#genetic relatedness

[herpsandbirds]

Seeking Student: MSc Position in Litzgus Lab:

Social behaviour of Painted Turtles during nesting

This MSc project will examine whether social information from dominant females guides PATU nesting decisions, to answer the question: Do population matriarchs lead the way to the best nest sites? Using nesting observations and genetic data, the student will build a social network to elucidate whether females that nest together are related by estimating relatedness among individuals and in preferred associations. The MSc position will be in the lab of Dr. Jackie Litzgus at Laurentian University in Sudbury, ON (https://laurentian.ca/faculty/jlitzgus), and the student will be co-supervised by Dr. Julia Riley at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB (https://www.rileyecology.com/). The project is also in collaboration with Dr. Njal Rollinson at UofT (https://rollinson.eeb.utoronto.ca/) who collaborates on the long-term turtle research in Algonquin Park. Field research will be based out of the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station (https://www.algonquinwrs.ca/). Please email your resume, (unofficial) transcripts, and a cover letter detailing your background, interests and why you should be considered for the position to Dr. Jackie Litzgus (jlitzgus@laurentian.ca) with “PATU Sociality” in the subject line. Applications will be considered as they are received. All applications will be reviewed, but only those invited for an interview will be contacted.  The anticipated start date is May 2025 or Sept 2025, and the deadline for applying is 15 November 2024.

[headspace-hotel]

Questions I have that I hope I'll be able to learn about when i start school in the fall

Do taxonomic ranks signify, even roughly, a particular amount of separation from other categories of organism, or are they totally arbitrary? How would you even quantify separation—time since a shared common ancestor, genetic similarity? Are two families in the same class generally a similar "distance" apart than another two families in a different class? Or are they basically annoying relics of Linnaean taxonomy that are still used because it's easier to just add categories like "infraorder" or "subfamily" than redo everything in an equally arbitrary way, and useless as an indicator of the level of relatedness of two organisms?

How do we make guesses about how often extinction happens? Say every big cat except lions goes extinct. Then a million years later lions have spread out and diversified into several new species. Now imagine that an alien civilization 100 years in the future is looking at the fossil record. How likely is it that the extinction of the big cats, excluding lions, is detectable in the fossil record?

I know about speciation, but what about de-speciation, where two species interbreed and merge back together again? We say that Neanderthals went extinct because of interbreeding with humans, or that red wolves are threatened by interbreeding with coyotes. Why is that considered to be extinction (or risk thereof) of one of the taxa? Is this all that rare throughout the history of life on Earth? Or is it possible that genera oscillate between speciation and de-speciation throughout time?

If you find a fossil of an animal and then find a fossil of that animal's ancestor from a million years earlier, are those two different species or what.

Why are we using the same system of categories to describe plants and animals when the mechanisms for speciation between the two of them appear WILDLY different?

[max1461]

What’s the deal with Basque. It’s a language isolate but are the Basque people like an “ethnic isolate”? Are the Basque people significantly genetically different than neighboring peoples? Is there any particular reason everyone else in Europe was either exterminated or assimilated by the Indo-Europeans, at least to the point that they adopted IE languages—but not the Basques?

Regarding genetics, I can't really say. Genetics is way outside my area of expertise, and looking online it doesn't appear that there's a real consensus. It appears that the general picture is that they have some amount of local hunter-gatherer ancestry and some amount of admixture from steppe populations, which is qualitatively the same as the rest of Europe. They may have these things in different proportions(?) than other European populations, or something like that; it sounds like a number of the studies disagree with each other. I think I'd have to have a better understanding of human genetics in general to give a more confident assessment of what is going on.

Linguistically speaking, Basque is the only non-IE language spoken in Western Europe today (Uralic languages, such as Finnish and Hungarian, are spoken in Eastern Europe, although they are probably later arrivals to the region than even IE), but it is not the only non-IE spoken in Western Europe within recorded history. The collective name for the languages spoken in the Iberian peninsula before the Roman conquest is the paleo-Iberian or Paleohispanic languages; of these, several were not Indo-European. Aquitanian in particular is generally identified as a direct ancestor of Basque. But there were also others, scantily attested, that may or may not have been related. These existed alongside Continental Celtic languages in the region.

