Conservationists are far from able to assist all species under threat, if only for lack of funding. This places a premium on priorities: how can we support the most species at the least cost? One way is to identify 'biodiversity hotspots' where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat. As many as 44% of all species of vascular plants and 35% of all species in four vertebrate groups are confined to 25 hotspots comprising only 1.4% of the land surface of the Earth. This opens the way for a 'silver bullet' strategy on the part of conservation planners, focusing on these hotspots in proportion to their share of the world's species at risk.

Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities

Bones of recent mammals in the Amboseli Basin, southern Kenya, exhibit distinctive weathering characteristics that can be related to the time since death and to the local conditions of temperature, humidity and soil chemistry. A categorization of weathering characteristics into six stages, recognizable on descriptive criteria, provides a basis for investigation of weathering rates and processes. The time necessary to achieve each successive weathering stage has been calibrated using known-age carcasses. Most bones decompose beyond recognition in 10 to 15 yr. Bones of animals under 100 kg and juveniles appear to weather more rapidly than bones of large animals or adults. Small-scale rather than widespread environmental factors seem to have greatest influence on weathering characteristics and rates. Bone weathering is potentially valuable as evidence for the period of time represented in recent or fossil bone assemblages, in- cluding those on archeological sites, and may also be an important tool in censusing populations of animals in modern ecosystems.

Taphonomic and Ecologic Information Form Bone Weathering

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ∼8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ∼24,000-year-old Siberian. By ∼6,000-5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ∼4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ∼75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ∼3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

Domestication interests us as the most momentous change in Holocene human history. Why did it operate on so few wild species, in so few geographic areas? Why did people adopt it at all, why did they adopt it when they did, and how did it spread? The answers to these questions determined the remaking of the modern world, as farmers spread at the expense of hunter-gatherers and of other farmers.

/pdf/evolution-consequences-and-future-of-plant-and-animal-c1ew0rpdox.pdf

Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication

Europe and the People without History

The largest movements and replacements of human populations since the end of the Ice Ages resulted from the geographically uneven rise of food production around the world. The first farming societies thereby gained great advantages over hunter-gatherer societies. But most of those resulting shifts of populations and languages are complex, controversial, or both. We discuss the main complications and specific examples involving 15 language families. Further progress will depend on interdisciplinary research that combines archaeology, crop and livestock studies, physical anthropology, genetics, and linguistics.

http://jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Further_Reading_files/Diamond%20et%20al%202003.pdf

Farmers and their languages: the first expansions.

The Environmental Background: Present and Past. Homo erectus in Sundaland. Indo-Malaysians of the Last 40000 Years. Recent Indo-Malaysian Prehistory: According to the Languages. The Patterns of History and Ethnography. The Hoabinhians and their Island Contemporaries. The Archaeological Record of Early Austronesian Communities. The Late Neolithic Phase in Island South-East Asia. The Early Metal Phase: A Protohistoric Transition towards Supra-tribal Societies. A Final Overview. Appendix. References. Index.

Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago

There can be no doubt that Peter Bellwood's First Farmers is a major new statement which presents a robustly expressed solution to one of those classic problems which provides a benchmark for theorization and justifies archaeology as a field. But agreement stops there. Few academic books published recently have evoked such highly charged reactions. On the one hand, First Farmers has impressed many critics, reached audiences far afield from traditional archaeological readerships, and garnered major book awards from professional bodies such as the Society for American Archaeology. On the other hand, it has been subjected to a level of concerted criticism rare in the academic world. As the reviews below show, it has clearly hit a nerve; the gloves are off.First Farmers polarizes scholars in complex ways. Much recent work on agricultural origins, particularly in Europe, has had a strongly indigenist and particularistic tone, averse to mass movements of peoples and ‘grand narratives’ in general. But even advocates of grand narrative in general may take exception to Bellwood's ‘language dispersals’ thesis. Similarly, the very attempt to bring together linguistic, genetic and archaeological data in an account of the past is controversial to some, but even those who aspire to this kind of interdisciplinary synthesis rarely agree on how it can be carried out.Neither the book nor its critics here are likely to be the last word on the subject. But whether one agrees with it or not, First Farmers is a welcome addition to the agricultural origins scene, which, at least in Europe, has been evolving over the last two decades towards a sort of eclectic middle-ground consensus in which difference of opinion is accommodated by eschewing bold generalization.

