Marean, C. W., & Gifford-Gonzalez, D. (1991). Late Quaternary extinct ungulates of East Africa and palaeoenvironmental implications. Nature, 350(6317), 418–420.
Abstract: UNGULATE communities of two East African savannas, the Serengeti and Athi-Kapiti Plains, are dominated by wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) supplemented by zebra (Equus burchelli), topi (Damaliscus lunatus), hartebeest (Alcelaphus buselaphus), buffalo (Syncerus caffer) eland (Taurotragus oryx) and gazelles (Gazella grand and G. thomsoni)1-3. Before this research, little was known of East African large mammal communities in the Late Pleistocene and early to middle Holocene. We document an extinct impala-sized alcelaphine antelope that is numerically dominant in Late Pleistocene archaeofaunal assemblages from the Athi-Kapiti Plains. The extinct giant buffalo Pelorovis antiquus is present, and a number of arid-adapted regionally extinct species are common. The small alcelaphine is rare in northern Tanzania, but regionally extinct arid-adapted species are present in Late Pleistocene deposits. These data indicate that as recently as 12,000 years ago, the large mammal community structure of East African savannas was very different and dry grasslands and arid-adapted ungulates expanded at least as far south as northern Tanzania during the Last Glacial Maximum.
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Karenina, K., Giljov, A., Ingram, J., Rowntree, V. J., & Malashichev, Y. (2017). Lateralization of mother�infant interactions in a diverse range of mammal species. Nat Ecol Evol, 1, 0030 Ep -.
Abstract: Left-cradling bias is a distinctive feature of maternal behaviour in humans and great apes, but its evolutionary origin remains unknown. In 11 species of marine and terrestrial mammal, we demonstrate consistent patterns of lateralization in mother�infant interactions, indicating right hemisphere dominance for social processing. In providing clear evidence that lateralized positioning is beneficial in mother�infant interactions, our results illustrate a significant impact of lateralization on individual fitness.
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Kamil, A. C. (1998). On the Proper Definition of Cognitive Ethology. In Russell P. Balda, Irene M. Pepperberg, & Alan C. Kamil (Eds.), Animal Cognition in Nature (pp. 1–28). London: Academic Press.
Abstract: Summary The last 20-30 years have seen two `scientific revolutions' in the study of animal behavior: the cognitive revolution that originated in psychology, and the Darwinian, behavioral ecology revolution that originated in biology. Among psychologists, the cognitive revolution has had enormous impact. Similarly, among biologists, the Darwinian revolution has had enormous impact. The major theme of this chapter is that these two scientific research programs need to be combined into a single approach, simultaneously cognitive and Darwinian, and that this single approach is most appropriately called cognitive ethology.
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Johnson, D. D. P., Stopka, P., & Knights, S. (2003). Sociology: The puzzle of human cooperation. Nature, 421(6926), 911–2; discussion 912.
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Henry, S., Fureix, C., Rowberry, R., Bateson, M., & Hausberger, M. (2017). Do horses with poor welfare show 'pessimistic' cognitive biases? Sci. Nat., 104(1), 8.
Abstract: This field study tested the hypothesis that domestic horses living under putatively challenging-to-welfare conditions (for example involving social, spatial, feeding constraints) would present signs of poor welfare and co-occurring pessimistic judgement biases. Our subjects were 34 horses who had been housed for over 3 years in either restricted riding school situations (e.g. kept in single boxes, with limited roughage, ridden by inexperienced riders; N = 25) or under more naturalistic conditions (e.g. access to free-range, kept in stable social groups, leisure riding; N = 9). The horses' welfare was assessed by recording health-related, behavioural and postural indicators. Additionally, after learning a location task to discriminate a bucket containing either edible food ('positive' location) or unpalatable food ('negative' location), the horses were presented with a bucket located near the positive position, near the negative position and halfway between the positive and negative positions to assess their judgement biases. The riding school horses displayed the highest levels of behavioural and health-related problems and a pessimistic judgment bias, whereas the horses living under more naturalistic conditions displayed indications of good welfare and an optimistic bias. Moreover, pessimistic bias data strongly correlated with poor welfare data. This suggests that a lowered mood impacts a non-human species' perception of its environment and highlights cognitive biases as an appropriate tool to assess the impact of chronic living conditions on horse welfare.
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Harman, F. S., Nicol, C. J., Marin, H. E., Ward, J. M., Gonzalez, F. J., & Peters, J. M. (2004). Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-delta attenuates colon carcinogenesis. Nat Med, 10(5), 481–483.
Abstract: Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-delta (PPAR-delta; also known as PPAR-beta) is expressed at high levels in colon tumors, but its contribution to colon cancer is unclear. We examined the role of PPAR-delta in colon carcinogenesis using PPAR-delta-deficient (Ppard(-/-)) mice. In both the Min mutant and chemically induced mouse models, colon polyp formation was significantly greater in mice nullizygous for PPAR-delta. In contrast to previous reports suggesting that activation of PPAR-delta potentiates colon polyp formation, here we show that PPAR-delta attenuates colon carcinogenesis.
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Hamilton, W. D. (1970). Selfish and Spiteful Behaviour in an Evolutionary Model. Nature, 228, 1218–1220.
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Grosenick, L., Clement, T. S., & Fernald, R. D. (2007). Fish can infer social rank by observation alone. Nature, 445(7126), 429–432.
Abstract: Transitive inference (TI) involves using known relationships to deduce unknown ones (for example, using A > B and B > C to infer A > C), and is thus essential to logical reasoning. First described as a developmental milestone in children, TI has since been reported in nonhuman primates, rats and birds. Still, how animals acquire and represent transitive relationships and why such abilities might have evolved remain open problems. Here we show that male fish (Astatotilapia burtoni) can successfully make inferences on a hierarchy implied by pairwise fights between rival males. These fish learned the implied hierarchy vicariously (as 'bystanders'), by watching fights between rivals arranged around them in separate tank units. Our findings show that fish use TI when trained on socially relevant stimuli, and that they can make such inferences by using indirect information alone. Further, these bystanders seem to have both spatial and featural representations related to rival abilities, which they can use to make correct inferences depending on what kind of information is available to them. Beyond extending TI to fish and experimentally demonstrating indirect TI learning in animals, these results indicate that a universal mechanism underlying TI is unlikely. Rather, animals probably use multiple domain-specific representations adapted to different social and ecological pressures that they encounter during the course of their natural lives.
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Goodall J. (1964). Tool-using and aimed throwing in a community of free-living chimpanzees. Nature, 201, 1264.
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Gilmanshin, R., Callender, R. H., & Dyer, R. B. (1998). The core of apomyoglobin E-form folds at the diffusion limit. Nat Struct Biol, 5(5), 363–365.
Abstract: The E-form of apomyoglobin has been characterized using infrared and fluorescence spectroscopies, revealing a compact core with native like contacts, most probably consisting of 15-20 residues of the A, G and H helices of apomyoglobin. Fast temperature-jump, time-resolved infrared measurements reveal that the core is formed within 96 micros at 46 degrees C, close to the diffusion limit for loop formation. Remarkably, the folding pathway of the E-form is such that the formation of a limited number of native-like contacts is not rate limiting, or that the contacts form on the same time scale expected for diffusion controlled loop formation.
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