Due to its pivotal geographical location and proximity to transcontinental migratory routes, Iran has played a key role in subsequent migrations, both prehistoric and historic, between Africa, Asia and Europe. To shed light on the genetic structure of the Iranian population as well as on the expansion patterns and population movements which affected this region, the complete mitochondrial genom...

Equus hydruntinus inhabited Europe and the Middle East for more than 300 000 years. For a long time, palaeontological data failed to place E. hydruntinus into the equid phylogenetic tree, confronted with the fact that it shares primitive Equus characters with both zebras and asses, and derived characters with asses and hemiones. However, the study of a recently discovered skull points to a rela...

Beveled Rim Bowls (BRBs) are the most iconic and well-known vessel type of ancient Southwest Asia. Roughly carelessly produced, these conical bowls attested in their thousands at 4th millennium BCE sites from southern Iraq Persian Gulf to highlands eastern Turkey Iran. Questions regarding function relationship with emergent state institutions have stood centre nearly a century debates about nat...

Genetic data can help answer questions about the basis of the contemporary population structure and evolutionary history of a species. Ancient Murrelets (Synthliboramphus antiquus) are north-Pacific seabirds that breed in a 9,000 km subarctic range from China to British Columbia. In this study, DNA sequence variation data from the cytochrome b gene and the mitochondrial control region are used ...

Abstract Iran’s armed forces have made tremendous strides since the decade‐long war with Iraq in 1980s. Tehran’s cultivation of ideologically sympathetic forces, along provision material help, has allowed Iran to project power and influence throughout Middle East. Some policy analysts who study military development are biased lack cultural understanding, contending that republic is driven by un...

Vitiligo is a common disorder of skin pigmentation. White spots of the skin are due to loss of melanocytes production (1). Multiple causes have been indicated for this issue by the researchers’ with the autoimmunity as the major one (2). The definitive treatment has not been provided so far. Over the past centuries, plants found in the natural habitat of Iran have thus played an important role ...

Background: A microscopic study on ancient metals was established to identify chemical composition and microstructure of archaeological tin bronze objects. For this purpose, ten small bronze pieces from Baba Jilan Iron Age site, western Iran, were selected and studied by optical microscopy (OM) and scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM–EDS) methods. Results: The...