First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies

There can be no doubt that Peter Bellwood's First Farmers is a major new statement which presents a robustly expressed solution to one of those classic problems which provides a benchmark for theorization and justifies archaeology as a field. But agreement stops there. Few academic books published recently have evoked such highly charged reactions. On the one hand, First Farmers has impressed many critics, reached audiences far afield from traditional archaeological readerships, and garnered major book awards from professional bodies such as the Society for American Archaeology. On the other hand, it has been subjected to a level of concerted criticism rare in the academic world. As the reviews below show, it has clearly hit a nerve; the gloves are off

First Farmers: the Origins of Agricultural Societies, by Peter Bellwood. Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2005; ISBN 0-631-20565-9

Part I Introduction. 'The Emerging Synthesis': the Archaeogenetics of Farming/Language Dispersals and other Spread Zones (Colin Renfrew) Farmers, Foragers, Languages, Genes: the Genesis of Agricultural Societies (Peter Bellwood). Part II Setting the Scene for the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. The Expansion Capacity of Early Agricultural Systems: a Comparative Perspective on the Spread of Agriculture (David R Harris) The Economies of Late Pre-farming and Farming Communities and their Relation to the Problem of Dispersals (Mark Nathan Cohen) What Drives Linguistic Diversification and Language Spread? (Lyle Campbell) Inference of Neolithic Population Histories using Y-chromosome Haplotypes (Peter A Underhill) Demic Diffusion as the Basic Process of Human Expansions (Luca Cavalli-Sforza) The DNA Chronology of Prehistoric Human Dispersals (Peter Forster & Colin Renfrew) What Molecules Can't Tell Us about the Spread of Languages and the Neolithic (Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt, Vincent Macaulay & Martin Richards). Part III Regional Studies. A. Western Asia and North Africa. The Natufian Culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and Economic Trends in Southwestern Asia (Ofer Bar-Yosef) Archaeology and Linguistic Diversity in North Africa (Fekri A Hassan) The Prehistory of a Dispersal: the Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) Farming Lexicon (Alexander Militarev) Transitions to Farming and Pastoralism in North Africa (Graeme Barker) Language Family Expansions: Broadening our Understandings of Cause from an African Perspective (Christopher Ehret) Language and Farming Dispersals in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Particular Reference to the Bantu-speaking Peoples (David W Phillipson). B. Asia and Oceania. An Agricultural Perspective on Dravidian Historical Linguistics: Archaeological Crop Packages, Livestock and Dravidian Crop Vocabulary (Dorian Fuller) The Genetics of Language and Farming Spread in India (Toomas Kivisild et al) Languages and Farming Dispersals: Austroasiatic Languages and Rice Cultivation (Charles Higham) Tibeto-Burman Phylogeny and Prehistory: Languages, Material Culture and Genes (George van Driem) The Austronesian Dispersal: Languages, Technologies and People (Andrew Pawley) Island Southeast Asia: Spread or Friction Zone? (Victor Paz) Polynesians: Devolved Taiwanese Rice Farmers or Wallacean Maritime Traders with Fishing, Foraging and Horticultural Skills? (Stephen Oppenheimer & Martin Richards) Can the Hypothesis of Language/Agriculture Co-dispersal be Tested with Archaeogenetics? (Matthew Hurles) Agriculture and Language Change in the Japanese Islands (Mark Hudson). C. Mesoamerica and the US Southwest. Contextualizing Proto-languages, Homelands and Distant Genetic Relationship: Some Reflections on the Comparative Method from a Mesoamerican Perspective (Ssren Wichmann) 26 Proto-Uto-Aztecan Cultivation and the Northern Devolution (Jane H Hill) The Spread of Maize Agriculture in the U.S. Southwest (R G Matson) Conflict and Language Dispersal: Issues and a New World Example (Steven A LeBlanc). D. Europe. Issues of Scale and Symbiosis: Unpicking the Agricultural 'Package' (Martin Jones) Demography and Dispersal of Early Farming Populations at the MesolithicNeolithic Transition: Linguistic and Genetic Implications (Marek Zvelebil) Pioneer Farmers: The Neolithic Transition in Western Europe (Chris Scarre) Farming Dispersal in Europe and the Spread of the Indo-European Language Family (Bernard Comrie) DNA Variation in Europe: Estimating the Demographic Impact of Neolithic Dispersals (Guido Barbujani & Isabelle Dupanloup) Admixture and the Demic Diffusion Model in Europe (Lounes Chikhi) Complex Signals for Population Expansions in Europe and Beyond (Kristiina Tambets et al) Analyzing Genetic Data in a Model-based Framework: Inferences about European Prehistory (Martin Richards, Vincent Macaulay & Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt). Postscript. Concluding Observations (Peter Bellwood & Colin Renfrew).

Peter Bellwood

Papers

Farmers and their languages: the first expansions.

Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago

First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies

First Farmers: the Origins of Agricultural Societies, by Peter Bellwood. Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2005; ISBN 0-631-20565-9

Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis