missing megafauna

There is so much exciting research based on sequencing of ancient DNA coming out now that it's easy to lose track of the historic and prehistoric humans and hominins getting sequenced and sorted into family trees. Not quite as much ancient DNA work targets animals, if only because they are more likely to get eaten after death, rather than being buried in a form that benefits genome analysis.

A recent paper on a dozen well-preserved cave lions found in permafrost soil and sequenced in comparison to modern lions caught my eye, however. I used it as an excuse to revisit megafauna extinctions, this time through the lense of genomic studies. It's always useful to have a mascot to remember a feature by, so this is now the cave lion feature, although other species of Pleistocene megafauna also appear, including elephants, ground squirrels and giant echidnas.

The resulting feature is out now:

Charting the missing megafauna

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 13, 6 July 2026, Pages R729--R731

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF.)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

This exceptionally well-preserved female cave lion cub named Sparta was discovered in 2018 in Belaya Gora, near the Indigirka River in northeastern Siberia. Her genome was one of the twelve studied by David Stanton and colleagues. (Photo by Love Dalén.)

survival secrets of the koalas

After the rather depressing outlook on AI safety (or lack thereof) I needed a bit of comfort and joy, so I jumped at the opportunity presented by a paper on the genomes of more than 400 cuddly koalas. They serve as the mascot for the feature on the subject of conservation genomics which also takes in other life forms such as sea snails, snow leopards, and lemurs.

The resulting feature is out now:

Survival in their genomes

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 7, 20 April 2026, Pages R299-R301

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF.)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

Although it is now widely adored as an icon of Australia, the koala has experienced severe population declines and is still in need of conservation attention, as a new study analysing hundreds of genomes confirms. (Photo: Mathias Appel/Flickr.)

prehistoric women ruled

While reporting on the revolutionary findings coming out of the sequencing of ancient DNA in the last two decades, I have occasionally come across the cases of buried bodies assumed to be male because they were associated with insignia of a warrior or a ruler, but then proven to be female by their DNA analysis. Which is always heartwarming but doesn't necessarily provide enough material to base a feature on.

Now the field progresses from individual genomes to systematically sequencing entire cemeteries and compiling family trees of humans who lived many millennia ago. Therefore we can now move beyond the stage of identifying single ancient women in apparent positions of power to looking at networks, such as matrilinear families, where the association with land and property appears to have been passed on in the female line.

Recent research into ancient genalogies has revealed several examples of such matrilinear groups (which may or may not have been matriarchies too), enough to base a feature on, which also highlights some of the unique women in roles previously assumed to be reserved to males.

My feature is out now:

Recognition for prehistoric women

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 22, 17 November 2025, Pages R1065-R1067

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(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

If I have crunched my numbers correctly, this is the 350th feature in this format, since I accepted the challenge to provide a feature for every issue, back in February 2011. I missed a couple of issues in the first few months, then one in 2014 and one in 2017.

The widespread use of ancient DNA sequencing to archaeological finds is now showing that women may have been more influential in some societies than hitherto appreciated. The photo shows excavation work at a burial site attributed to the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe in southern Britain.
(Photo courtesy of The Durotriges Project and © Bournemouth University.)

sequencing all species

I reported about the Earth BioGenome Project, which aims to obtain genome sequences for all eukaryotic species known to science, when it launched back in 2018. Since then, continuing progress in technology has enabled the project to keep on its somewhat ambitious course, so it now is approaching the finish of phase I (out of three) and beginning to make detailed plans for phase II. Which means it's a good time for a new feature about the project. The focus of attention this time lies on the fact that much of the biodiversity yet to be sequenced resides in the countries of the Global South, so the project needs to build capacity where the species are found.

My feature is out now:

All eukaryotes great and small

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 20, 20 October 2025, Pages R937-R939

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

The African BioGenome Project aims to contribute genome sequences for more than 100,000 species. (Photo: Antonius Smal/Unsplash.)

crossing the Mediterranean

Humans have been crossing the Mediterranean for millennia, even before the Phoenicians invented the ways and means to build proper ships. I took a recent study of the ancient genomes of numerous people living in the Phoenician colonies around the Western Mediterranean as an excuse to look into the ancient travels on the Mediterranean, including when and how people first reached the islands. Your regular reminder that humans have always migrated and will continue to do so.

