Altamira Cave, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, houses one of the world's most prominent Palaeolithic rock art. The conservation of the rock art is threatened by microorganisms (bacteria and recently fungi). Previous studies revealed that the entry and dispersion of microorganisms and nutrients to the interior of the cave depends on the exchange rates between the cave atmosphere and the exterior t...

Patterns of sleep vary widely among species, but the functional and evolutionary principles responsible for this diversity remain unknown. The characin fish, Astyanax mexicanus, has eyed surface and numerous blind cave populations. The cave populations are largely independent in their origins, and the species is ideal for studying the genetic bases of convergent evolution. Here we show that thi...

Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash) is located in Bashkortostan, the Southern Urals, in the Shulgan Tash Reserve on the Belaya River. Its coordinates are 53°02’ N; 57°03’ W. It is a large karst three-level system of chambers, galleries and wells having the total length of 3323 m with vertical amplitude of 165 m. The karst system is characterized by large chambers and galleries, great dynamics of microcl...

Endemism, which is typically high on islands and in caves, has rarely been studied in the cave entrance ecotone. We investigated the endemism of the spider genus Uthina at cave entrances. Totally 212 spiders were sampled from 46 localities, from Seychelles across Southeast Asia to Fiji. They mostly occur at cave entrances but occasionally appear at various epigean environments. Phylogenetic ana...

Cave fish have rarely been investigated with regard to their inner ear morphology, hearing abilities, and acoustic communication. Based on a previous study that revealed morphological differences in the saccular otolith between a cave and two surface populations of Poecilia mexicana, we checked for additional differences in utricular and lagenar otoliths and tested whether different populations...

Lower Kane Cave, Wyoming (USA), has hydrogen sulfide-bearing springs that discharge into the cave passage. The springs and cave stream harbour white filamentous microbial mats dominated by Epsilonproteobacteria. Recently, novel 16S rRNA gene sequences from the phylum Acidobacteria, subgroup 7, were found in these cave mats. Although Acidobacteria are ubiquitously distributed in many terrestrial...

Our ongoing investigation of early maize farming in the American Southwest has entailed stable isotope analysis and accelerator radiocarbon dating of Basketmaker II remains from sites in the Four Corners region. Here we report radiocarbon dates on a large mortuary assemblage excavated by RichardWetherill in 1893 from a burial cave in southeastern Utah. It has long been thought that all individu...

A CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) is a 3D interactive environment that enables a user to be fully immersed in a virtual world and offers a unique way to visualise and interact with digital information. In this paper we build a foundation of CAVE interaction design by characterising generic affordances of such an environment and enumerating currently conceivable/implementable interacti...

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...