First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Every time you think the question of American settlement is near to becoming settled something new turns up to upset the apple-cart. This time Skoglund et al. have turned up evidence of two founding populations with remnants of one concentrated in the Brazilian jungle.
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Cvijovic et al. is another model confirming the possibility of times of rapid speciation and others of long drawn out equilibrium. This strengthens the argument, that the mutation rate can only be used for dating when averaged out over very long time scales but becomes misleading over the shorter term – a few millions of years or less in the case of hominids.
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It may be nice to have a result rigorously derived as in Miller et al., but their limit of about 1 W/m2 was already inferred from quite simple assumptions by the physicist Howard Hayden in his book “The Solar Fraud” from 2001.