My feature is out now:

Mediterranean movements

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 13, 7 July 2025, Pages R639-R641

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(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

Genomes from Punic burials reveal the surprising diversity of the people who lived in communities that were culturally Phoenician. The image shows pendant masks from Carthage made of glass paste in the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE. (Photo from the exhibit Carthage: The Immortal Myth inside the Colosseum and taken by G41rn8/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

how the Sahara became a desert

The Sahara isn't exactly the place where you would want to store your DNA for a few millennia and expect it to still be readable, so it was a bit of a sensation that researchers recently published the first genome-wide analysis of 7000-year-old DNA of humans who lived there, when it wasn't a desert yet. A good excuse to look a bit more closely at the "Green Sahara" and how it became the Sahara desert we know today. It also serves as a warning, as some places are at risk of desertification due to climate change.

The resulting feature is out now:

Becoming a desert

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 10, 19 May 2025, Pages R357-R359

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(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

The Acacus Mountains in Southwest Libya, where archaeological excavations at sites such as the Takarkori Cave have revealed a rich fauna and human habitation during the African Humid Period. (Photo: Franzfoto/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).)

homo migrans

It is a sad irony that the current wave of (populist, racist, fascist etc) sentiment against people who migrate from one part of our planet to another comes at a time when genetics enables us to better understand humanity's past migrations, and to appreciate that humans have always been migrants. They may stick around for a few generations if the living conditions are favourable, but in the long term, across centuries, all human ancestries have a migration background (the more interesting parts of mine are in the 17th century).

The current anti-migration populism is all the more tragic as the ongoing climate catastrophe is already displacing people and will displace millions more. As Gaia Vince has argued in her excellent book Nomad Century, migration should be embraced as an essential part of the adaptation to climate change, rather than vilified.

All of which provides good enough reasons to add another feature to the ones I have already written about the many migrations of the past. This time the focus is on Europe in the first millennium CE, but inevitably, given the current political meltdown, it is also about the present and future of humanity:

Migration in our genes

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 3, 3 February 2025, Pages R81-R83

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See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

Even before the Viking invasions, European populations migrated over long distances. This nineteenth-century painting is Viking Armada by Edward Moran (1829–1901). (Painting courtesy of The Knohl Collection.)

aurochs dead and alive

My latest feature in Current Biology is about a big beast of the Pleistocene that has been extinct for almost four centuries, but is also present in the genomes of current livestock: the aurochs. A large scale study of ancient genomes has revealed the population history of the Eurasian species from which today's domestic cattle descends, and based on this wealth of information, the chances are improving to recreate an aurochs-like bovine that could serve the ecosystem services of the defunct species.

Big bovines lost and reborn

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 23, 2 December 2024, Pages R1159-R1161

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See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Cave art at Lascaux, shown here, depicts the aurochs among other large mammals present across Europe in the Pleistocene. (Photo: JoJan/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).)

ancient family trees

Ancient DNA studies have moved on from finding out about amazingly old individuals. The latest thing is to sequence entire groups of humans who have been dead for centuries or even many millennia, and derive their family relations. A recent study of neolithic burial has set the record with a family tree connecting more than 60 individuals.

I used this as an occasion to round up a few other examples of family histories revealed by sequencing ancient DNA and to argue that, like ordinary family history, this is a way of unveiling the human histories that for one reason or another have remained hidden. My feature is out now:

Hidden histories

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 18, 25. September 2023, Pages R931-R934

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See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

Based on ancient DNA sequenced from 64 individuals buried at Gurgy, northern France, researchers have constructed the largest ever family tree of prehistoric people. The portraits are artistic impressions incorporating some details derived from the genome information. (Painting: © Elena Plain; reproduced with the permission of the University of Bordeaux/PACEA.)

prime time for primates

It's always handy when a whole bunch of papers on a suitable topic arrives in a package - saves me the trouble of having to look for them in different places. So when Science magazine published a special issue on a major release of primate genomes and additional research based on these, I grabbed the opportunity to do a feature about them, which is out now:

A tree full of primate genomes

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 13, 10. July 2023, Pages R699-R702

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

The phylogenetic history of macaques in Asia has also been complicated by hybridisation and admixture. The image shows long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis). (Photo: Martin Harvey/Getty.)

going bananas

Various things have gone completely bananas around here, to the extent that Der Spiegel called the UK the banana island, so a feature about the evolution and ecology of bananas appears to fit the zeitgeist. Starting from a recent genomes study, I also looked at the problems with pests and diseases, as well as the economic structures that gave bananas a bad name. Oh, and Jules Verne is in there too, as he made an important contribution to banana history.

The resulting feature is out today:

The trouble with bananas

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 21, 7. November 2022, Pages R1201-R1203

FREE access to full text and PDF download

NB: as the 2022 features move into the open archives, I will add them to this thread on Mastodon.

