New research led by Oxford University and Queen Mary University of London has resolved a pig paradox. Archaeological evidence has shown that pigs were domesticated in the Near East and as such, modern pigs should resemble Near Eastern wild boar. They do not. Instead, the genetic signatures of modern European domestic pigs resemble European wild boar.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the study shows how this has happened.
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12th August 2019
New research led by Oxford University and Queen Mary University of London has resolved a pig paradox. Archaeological evidence has shown that pigs were domesticated in the Near East and as such, modern pigs should resemble Near Eastern wild boar. They do not. Instead, the genetic signatures of modern European domestic pigs resemble European wild boar.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the study shows how this has happened.
25th September 2018
Post-doctoral Research Assistant in Evolutionary Genomics of Wild and Domestic Pigs |
PalaeoBARN |
The School of Archaeology, South Parks Road, Oxford |
Grade 7: Salary in the range £32,236 - £38,460 p.a. |
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Assistant position as part of a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant entitled: “The Consequences of Gene Flow between Wild and Domestic Populations during Livestock Evolution”.
5th July 2018
The arrival of Europeans to the Americas, beginning in the 15th century, all but wiped out the dogs that had lived alongside native people on the continent for thousands of years, according to new research published today in Science.
But one close relative of these native dogs lives on in an unexpected place – as a transmissible cancer whose genome is that of the original dog in which it appeared, but which has since spread throughout the world.
Using genetic information from 71 archaeological dog remains from North America and Siberia, an international team led by researchers at the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, and Durham University showed that ‘native’ (or ‘pre-contact’) American dogs, which arrived alongside people over 10,000 years ago and dispersed throughout North and South America, possessed genetic signatures unlike dogs found anywhere else in the world.
24th April 2018
In our recently published paper we reveal that the biodiversity of Indonesia's Sulawesi is much younger than previously thought, as well as the geology! Read more about it here.
19th February 2018
A recent paper by the Palaeobarn team has challenged the mythology surrounding the domestication of rabbits, widely held to have occurred around 600AD after a decree by Pope Gregory allowed fetal rabbit meat to be eaten during Lent. Published in Ecology & Evolution, the paper outlines a much more complex picture of rabbit domestication as a continuum, rather than a short series of historically localised events.
1st December 2017
Congratulations to doctoral candidate Evan Irving-Pease, who won the student presentation prize at the 7th Archaeozoology, Genetics, and Morphometrics Working Group Meeting (ICAZ) held at the University of Liverpool, 13-15 October 2017.
20th June 2016
You may have seen us in the news recently... Below is just a sample of the media we featured in, in response to our Irish Dog Paper
2nd June 2016
Our latest dog domestication paper is out in Science. A huge congratulations to our team and collaborators who have worked hard to make this happen!
4th February 2016
The PalaeoBARN team has been in the international and local media a lot lately.
21st January 2016
It's all happening this week over at the New York Times, as far as the PalaeoBARN team is concerned!
