Germany Starts Work on Space Mining Laws

Facing tough competition from China, the United States and even tiny Luxembourg, Germany is racing to draft new laws and attract private investment to secure a slice of an emerging space market that could be worth $1 trillion a year by the 2040s.

The drive to give Germany a bigger role in space comes as European, Asian and U.S. companies stake out ground in an evolving segment that promises contracts for everything from exploration to mining of outer-space resources.

Firms likely to benefit from any future spending rise in Germany include Airbus, which co-owns the maker of Europe’s Ariane space rockets, and Bremen-based OHB.

The new legislation would limit financial and legal liabilities of private companies should accidents happen in orbit, set standards for space operations and offer incentives for new projects, the German economy ministry told Reuters.

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There was a Huge Steppe Migration into Europe Circa 3,300 BC

Consider the unexpected movement of people who originally lived on the steppes of Central Asia, north of the Black and Caspian seas. About 5,300 years ago, the local hunter-gatherer cultures were replaced in many places by nomadic herders, dubbed the Yamnaya, who were able to expand rapidly by exploiting horses and the new invention of the cart, and who left behind big, rich burial sites.

Archeologists have long known that some of the technologies used by the Yamnaya later spread to Europe. But the startling revelation from the ancient DNA was that the people moved, too - all the way to the Atlantic coast of Europe in the west to Mongolia in the east and India in the south. This vast migration helps explain the spread of Indo-European languages. And it significantly replaced the local hunter-gatherer genes across Europe with the indelible stamp of steppe DNA, as happened in Britain with the migration of the Bell Beaker people to the island.

"This whole phenomenon of the steppe expansion is an amazing example of what ancient DNA can show," says Reich. And, adds Cunliffe, "no one, not even archeologists in their wildest dreams, had expected such a high steppe genetic content in the populations of northern Europe in the third millennium B.C."

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The Copper Age Iberian Bell Beaker Culture Exported Culture & Technology, not Genes

Prehistoric Iberians 'exported' their culture throughout Europe, reaching Great Britain, Sicily, Poland and all over central Europe in general. However, they did not export their genes. The Beaker culture, which probably originated in Iberia, left remains in those parts of the continent. However, that diffusion was not due to large migrations of populations that took this culture with them. These are the conclusions of an international study in which the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was involved. Its findings, published in the journal Nature, indicate no evidence of any genetic outflow from Iberia to those areas has been discovered. "Therefore, the diffusion of the Beaker culture from Iberia is the first example of a culture being transmitted as an idea, basically due to a question of social prestige (since it was associated with the virtues of being virile and of being warriors), which is why it is adopted by other populations", indicates researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox, from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, a mixed research centre run by CSIC and the Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona, Spain.

Between 4,700 and 4,400 years ago, a new type of bell-shaped beaker pottery was introduced throughout western and central Europe. For more than a century, archaeologists have been trying to determine whether the spread of this beaker pottery - and the (Beaker) culture associated with it - represented a large-scale migration or whether it was due simply to the exchange of new ideas. Now, this new study, which includes DNA data from 400 prehistoric skeletons collected from sites across Europe, resolves the debate of whether the spread was due to migrations or ideas, indicating that both arguments are correct. The findings show that the culture which produced these bell-shaped beakers extended from Iberia to central Europe without a significant movement of populations, although the Beaker culture would spread to other places through migrations at a later date.

The study, whose first author is the Spanish researcher Íñigo Olalde, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, shows that once the (Bell) Beaker culture reaches the centre of Europe (around Germany and its surrounding area), it expands backwards to other places, notably to the British Isles. Yet, in this case, it does represent a migration, replacing around 90% of the population with it. "That is to say, the Neolithic people who built Stonehenge (and who had a greater genetic similarity with Neolithic Iberians than with those from Central Europe) almost disappear and are replaced by the populations from the Beaker culture from the Netherlands and Germany. This replacement is almost absolute in terms of the Y chromosome, which is transmitted by the paternal line, indicating an extreme reproductive bias, and therefore a previously unheard of social dominance. The backward flow also reaches other places such as Italy (at least in the north) and Iberia. I believe it is possible that this is also associated with the expansion of the Celtic or Proto-Celtic languages," Mr. Lalueza-Fox points out.

