Volume 3 Issue 10, October 2019

The past half century has seen a move from a multiregionalist view of human origins to widespread acceptance that modern humans emerged in Africa. Here the authors argue that a simple out-of-Africa model is also outdated, and that the current state of the evidence favours a structured African metapopulation model of human origins.

Currently honeybees are the sole model insect pollinator for regulatory pesticide risk assessments globally. Here we question whether this surrogacy approach provides adequate protection against potential non-target impacts of pesticide exposure for the wide diversity of insect pollinators on which agricultural production and wild plant ecosystems depend.

A simulation of expansion, fragmentation and extirpation of species ranges over multiple glacial–interglacial cycles matches empirical biodiversity gradients and shows that high levels of biodiversity in the tropics can emerge from temporally variable but spatially patchy precipitation regimes, driven by allopatric speciation.

Measurement comparisons of ancient and modern carp push back the initial stages of aquaculture to 6000 bc, raising the possibility that rice paddy and fish co-culture systems are much older than previously thought. This research suggests carp were later independently domesticated twice, once in Europe and once in Asia.

A Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment experiment that manipulates seawater pH on a coral reef flat shows that the level of ocean acidification at which net dissolution of corals occurs may arrive much sooner than expected.

The authors evaluate the reproducibility of ecological niche modelling literature and provide a checklist of crucial items for more reproducible ecological niche models.

Transnational corporations control large proportions of the industries and commodities that directly and indirectly impact the environment. Here, the authors discuss the problems, but also potential benefits, of such consolidation for sustainability.

Microscopic analysis of backed stone pieces from the Uluzzian technocomplex of Italy (45–40 thousand years ago) identifies them as hafted armatures, probably used as projectiles.

Comparing body-length distributions of modern and archaeological specimens of common carp, the authors find evidence consistent with fish management in the Early Neolithic site of Jiahu in China, representing the earliest identified form of aquaculture.

The number of species increases from the poles to the Equator; yet it is unclear what determines this pattern. Using simulations, the authors show that spatio-temporal climatic changes recapitulate the patterns of vertebrate biodiversity as a function of speciation, extinction and dispersal alone.

Sampling plants and lichens from across boreal North America and Eurasia, the authors show that the composition and diversity of symbiotic fungal endophyte communities are controlled primarily by host associations, not environmental filtering.

A Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment study on the Great Barrier Reef finds that elevated carbon dioxide impairs net calcification of living corals and may accelerate dissolution of dead corals.

Conducting a series of removal experiments using synthetic leaf-inhabiting bacterial communities, the authors identify several keystone strains and show that priority effects drive phyllosphere community assembly.

Ascaroside pheromones reflect population density in Caenorhabditis elegans. Here, the authors show that variation in ascaroside receptor genes contributes to differences in pheromone responses in natural populations of C. elegans.

Whereas vertebrate genomes are highly methylated at CpG positions, invertebrate genomes are typically sparsely methylated. Here, the authors report a highly methylated genome in a marine sponge and show striking similarities with vertebrates.

Vavilovian mimicry is the phenomenon whereby weeds evolve to resemble co-located crop plants through unintentional human selection. Here the authors compare mimetic and non-mimetic populations of Echinochloa crus-galli (a weed mimic of rice) to characterize the genomic underpinnings of this case of Vavilovian mimicry.

An analysis of 33 brain regions across a wide sample of primates reveals that primate brain structure is largely driven by selection on sensory and cognitive specializations that develop in response to different socioecological niches.