There was also Etruscan, in Italy, which was non-IE. Etruscan civilization largely predated the Romans in the area and was highly influential on them; the Latin alphabet is principally adapted from the Etruscan alphabet (itself adapted from Greek), and Latin borrowed a number of words from Etruscan. Some of these have even made their way into English, for instance the very common word person, from Latin persōna "mask", possibly from Etruscan phersu "mask".

Anyway, whether or not any of these languages represent holdovers of the pre-IE linguistic environment in Europe is hard to say. For instance, some have argued that the Etruscans or their ancestors were actually late arrivals from somewhere south, possibly Anatolia. But I don't think there is any conclusive evidence for or against such ideas.

It is worth noting that ethnic and linguistic groupings very often don't align. Groups may remain ethnically distinct while adopting a majority language, or may remain linguistically distinct while losing a sense of ethnic identity, and so on. So genetic studies are often-useful-but-highly-imperfect proxies for linguistic relatedness, and vice versa. For instance, most of the "Negrito" peoples of South East Asia are highly genetically distinct from neighboring populations, but many of them speak Aslian languages related (distantly) to Vietnamese and Khmer. These languages are clearly distinct, but should not be misunderstood as holdovers predating the spread of genetically East Asian people to the region.

My understanding is that the evidence regarding Basque points to it being as pre-IE holdout in Western Europe. However, this need not say much about the genetics of the Basque people.

In any case, as to the question of "why" it held out when other pre-IE languages disappeared? I think it's kind of impossible to say. Presumably the mountainous and isolated nature of the Basque Country played a role; indeed all the studies I looked at seemed to say that genetically Basque people showed signs of isolation within the last thousand years or so, suggesting that they did not have as much contact with other European populations. But, beyond that, if you look at the fact that other pre-IE (or at least non-IE) languages survived in Western Europe until the historical period (Etruscan and some paleo-Iberian), it is perhaps not so surprising that at least one of them would make it to the modern day. Basque looks like a complete outlier now, but going back even 2000 years and there were a number of other languages in its position. In some sense the Indo-European migration into Europe was "not that long ago", on archeological timescales, so perhaps things like this are to be expected.

[trilobiter]

I am always fascinated by the existence of languages that appear to be genetically unrelated to any other known languages, alongside other languages that are part of families which can be traced back to proto-languages spoken thousands of years in the past.

It's a testament to how very, very old human languages are. It's in the nature of languages to change and diversify over time, which means that the "isolate" languages are only isolated because their relatives escaped documentation before falling out of use. As for the families with reconstructed ancestors, we can only speculate on their relationship to each other, because those languages are only reconstructed and not documented in themselves, and neither are any of the unknown number of languages spoken at the same time that they may have been related to.

Speculation can take you anywhere, but there are hard limits on what can be substantiated about languages beyond the reconstruction of the common ancestor of a group of documented languages. We know that they didn't all spring into existence fully formed, but we don't know where they came from. Every language family, even if it has thousands of members, is effectively an isolate as far as we can be sure.

Maybe this changes in the future, with a revolution in the way that the evidence can be analyzed or the kind of evidence that is available, but it may be that speculation is the only real source of answers in the question of the ultimate relatedness of all languages, and all those answers come with unresolvable uncertainty attached.

[felinefractious]

hello! could there be significant genetic issues from a cat bred from cousins? I can only find information on parent-offspring and sibling litters. are cousin pairings deemed acceptable in the breeding world, or are they genetically still too close? people have been calling Moonpaw wc inbred and I was wondering if that was based more off humans or if that is reflected in real life cats as well. I'm not very familiar with cat genetics. thanks!

Moonpaw is canonically inbred because her parents are canonically first cousins based, it isn’t just a thing people are saying she literally is.

For those not familiar with Warriors this isn’t a conscious choice by the authors rather they can’t be assed to keep their tremendous family trees straight and routinely partner related cats together without realizing they’re related.

Anyways, it’s isn’t relevant whether or not she would realistically have health issues based on her lineage the problem is these characters are anthropomorphized - as in, they’re meant to function in place of human characters and the reader is supposed to relate to them in a similar way - and you have this protagonist born to several times related first cousins and it’s like… just supposed to be fine?

So yeah, cats with a relatedness equivalent to cousins might be used in breeding but it isn’t relevant because thise are real cats and not people-cats with language and organized religion.

Reblogs off because the WC fandom can’t be trusted.

[Follow-up Ask]

[vladdocs]

CD SHORTS: How can we find the descendants of Vlad the Impaler?