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Europe Wants its own X-37B, called the Space Rider

Space Rider is a re-entry vehicle, the evolution of the IXV (Intermediate Experimental Vehicle, launched by Vega in February 2015), capable of ‘navigating’ up to 2 months in low Earth orbit before returning to earth. Re-entry enables the recovery of all the useful load that can be analysed, and the vehicle to be reused for a new mission. The contract signed by ESA with Avio and TAS-I (Thales Alenia Space Italia) is worth a total of €36.7 million for the development of the Space Rider system, consisting of two modules: AOM (Avum Orbital Module) and RM (Re-entry Module). Avio will handle the development of AOM, a specific version of AVUM (fourth stage of the VEGA C) capable of supplying power and services for controlling the vehicle’s re-entry attitude during the orbital stage.

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So, Brexit, wow...

Wow.  Just wow.

So we ought to expect a new Scottish Referendum soon and I suspect Scotland to become an independent nation.  Some are saying Northern Ireland is talking seceding as well.

I have to wonder if we have the political classes completely misreading the public, here, in Britain and abroad, because their beliefs have become so strong as to place them into an echo chamber.  The world might have shifted underneath us and many might be in denial.  It makes me rather worried for November.

Well, my brit friends, you can always join the US.  Heck, you could even get a William Windsor, POTUS, if he were willing to abdicate.  He seems far more capable than at least one of the twits in our presidential race right now.

Modern Europeans are Descended From Anatolian Farmers, not Paleolithic Europeans

For most of the last 45,000 years Europe was inhabited solely by hunter-gatherers. About 8,500 years ago a new form of subsistence - farming - started to spread across the continent from modern-day Turkey, reaching central Europe by 7,500 years ago and Britain by 6,100 years ago. This new subsistence strategy led to profound changes in society, including greater population density, new diseases, and poorer health. Such was the impact of farming on how we live that scientists have debated for more than 100 years how it was spread across Europe. Many believed that farming was spread as an idea to European hunter-gatherers but without a major migration of farmers themselves.

This week, an international research team led by paleogeneticists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) publishes a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America showing that early farmers from across Europe have an almost unbroken trail of ancestry leading back to the Aegean. The scientists analyzed the DNA of early farmer skeletons from Greece and Turkey. According to the study, the Neolithic settlers from northern Greece and the Marmara Sea region of western Turkey reached central Europe via a Balkan route and the Iberian Peninsula via a Mediterranean route. These colonists brought sedentary life, agriculture, and domestic animals and plants to Europe. During their expansion they will have met hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe since the Ice Age, but the two groups mixed initially only to a very limited extent. "They exchanged cultural heritage and knowledge, but rarely spouses," commented anthropologist Joachim Burger, who lead the research. "Only after centuries did the number of partnerships increase."

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Is the Western World in Crisis?

NATO’s start in 1949 was a hardly a smooth one.

George Kennan, having advocated political and economic containment of the Soviet Union, opposed the formation of the military alliance. Norway was reluctant to join the transatlantic defense pact, fearful that accession might provoke Soviet military action. Portugal was similarly ambivalent. The authoritarian government of António de Oliveira Salazar — anti-communist, but also troubled by a rise of American influence — initially refused to participate in the Marshall Plan. The strategic environment was otherwise hardly settled. There was civil war in Greece. The Germans were tiring of occupation. And Washington’s increasingly assertive stance toward the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was causing tension in most capitals across risk-averse Western Europe. The alliance was “held together with string, chewing gum and safety pins,” in those days, as Dean Acheson would later put it.

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Why did Several Dinosaur Families go Locally Extinct ONLY in Europe During the Cretaceous?

Researchers have used 'network theory' for the first time to visually depict the movement of dinosaurs around the world during the Mesozoic Era - including a curious exodus from Europe.

The research, published today in the Journal of Biogeography, also reaffirms previous studies that have found that dinosaurs continued to migrate to all parts of the world after the 'supercontinent' Pangaea split into land masses that are separated by oceans.

Study lead Dr Alex Dunhill from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, said: "We presume that temporary land bridges formed due to changes in sea levels, temporarily reconnecting the continents."

"Such massive structures - spanning, for example, from Indo-Madagascar to Australia - may be hard to imagine. But over the timescales that we are talking about, which is in the order of tens of millions of years, it is perfectly feasible that plate tectonic activity gave rise to the right conditions for such land bridges to form."

In the study, the researchers used the Paleobiology Database that contains every documented and accessible dinosaur fossil from around the world. Fossil records for the same dinosaur families from different continents were then cross-mapped for different periods of time, revealing connections that show how they have migrated.

