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Monday, October 5, 2009

Post-glacial colonization created a "Celtic fringe" among small mammals too


It's not just humans, other mammals, who have not been affected by Neolithic or the Kurgan invasions as such, also show that pattern of genetic specificity at the edges of Great Britain. The animals (voles and shrews) show two unrelated clades, one of them more closely related to the continent, which arrived in a second phase, pushing the pioneering clades into forming a "Celtic fringe" of sorts at the periphery of the island.


Source: Jeremy B. Searle et al. The Celtic fringe of Britain: insights from small mammal phylogeography. PNAS 2009 (freely available, early publication).
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2 comments:

terryt said...

One of my friends commented long ago, "Why should humans be any different to all other species?" You've provided us with yet another example of how all species spread in much the same way.

Maju said...

Humans are different to most other species, that's quite obvious: we have the unusual ability to radically trasform the environment and all that and to form vast complex networks of intellectual flow. But, sure, in many aspects we are not that different.