This paper aims to identify the spatial patterning of burning and occupation within an early Middle Stone Age (MSA) sea cave in the Western Cape Province of South Africa by creating a multidimensional model of archaeomagnetic data recovered from all excavated units. Magnetic susceptibility and other mineral magnetic parameters are shown to provide an excellent proxy for the anthropogenic altera...

Caves are perceived as isolated, extreme habitats with a uniquely specialized biota, which long ago led to the idea that caves are "evolutionary dead-ends." This implies that cave-adapted taxa may be doomed for extinction before they can diversify or transition to a more stable state. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested in a phylogenetic framework with multiple independently...

Massive amounts of data are available in today’s Digital Libraries (DLs). The challenge is to find relevant information quickly and easily, and to use it effectively. A standard way to access DLs is via a text -based query issued by a single user. Typically, the query results in a potentially very long ordered list of matching documents, that makes it hard for users to find what they are lookin...

Two new species of Cyclocephala from Central America are described and diagnosed: C. abrelata Ratcliffe and Cave from northern Honduras and C. melolonthida Ratcliffe and Cave from southern El Salvador.

The coprophilous Dimargaris bacillispora is a rarely found and more rarely isolated microfungal species. In this study, we report the repeated observation and isolation of this fungus from a cave sediment used to rear cave-inhabiting isopods and springtails in the laboratory, originating from the Domica Cave, Slovakia. Dimargaris bacillispora was also observed and isolated from the faeces and c...

The Cueva del Azufre in Tabasco, Mexico, is a nutrient-rich cave and its inhabitants need to cope with high levels of dissolved hydrogen sulfide and extreme hypoxia. One of the successful colonizers of this cave is the poeciliid fish Poecilia mexicana, which has received considerable attention as a model organism to examine evolutionary adaptations to extreme environmental conditions. Nonethele...

How organisms respond to environmental change is a long-standing question in evolutionary biology. Species invading novel habitats provide an opportunity to examine contemporary evolution in action and decipher the pace of evolutionary change over short timescales. Here, we characterized phenotypic evolution in the Italian plethodontid salamander, Hydromantes strinatii, following the recent col...

1941-1942, many Middle Stone Age industries were revealed. In addition, an infant burial was found in the assemblage. This finding lead archeologists to think that there may have been earlier hominid habitation in the Border cave site. Geologist H. B. S. Cooke did geological studies of the Border Cave assemblages. In 1974, a hominid mandible was found during an excavation along with younger MSA...

Animal life in caves has fascinated researchers and the public alike because of the unusual and sometimes bizarre morphological adaptations observed in numerous troglobitic species. Despite their worldwide diversity, the adaptations of cave millipedes (Diplopoda) to a troglobitic lifestyle have rarely been examined. In this study, morphological characters were analyzed in species belonging to f...