Some regions of the world, such as Europe, have extensive fossil records from a long history of palaeontology digs, while other parts of the world have been largely unexplored. To help account for this disparity in fossil records, which could otherwise skew the findings, the researchers applied a filter to the database records to only count the first time that a dinosaur family connection occurred between two continents.

The findings support the idea that, although continental splitting undoubtedly reduced intercontinental migration of dinosaurs, it did not completely inhibit it.

Surprisingly, the research also showed that all connections between Europe and other continents during the Early Cretaceous period (125-100 million years ago) were out-going. That is, while dinosaur families were leaving Europe, no new families were migrating into Europe.

Dr Dunhill said: "This is a curious result that has no concrete explanation. It might be a real migratory pattern or it may be an artefact of the incomplete and sporadic nature of the dinosaur fossil record."

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Greatest Megafauna Mammal Extinctions in Europe Began 3,000 Years Ago

Millennial-scale faunal record reveals differential resilience of European large mammals to human impacts across the Holocene

Authors:

Crees et al

Abstract:

The use of short-term indicators for understanding patterns and processes of biodiversity loss can mask longer-term faunal responses to human pressures. We use an extensive database of approximately 18 700 mammalian zooarchaeological records for the last 11 700 years across Europe to reconstruct spatio-temporal dynamics of Holocene range change for 15 large-bodied mammal species. European mammals experienced protracted, non-congruent range losses, with significant declines starting in some species approximately 3000 years ago and continuing to the present, and with the timing, duration and magnitude of declines varying individually between species. Some European mammals became globally extinct during the Holocene, whereas others experienced limited or no significant range change. These findings demonstrate the relatively early onset of prehistoric human impacts on postglacial biodiversity, and mirror species-specific patterns of mammalian extinction during the Late Pleistocene. Herbivores experienced significantly greater declines than carnivores, revealing an important historical extinction filter that informs our understanding of relative resilience and vulnerability to human pressures for different taxa. We highlight the importance of large-scale, long-term datasets for understanding complex protracted extinction processes, although the dynamic pattern of progressive faunal depletion of European mammal assemblages across the Holocene challenges easy identification of ‘static’ past baselines to inform current-day environmental management and restoration.

Euro-Russian Exomars Launched on Proton Rocket

A joint European-Russian mission aiming to search for traces of life on Mars blasted off on Monday for the start of a seven-month unmanned space journey to the Red Planet.

A Proton rocket carrying the Trace Gas Orbiter to examine Mars's atmosphere and a descent module that will conduct a test landing on its surface launched into an overcast sky at the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe at 0931 GMT.

The spacecraft is set to detach from its Briz-M rocket booster just after 2000 GMT before beginning its 496-million-kilometre (308-million-mile) voyage through the cosmos.

The ExoMars 2016 mission, a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Russian equivalent Roscosmos, is the first part of a two-phase exploration aiming to answer questions about the existence of life on Earth's neighbour.

The Trace Gas Orbiter will examine methane around Mars while a lander dubbed Schiaparelli that will detach and descend to the surface of the fourth planet from the Sun.

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More info here.

Still more info here.

Finally, one more.

New Space Race #3

Canada:

The opinion has been expressed Canada at risk of losing out on the riches of asteroid mining.

Europe:

Antitrust regulators are not granting immediate approval for Safran acquiring Arianespace.

The Europeans are looking at what to do for the next iteration of the Vega rocket.

They are also considering a new, smallsat launcher.

India:

ISRO is looking how to privatize its PSLV rocket.

India's on track to launch its new rocket in December after a successful engine test.

Russia:

After launching the Joint European Russian Exomars and associated orbiter, the Russians space plans are woefully underfunded to achieve their official goals.

At the same time, the Russians are stating they want to build space based weapons.

And they want to test their ballistic missiles against an asteroid in 2033.

USA:

The CST-100/Starliner has been testing its water landings.   (and here). 

Here are some more details about the new cargo missions to the space station.  SpaceX was awarded another 5 cargo missions in December to the Internal Space Station by NASA for roughly $700 million.

Orbital ATK's new Antares rocket is expected to debut this summer.

The Atlas V launcher may lose its USAF payloads if the Treasury Department finds the Russian RD-180 rocket engines violate the sanctions on Russia.  The chief buyer at the Pentagon has stated the engine buys do not violate the sanctions currently in place for Russia.  An Air Force General has stated they will be moving off the RD-180.

