One of the outstanding mysteries of human history is how agriculture spread across Europe, replacing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Did farmers migrate, bringing a culture of plant and animal domestication that took over? Or did local hunter-gatherer groups merely adopt ideas about those practices?
A new study in the journal Science provides new insights. Researchers suggest that farmers and hunter-gatherers were genetically distinct groups that intermingled after the migration of the agriculturally savvy people.
"These results are important because they are using ancient DNA, extracted from skeletal remains, rather than sampling living populations and making assumptions about the past," British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who was not involved in the study, said in an e-mail.
"The Orion Ground Test Vehicle arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Operations & Checkout (O&C) Facility on April 21. The vehicle traveled more than 1,800 miles from Lockheed Martin's Waterton Facility near Denver, Colo., where it successfully completed a series of rigorous acoustic, modal and vibration tests that simulated launch and spaceflight environments.
The ground test vehicle will now be used for pathfinding operations at the O&C in preparation for the Orion spaceflight test vehicle's arrival this summer. The spaceflight vehicle is currently being fabricated at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, La., and is slated for NASA's Exploration Flight Test, or EFT-1, in 2014."Source: NASA