Context: The evidence is mounting that reticulate (web-like) evolution has shaped the biological histories of many macroscopic plants and animals, including non-human primates closely related to Homo sapiens, but the implications of this non-hierarchical evolution for anthropological enquiry are not yet fully understood. When they are understood, the result may be a paradigm shift in evolutionary anthropology.
Objective/methods: This paper reviews the evidence for reticulated evolution in the non-human primates and human lineage. Then it makes the case for extrapolating this sort of patterning to Homo sapiens and other hominins and explores the implications this would have for research design, method and understandings of evolution in anthropology.
Results/conclusion: Reticulation was significant in human evolutionary history and continues to influence societies today. Anthropologists and human scientists-whether working on ancient or modern populations-thus need to consider the implications of non-hierarchic evolution, particularly where molecular clocks, mathematical models and simplifying assumptions about evolutionary processes are used. This is not just a problem for palaeoanthropology. The simple fact of different mating systems among modern human groups, for example, may demand that more attention is paid to the potential for complexity in human genetic and cultural histories.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/03014460.2014.922613 | DOI Listing |
Mol Ther
January 2025
Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, MA, USA, 02139; Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, MA, USA, 02139; Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, MA, USA, 02139; Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University; Cambridge, MA, USA, 02139; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Chevy Chase, MD, USA, 20815; Department of Materials Science of Engineering; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, MA, USA, 02139. Electronic address:
mRNA delivered using lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) has become an important subunit vaccine modality, but mechanisms of action for mRNA vaccines remain incompletely understood. Here, we synthesized a metal chelator-lipid conjugate enabling positron emission tomography (PET) tracer labeling of LNP/mRNA vaccines for quantitative visualization of vaccine trafficking in live mice and non-human primates (NHPs). Following i.
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Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Çanakkale 17100, Türkiye.
Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), the third most abundant solid component in human milk, vary significantly among women due to factors such as secretor status, race, geography, season, maternal nutrition and weight, gestational age, and delivery method. In recent studies, HMOs have been shown to have a variety of functional roles in the development of infants. Because HMOs are not digested by infants, they act as metabolic substrates for certain bacteria, helping to establish the infant's gut microbiota.
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December 2024
Institute of Health & Environment, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Republic of Korea.
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Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Improved vaccination strategies for tuberculosis are needed. Intravenous (i.v.
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Center for Mind/Brain Science, University of Trento, Rovereto, (TN), Italy.
Number and space are inherently related. Previous research has provided evidence that numbers are aligned to a so-called "mental number line", which is malleable and affected by cultural factors mostly linked to literacy-related habits. However, preverbal humans and non-human animals also map numerosities into space, in a consistent left-to-right direction.
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