The US Air Force plan to develop a new rocket with the $1 billion budget request has been called a violation of the law by Congressman Rogers.

NASA has ordered stop work to man rating the interim upper stage for the Space Launch System and will move forward with the long term solution.  This ought to make Culberson happy as it makes doing the Europa mission(s) easier.  The Upper Stage might just be stuck in a political tug of war though.

A mock up of the SLS first stage is making the rounds in the Southern US.

One of the crawlers formerly used to transport the shuttle to the launch pad has been modified to carry the SLS.

Due to other nations actions, China and Russia mainly, the US needs to prepare for a space war.  Here's Undersecretary of Defense Kendall on future space military programs.

It seems the reports of the death of XS-1, the DARPA reusable small sat launcher, are exaggerated: DARPA is requesting a further $50.5M for the fabrication of the airframe.  More info here as well.

The House is considering (in hearings at least) the Space Leadership Preservation Act.  Amongst the changes are giving the NASA administrator a ten year appointment.  Here are some arguments for the act.  Here are some reasons against it.   Considering who the main proponent is, I'm not surprised by the provisions.  Whether its a good idea or not, its considered a very long shot to get passed.

Lebenslüge: Germany's Delusional Approach to Russia

There is a German word for nearly everything. An unquestioned lifelong self-delusion is referred to as a life-lie, a Lebenslüge. When it comes to Germany’s policies vis-à-vis Russia there are plenty of such self-delusions that drive Berlin’s foreign policy. This fact is more important given that Berlin heads the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which runs the two observer missions that are supposed to monitor the implementation of the Minsk II agreements in Ukraine. In January 2016, Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, laid out the priorities for the OSCE chairmanship — and they could hardly be more revealing. They indicate all that is wrong with the German approach to European security. Steinmeier seems to believe that the current insecurity in Europe is the result of a lack of trust stemming from a breakdown in communications between Moscow and Western nations. No wonder, then, that Germany’s emphasis is on dialogue to restore trust and ultimately make Europe secure again.

Unfortunately, this logic has it backwards. There is indeed a lack of trust. However, that lack of trust is a direct consequence of Russian aggression, not Western miscommunication. Approaching Russia with suspicion and mistrust — as many Eastern European nations do — is the only sane reaction, given that Russia has invaded a neighbor, annexed part of its territory, and tried to divide the rest of the country while threatening half a dozen other countries in Europe, all based on a “blood and soil” ideology.

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New Space Race #2

North Korea:

North Korea placed...something...in orbit.  It appears the satellite is tumbling and probably is unusable.  The US has stated the satellite orbit is stable, but the sat is NOT transmitting.  It appears the Norks have been able to stabilize the sat: its no longer tumbling.

Apparently the rocket that launched the satellite had twice the payload of the previous one.  This is, of course, a concern.

Russia:

The Russians have significant doubts about reusable rockets and will be retiring the Rockot.

Europe:

Luxembourg is getting into the asteroid mining race!  The country will be implementing a legal framework to do that same thing as the US Congress did to allow for mining offworld, will be investing in asteroid mining companies, and act as a tax haven for those companies (of course!).

Magna Parva has launched an 'in-space manufacturing' website.

The European Space Agency has released its roadmap for the future.

USA:

The White House released its proposed 2017 NASA budget.

NASA has released more details about the selection of the new cargo contracts to the ISS.

Congress wants a solid roadmap to get to Mars from NASA.

NASA's EM-1 Orion capsule has been delivered to Kennedy Space Flight Center.  And here.

Watch the EM-1 Orion being built.

NASA will be launching several cubesats into deep space and to the Moon on the first SLS launch.

The US Air Force is disputing why the United Launch Alliance refused to bid on the new GPS satellite launch and is quite angry.

The US Air Force is also going to spend over $1.2 billion over the next 5 years to replace the Russian engines in the Atlas V or develop a new rocket to effectively do the same thing.

The New Space Race #1

Whether people realize it or not, there is a new space race on.  This time, its less about getting to a place first, so much as attempting to build a sustainable, reliable space program with guaranteed access to space.   To be sure, the world will be going to Mars, but the steps to get there are much bigger than simply going to the Moon.  The US, China and others are build the infrastructure to get there.  Who will build fastest and sustainably will be the first ones to step onto the Red Planet.