In the producing countries, like here in Indonesia, a wider variety of bananas are grown and consumed locally. (Photo: Taufan Prasetya/Pixabay.)

fusion and other challenges

As our civilisation is collectively failing every marshmallow test that presents itself, I am not very optimistic about our chances of averting catastrophic climate change. One tiny spark of hope comes from the fusion sector however. There are several startups that claim they can have their small fusion reactors ready to roll out in time to make a difference for climate change. They'd better pull their socks up, as this means they will have to start supplying electricity to the grid by the end of this decade, but part of me wants to believe that this might still be possible.

I rounded up some recent good news from the fusion startups in a new feature which is out now in C&I:

Fusion momentum

Chemistry & Industry Volume 86, Issue 3, March 2022, Pages 26-29

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (members only)

Any access problems give me a shout and I can send a PDF file.

In the same issue, on page 34, you'll also find my review of the book

Climate adaptations
by the Arkbound foundation,

which rounds up some very different responses to climate change from around the world (not involving fusion reactors).

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

Also in this issue, in the news section on page 15, an update on the Earth Biogenome Project, which aims to sequence every eukaryotic species known to science within 10 years (see also the feature I wrote when it launched in 2018). As challenges go, this is similar in scale to getting fusion to work by 2030.

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (members only)

On the cover of the magazine, a story about using metals as boosters for antibiotics, a new approach I wasn't aware of, so I should probably read the feature by Jasmin Fox-Skelly. Well, ahem, I would have shown that lovely cover if there was a decent image of it online, but as I can't find one, I'll have to show the first page of my feature instead:

Update 31.3. - here is the cover at last (or most of it):

Update 5.4.2022: Oxford spinout company First Light Fusion, whose unusual approach to fusion I mentioned briefly in this feature and discussed in more detail in the previous fusion feature in 2018, have today announced they have achieved fusion, a result that was independently verified. Press release here.

all about Allium

a rare excursion into food related botany with this feature sweeping up genome studies of garlic and onion, along with the recent discovery of a new Allium species. All in all, a surprising amount of really challenging science to be found around the plants in the Allium genus, which also includes leek, chives, and lots of ornamental plants.

Read all about garlic et al. in my latest feature:

All about Allium

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 22, 22 November 2021, Pages R1449-R1452

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Chives, unless they are eaten before they get the chance, produce decorative spherical umbels similar to the larger ones of many ornamental Allium species. (Photo: PublicDomainPictures/Pixabay.)

palaeo beyond genomics

I've been covering the very exciting progress in ancient DNA studies for nearly 20 years now, and I'm not complaining, but, in order to persuade editors that they should publish even more of my ravings, I need to introduce new elements every once in a while. So it was rather handy that recent developments in palaeoanthropology have featured a few things that were molecular but not based on the genomes retrieved from ancient people's bones, including proteomes read from tooth proteins (which may allow us to travel a lot further back in time), microbiomes, and DNA from dirt with absolutely no trace of fossil remains.

And the Neanderthal teeth used in the dental microbiome study come from the cave of Sima de las palomas (near Murcia), where I've also been scraping around in the dirt for a while, a few years before the site started coughing up some very impressive Neanderthal skeletons.

Looking at it from an analytics perspective for a chemically minded audience, I've discussed these developments in my latest feature for Chemistry & Industry, which is out now:

Chemistry & Industry Volume 85, Issue 7/8, July-August 2021 Pages 23-26

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI - appears to be on open access right now

Lateral view of the mostly-complete skull of Zlatý kůň, which cannot be carbon-dated but has now been identified as the earliest modern human from Europe, based on recent admixture of Neanderthal ancestry.
Credit: Martin Frouz
Source

Oh, and Blogspot tells me that this is my 1999th published post. So let's party like it's 1999, and watch out for the millennium bug!

giraffe genomes

I tend to write about species that are underappreciated, eg because they are living underground or in the deep sea or because they are invisibly small. Every once in a while, however, I also cover the big beasts that everybody knows from their local zoo or wildlife park. So this week it's the debut appearance in my writing of the mighty giraffe. I had noticed a paper on its collective behaviour, as well as one on genomics explaining its extreme adaptations, and then it turned out Current Biology had another one in the pipeline with more giraffe genomes.

