. Missionaries and Brazilian government and non-governmental organization employees are the agents with whom the Sanumá had to deal during the implementation of a healthcare policy. The ethnography of this interrelationship, permeated by moments of epidemic outbreaks, clashes, and attempts at collaboration, raises questions on the implementation of health services in indigenous territories.

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This article seeks to understand the viewpoint of cancer patients about the disease process and the therapeutic procedures that they experience. Cancer treatments provoke a series of physical and emotional consequences in patients. Thus, patients undergo a restructuring of life and establish mechanisms to "take care of themselves.

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The available mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data do not point to clear genetic relationships between current Tuscans and the Bronze-Age inhabitants of Tuscany, the Etruscans. To understand how and when such a genetic discontinuity may have arisen, we extracted and typed the mtDNAs of 27 medieval Tuscans from an initial sample of 61, spanning a period between the 10th and 15th century AD. We then tested by serial coalescent simulation various models describing the genealogical relationships among past and current inhabitants of Tuscany, the latter including three samples (from Murlo, Volterra, and Casentino) that were recently claimed to be of Etruscan descent.

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We report on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis of the supposed remains of Francesco Petrarca exhumed in November 2003, from the S. Maria Assunta church, in Arquà Padua (Italy) where he died in 1374. The optimal preservation of the remains allowed the retrieval of sufficient mtDNA for genetic analysis.

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