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...

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...

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...