So here goes, the questions you were asking on your first visit to a zoo, can finally be answered:

Survival of the tallest

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 11, 07 June 2021, Pages R697-R699

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Giraffe mothers with calves are more often seen near human settlements, presumably due to the lower risk of predation from lions and hyenas. (Photo: 12019/Pixabay.)

the original barbarians

It may just have been their bad luck, but the Scythians were there on the Pontic Steppe (north of the Black Sea) in the middle of the first millennium BCE, when the ancient Greeks unilaterally decided that their own folks represented civilisation, and everybody else, especially the Scythians, were barbarians. The Greeks wrote this down in the documents which became the bedrock of European civilisation, while the Scythians, although successful in many ways, left no written documents to be used in their defence. Now molecular studies including genomics are promising to give a fair hearing to those original barbarians.

I've rounded up recent molecular research into the life and fates of the Scythians and mixed it up with some cultural history for my latest feature which is out now in Current Biology:

Saving Scythians from oblivion

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 8, 26 April 2021, Pages R359-R361

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access again one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

Many Scythian burial sites contain elaborate art sculpted in gold, often displaying animals or warriors. This battle scene is part of a comb. (Photo: Levan Ramishvili/Flickr.)

PS (30.4.2021): I've now posted a review of the book Black Sea, which I read in preparation for this feature.

viral variants

Four weeks ago I prepared the last Curr. Biol. feature for this year, about Covid-19 related sequencing work and the mutations and variants observed. (Even longer ago I planned this topic as a way of drawing a line under this plague year. Didn't quite work out that way.) It has been online as a preprint for a couple of weeks, but the proper version just came out today, as the whole world is debating this new UK variant of the virus. Oh well.

Pandemic genomics

Current Biology Volume 30, issue 24, pages R1455-R1457, December 21, 2020

FREE access to full text and PDF download

The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has spread globally and caused a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu pandemic. The rapid elucidation of its structural biology and genomics, however, offers opportunities to better understand its spread and to develop vaccines and treatments. (Photo: used with permission of Sai Li, Tsinghua University (Cell (2020) 183, 730–738).)

the first Americans

Very exciting findings have emerged recently from ancient DNA studies of dozens of ancient Americans, giving a much more detailed picture of the remarkable migrations across all climate zones from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

I've covered this in my last feature to be published this year, which is out now:


Ancient genomes of the Americas

Current Biology Volume 28, Issue 24, 17 December 2018, Pages R1365-R1368

FREE access to full text and PDF download





Archaeological evidence of the Clovis culture is widespread in North America. Genome analysis now suggests that people related to Clovis also lived as far south as Brazil. (Image: Reproduced with permission from Peter A. Bostrom.)

say cheese

In a widely publicised paper this summer, researchers claimed to have dicovered the world's oldest cheese in an Egyptian tomb. Only that the remains of that cheese were mainly sodium carbonate, and that two weeks later, traces of cheese were discovered that were twice as old. I wrote a column poking fun at the short-lived "oldest cheese in the world" but in the process discovered that the paper about the earlier cheese traces was really interesting, because it pushes the origins of cheese-making in Europe to a time that is earlier than the arrival of lactose tolerance. Which means that cheese, containing less lactose than fresh milk, may have been the gateway of ancient Europeans to the benefits of using nutrients from milk beyond early childhood. And then, being culturally prepared to use milk and milk products, ancient Europe was a fertile ground for the lactose tolerance genes when they arrived.

The whole story is now out in feature format:


On the origins of cheese

Current Biology
Volume 28, Issue 20, 22 October 2018, Pages R1171-R1173

OPEN access to full text and PDF download





Europeans enjoy an overwhelming variety of cheese products. Interestingly, the earliest evidence of cheese making in Europe now predates the arrival of lactose tolerance genes, suggesting that cheese may have paved the way for dairy use. (Image: Ted Drake/Flickr by a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence.)

epic genomes

Open Archive Day

There are so many exciting discoveries coming out of the analyses of ancient DNA - ranging from recent history back to the times when Neanderthals, Denisovans and our sapiens sapiens ancestors coexisted - that one could easily write about these all the time. However, remembering that I write for a general biology journal, I make sure that stories about humans don't take over and that animals, plants and microbes also get their fair share.

While I can't catch everything, here's one ancient DNA story I did a year ago, and which is now on open access, covering the early civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean and providing some genetic context for sources like Homer and the Bible:


Roots of Mediterranean civilisations



Figurine of an ox and driver, from Phylakopi, a site on the island of Milos related to Mycenaean culture, which dominated mainland Greece and some Aegean islands in the Bronze Age. (Photo: Zde/Wikimedia Commons by CC BY-SA 4.0.)of an ox and driver, from Phylakopi, a site on the island of Milos related to Mycenaean culture, which dominated mainland Greece and some Aegean islands in the Bronze Age. (Photo: Zde/Wikimedia Commons by CC BY-SA 4.0.)