The northern wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) is a small (approx. 25 g), insectivorous migrant with one of the largest ranges of any songbird in the world, breeding from the eastern Canadian Arctic across Greenland, Eurasia and into Alaska (AK). However, there is no evidence that breeding populations in the New World have established overwintering sites in the Western Hemisphere. Using light-level ...

Although southern African Khoisan populations are often assumed to have remained largely isolated during prehistory, there is growing evidence for a migration of pastoralists from eastern Africa some 2,000 years ago, prior to the arrival of Bantu-speaking populations in southern Africa. Eastern Africa harbors distinctive lactase persistence (LP) alleles, and therefore LP alleles in southern Afr...

OBJECTIVE To review progress towards adoption of contraception among married or cohabiting women in western and eastern Africa between 1991 and 2004 by examining subjective need, approval, access and use. METHODS Indicators of attitudes towards and use of contraception were derived from Demographic and Health Surveys, which are nationally representative and yield internationally comparable da...

African swine fever virus (ASFV) outbreak has been considered as an emerging and re-emerging disease for almost a century. Diagnostically, simple polymerase chain reaction and sequencing-based molecular detection could be employed for both viral identification and genotyping. This study established a novel phylogenetic analysis and epidemiology comparison based on 205 bp of p72 gene sequences. ...

Although geneticists have extensively debated the mode by which agriculture diffused from the Near East to Europe, they have not directly examined similar agropastoral diffusions in Africa. It is unclear, for example, whether early instances of sheep, cows, pottery, and other traits of the pastoralist package were transmitted to southern Africa by demic or cultural diffusion. Here, we report a ...

We have analyzed and compared mitochondrial DNA variation of populations from the Near East and Africa and found a very high frequency of African lineages present in the Yemen Hadramawt: more than a third were of clear sub-Saharan origin. Other Arab populations carried approximately 10% lineages of sub-Saharan origin, whereas non-Arab Near Eastern populations, by contrast, carried few or no suc...

Drosophila melanogaster is an important model organism in evolutionary genetics, yet little is known about the population structure and the demographic history of this species within sub-Saharan Africa, which is thought to contain its ancestral range. We surveyed nucleotide variation at four 1-kb fragments in 240 individual lines representing 21 sub-Saharan and 4 Palearctic population samples o...

A new andromonoecious species related to the eggplant and belonging to Solanum subgenus Leptostemonum from southern Africa is described. Solanum umtuma Voronts. & S.Knapp, sp. nov. is found in the eastern part of South Africa, and is sympatric with its close relative Solanum linnaeanum Hepper & P.M-L.Jaeger. It is morphologically very similar to Solanum cerasiferum Dunal of northern tropical Af...

1 Department of Mathematics, Eastern University, Chenkalady 30350, Sri Lanka 2 International Institute for Symmetry Analysis and Mathematical Modelling, Department of Mathematical Sciences, North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, Private Bag X 2046, Mmabatho 2735, South Africa 3 Centre for Differential Equations, Continuum Mechanics and Applications, School of Computational and Applied Mathemat...