The New Space Race will be an aggregation of news about those efforts that will be posted as sufficient news of interest has accumulated.  

China:

China will launch a second space station in June.

Europe:

The new Airbus+Safran rocket is hinging on a French tax ruling.

The Ariane 6 is moving ahead, but will not be reusing any of its parts, unlike the American rockets being developed.

Safran believes the first first contract for the Ariane 6 will be signed by year's end.

Russia:

The first satellites have been shipped to Russia's new spaceport for launch.

Russia will be substituting local parts for its rockets that used to be made in Ukraine.

Russia's new Federation space capsule being developed is touted as being cheaper than the SpaceX Dragon Capsule.

Due to the crashing Russian economy and slashed Russian space budget, the new Angara-A5V rocket first launch has been postponed at least ten years to 2025.

USA:

Did the law that granted Americans and American companies rights to mine asteroids not go far enough?  Should the US have allowed foreign companies to register claims?   I think that would have clashed with the international treaties regarding outer space, but also would have ended up making the US the defacto arbitrator of all things space.  That seems like a really big...presumption.

Dragon 2 landing rocket test.

SpaceX also tested the Dragon 2 capsule's parachute system, but with a mass simulator rather than a capsule.

The NASA awarded three new resupply contracts for the space station.  SpaceX will continue with their Dragon capsule.  Orbital ATK will continue with their Cygnus module.  The new addition is Sierra Nevada with a unmanned cargo version of their DreamChaser.  This is partially being funded by the Europeans.  The really good news about the decision is losers, Boeing and Lockheed, will not be protesting the selections!

Lockheed has stated the Orion capsule is still on schedule for its 2018 first launch. Work on the pressure vessel for the first Orion has completed.

The Senate and House have introduced legislation to reinstate the limitation on the United Launch Alliance on using the Russian rocket engines.  Congress is debating the engine ban now.

In a related move, the US Air Force may terminate the unique contract it has with the ULA due it not bidding on a GPS launch.

Musk claims he will be unveiling his Mars architecture in September and the first launch to Mars will be in 2025.

Copper Age Mummy Ötzi was Infected With Ulcer Causing Bacterium, Helicobacter pylori

Scientists are continually unearthing new facts about Homo sapiens from the mummified remains of Ötzi, the Copper Age man, who was discovered in a glacier in 1991. Five years ago, after Ötzi's genome was completely deciphered, it seemed that the wellspring of spectacular discoveries about the past would soon dry up. An international team of scientists working with paleopathologist Albert Zink and microbiologist Frank Maixner from the European Academy (EURAC) in Bozen/Bolzano have now succeeded in demonstrating the presence of Helicobacter pylori in Ötzi's stomach contents, a bacterium found in half of all humans today. The theory that humans were already infected with this stomach bacterium at the very beginning of their history could well be true. The scientists succeeded in decoding the complete genome of the bacterium.

When EURAC's Zink and Maixner first placed samples from the Iceman's stomach under the microscope in their ancient DNA Lab at EURAC, almost three years ago, they were initially sceptical.

"Evidence for the presence of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is found in the stomach tissue of patients today, so we thought it was extremely unlikely that we would find anything because Ötzi's stomach mucosa is no longer there," explains Zink. Together with colleagues from the Universities of Kiel, Vienna and Venda in South Africa as well as the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, the scientists tried to find a new way to proceed. "We were able to solve the problem once we hit upon the idea of extracting the entire DNA of the stomach contents," reports Maixner. "After this was successfully done, we were able to tease out the individual Helicobacter sequences and reconstruct a 5,300 year old Helicobacter pylori genome."

The scientists found a potentially virulent strain of bacteria, to which Ötzi's immune system had already reacted. "We showed the presence of marker proteins which we see today in patients infected with Helicobacter," said the microbiologist.

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Should Europe Cover the Sahara With Solar Panels for Power?

Could one solution to climate change be to harvest the power of sunlight where it shines brightest on the planet? Should we solar panel the Sahara desert?

Four experts discuss the radical proposal with the BBC World Service Inquiry programme.

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Xenokeryx amidalae: an Extinction Palaeomerycid Ruminant Related to Giraffes From Miocene Neogene Spain

The extinct three-horned palaeomerycid ruminant, Xenokeryx amidalae, found in Spain, may be from the same clade as giraffes, according to a study published December 2, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Israel M. Sánchez from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales-CSIC, Madrid, Spain, and colleagues.

