With the help of UA researchers, archaeologists have discovered that the highest known human occupation sites also are the world’s oldest, challenging theories about the speed of human adaptation to high-altitude living.
Researchers at the University of Arizona have helped determine that human occupation sites in the southern Peruvian Andes not only are the highest known in the world, but also the oldest. (more…)
A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for organisms that eke out a living in some of the most inhospitable soils on Earth has found a hardy few.
A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the Martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi and other rudimentary organisms called archaea, which seem to have a different way of converting energy than their cousins elsewhere in the world.
“We haven’t formally identified or characterized the species,” said Ryan Lynch, a CU-Boulder doctoral student involved in the study. “But these are very different than anything else that has been cultured. Genetically, they’re at least 5 percent different than anything else in the DNA database of 2.5 million sequences.” (more…)