THOMAS HIGHAMAnalyzing ancient remains across Europe, a team led by investigators at the University of Oxford has pinpointed the timing the Neanderthals’ extinction to between 39,000 and 41,000 years ago, highlighting “a shorter time frame for the potential interaction of humans with Neanderthals,” said study coauthor Ron Pinhasi, a professor of archaeology at the University College Dublin in Ireland. The team’s results were published in Nature this week (August 20).
“Until recently, the main view was for a coexistence [of Neanderthals and early modern humans] in Europe between about 30,000 to 40,000 years, with a few sites suggesting Neanderthal survived even later than 30,000 years,” Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum, told The Scientist in an e-mail. “This new work seems to have falsified that model with no signal of a Neanderthal presence after 39,000 to 40,000 years ago.”
WIKIMEDIA, ANDREW W. MCGALLIARDBeginning this year, children in polio-affected parts of the world will receive both the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the live, attenuated oral polio vaccine (OPV), according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A WHO-led study published in Science this week (August 20) provided support for this approach, showing that, in children who had already received one or more doses of OPV, a booster shot of IPV improved their immune response and reduced their shedding of viral particles, which can spread the disease.
A supplementary dose of IPV “offers substantial benefits to using [OPV] alone in the eradication process,” Manish Patel of the Decatur, Georgia-based Task Force for Global Health who ...