Palaeomerycids, now extinct, were strange three-horned Eurasian Miocene ruminants known through fossils from Spain to China. In this article, the authors classify the palaeomerycid to their clade based on shared characteristics with the best-known species of the group and reassess their phylogenetic position among ruminants, which is currently disputed. The authors use well-preserved remains of a new palaeomerycid, Xenokeryx amidalae, which included a complete sample of cranial--including both frontal and supra-occipital 't-shaped' cranial appendages--dental, and postcranial remains, from middle Miocene deposits of Spain.

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paper link.

Hominins From Lower Paleolithic Schöningen Spear Site Competed With Sabre Tooth Cats and ate a lot of Horse

Bone taphonomy of the Schöningen “Spear Horizon South” and its implications for site formation and hominin meat provisioning

Authors:

Starkovich et al

Abstract:

This paper presents the faunal remains from the new excavation area at the Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen. The focus of the study is on the southern extension of the main find horizon (Spear Horizon South), which includes the layer that yielded the famous Schöningen spears (13 II-4). Taxonomic data corroborate previous studies, that hominins primarily hunted Equus mosbachensis, a large Pleistocene horse. Equid body part representation at the site suggests that the animals were hunted and butchered locally. There is no evidence for density-mediated attrition in the assemblage. Weathering damage is uncommon, though there is ample evidence that carnivores had access to the bone. Carnivore bite sizes were measured and compared to experimental data provided by previous authors. Based on relationships between bite size and carnivore behavior and body size, we conclude that the primary modifying agents were large carnivores (i.e., wolves or saber-toothed cats). Previous studies show that carnivores often had secondary access to the remains, after hominins. Cut marks are commonly arranged haphazardly on the bones. This may indicate that multiple hominins participated in the butchery of horse skeletons, or that they were butchered over the course of hours or days. Cut marks on axial elements are more “orderly,” which probably reflects the physical logistics of orienting one's body in relation to a large carcass. These data differ from sites formed by Middle and Upper Paleolithic hominins, which might suggest that in later times, a system of organized meat provisioning was already in place. Taken together, the faunal evidence from the Spear Horizon South indicates that late Lower Paleolithic hominins using the site understood the behaviors of different prey species, hunted socially to take down large game, and successfully competed with large carnivores on the landscape for primary access to ungulate remains.

Europeans are Really all Turkish, well, Anatolian

The introduction of agriculture into Europe about 8,500 years ago changed the way people lived right down to their DNA.

Until recently, scientists could try to understand the way humans adapted genetically to changes that occurred thousands of years ago only by looking at DNA variation in today's populations. But our modern genomes contain mere echoes of the past that can't be connected to specific events.

Now, an international team reports in Nature that researchers can see how natural selection happened by analyzing ancient human DNA.

"It allows us to put a time and date on selection and to directly associate selection with specific environmental changes, in this case the development of agriculture and the expansion of the first farmers into Europe," said Iain Mathieson, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study.

By taking advantage of better DNA extraction techniques and amassing what is to date the largest collection of genome-wide datasets from ancient human remains, the team was able to identify specific genes that changed during and after the transition from hunting and gathering to farming.

Many of the variants occurred on or near genes that have been associated with height, the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, fatty acid metabolism, vitamin D levels, light skin pigmentation and blue eye color. Two variants appear on genes that have been linked to higher risk of celiac disease but that may have been important in adapting to an early agricultural diet.

Other variants were located on immune-associated genes, which made sense because "the Neolithic period involved an increase in population density, with people living close to one another and to domesticated animals," said Wolfgang Haak, one of three senior authors of the study, a research fellow at the University of Adelaide and group leader in molecular anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

"Although that finding did not come fully as a surprise," he added, "it was great to see the selection happening in 'real time.'"

The work also supports the idea that Europe's first farmers came from ancient Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, and fills in more details about how ancient groups mixed and migrated.

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Britain, European Union Discussing Technicalities of Brexit

A European official says British Prime Minister David Cameron and European Council President Donald Tusk will meet Sunday night to discuss the technicalities of the process needed if the U.K. decides to exit the bloc in the next couple of years.

Following an EU summit on Turkey and the refugee crisis on Sunday afternoon, Cameron and Tusk will meet for pre-arranged talks to work out details of a so-called Brexit.

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