The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century. Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible. Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the ...

The evolutionary history of the extinct ratite moa and New Zealand Neogene paleogeography: ...We synthesize mitochondrial phylogenetic information from 263 subfossil moa specimens from across NZ with morphological, ecological, and new geological data to create the first comprehensive phylogeny, taxonomy, and evolutionary timeframe for all of the species of an extinct order. We also present an ...

... Denver said. "We now think that many genetic changes were happening that conventional DNA analysis did not capture. They were fairly easy to use and apply ... scientific resource." A precise study of this ancient DNA was compared to the known ages of the bones, and produced ... genetic dating techniques         Technorati Tags: Ancient,doubts,accuracy,Enlarge,Adelie,Antarctica ...

... genetic samples are in the neighborhood of 44,000 years old, so if ancient DNA is saying something unusual about penguins, it might say something unusual about them, right? But what are they talking about here ... the branches connecting with living sequences will have coalesced into very few ancient branches, and it becomes progressively less likely that you will discover a representative of one of ...

... of change among penguin generations for all parts of the DNA circle. Usually, ancient DNA is badly degraded, but because Antarctica is so cold, specimens were well preserved. The team was able to extract DNA from several penguin generations, including 12 modern penguins ... Probe Links Between Modern Humans and NeanderthalsAncient penguin DNA raises doubts about accuracy of genetic dating techniques ...

ScienceDaily for November 15, 2009 reported on the accuracy of DNA dating. "The observations in this report appear to be fundamental and should extend to most animal species," he added. "We believe that traditional DNA dating techniques are fundamentally flawed, and that the rates of evolution are in fact much faster than conventional technologies have led us to believe."