The Drăculești line of the Basarab dynasty has long since died out. However, it is likely that there are illegitimate descendants still around today. These individuals can be identified through new technologies. DNA collected from the graves of "Dracula's relatives" is compared with commercial genetic databases that show the degree of relatedness to millions of people. Which graves are we talking about? The grave in Sibiu of Mihnea the Bad, Vlad the Impaler's son, was emptied of bones by the 18th century. The graves of his sons in Hungary are unknown, and the claims of kinship by some Hungarian nobles are dubious or based solely on adoption. The only chance is Putna. Maria Voichița, the wife of Stephen the Great, was the daughter of Radu the Handsome, Vlad's brother. Her remains and those of her son, Bogdan III, are the only ones that contain Drăculești DNA. Now, all that is missing is the permission from the Romanian Orthodox Church (BOR) to open these graves. More about Vlad the Impaler's grave and his relatives…

[play-now-my-lord]

relatedness is socially determined. Degrees of kinship are socially determined. If I asked the average person "who are you more closely related to, your sibling or your parents", from a purely genetic point of view the expected answer would be incorrect - we see ourselves as "more related" to our parents but are actually (or, well, taking genetics as "actual" rather than social intuition!) more related to our siblings.

English lacks several relational terms that are commonplace in other languages, and lacks whole concepts that elsewhere dominate exogamy/endogamy (which is where the rubber really hits the road on 'degrees of relatedness', because if you look back far enough most people are vaguely related to each other, and to cattle and bacteria for that matter; it's necessary to draw a line somewhere). the concept of "parallel" and "cross cousins" - that there are cousins you are more or less related to, usually those related to the parent of the same sex or opposite sex (respectively) as you - is extremely difficult to explain to anglophones intuitively.

that being said, as they say, stoplights too are a social construct; ignore them and you might get killed. relatedness is deeply-felt and significant, despite varying intensely from culture to culture.

circling back and changing topics a bit, in many cultures it is simply accepted that humans and animals are distantly related; this is a bit of scientific trivia in our culture, but it's also demonstrably true, and a lot of our intuitions about what animals feel or experience fly in the face of plain empirical logic. ("fish don't feel pain or have memories", etc.) the "truth" in our society is that we have no moral obligation to animals, and preventing animal cruelty with violence towards a person is only accepted in extreme cases and rarely considered acceptable unless the animal in question is a domestic animal. physically slapping a teakettle out of a teenager's hands to keep him from trying to boil an ant colony to death for fun would seem like disproportionate escalation to us! a person mutilating a captured squirrel would seem like a red flag mainly because we associate that kind of behavior with violence against humans! there's a whole 90s comedy franchise about a guy trying to torture and kill a rodent! that's kinda weird, isn't it?

[bimdraws]

Reminder that Palestinian DNA isn't "Greek". That's some pseudo-historical BS zionists pull out of nowhere to discredit Palestinian identity.

[creampuffqueen]

How related are Ivypool and Fernsong?

so, as it happens, they are related through BOTH of ivypool’s sides of her family. so i had to make two trees to accurately show this

if you take their similar ancestors of frostfur and lionheart, they are 3rd cousins once removed, which gives us a number so small my calculator won’t make it into a fraction. but this ends up giving them 0.000977% shared genetic material through ivypool’s grandma

then, if we take cloudtail’s side, this makes ivy and fern fourth cousins from their shared ancestors of nutmeg and jake. this is also a very tiny number, 0.000488%

but, then i add them together to account for this both sides relatedness thing. (i’m going to be totally real i don’t know for absolute certain this is how you factor this in but so far doing it has been giving me decently accurate numbers)

this ends us out with a coefficient of relatedness of 0.0015%, or 3/2048

double family tree work up

so actually they really aren’t that related. the only thing i find weird is that because of the prophecy of the three, in canon i feel like they should recognize each other as cousins. like i don’t have much of an issue with it really i just think that’s kind of a lapse in canon to emphasize that ivypool and lionblaze are related and then have ivy get with lion’s son

but that’s just me, you do what you want

[lichenaday]

Nigrovothelium tropicum

Liquen con ampullas salpicaradas, speckled blister lichen

Names are hard, especially when they have to connect you to all of your close relatives in a phylogenetic tree. For a long time, all we had to go on was physiological characteristics to determine who was related to who. But with advances in genetics, we are now able to determine relatedness with a bit more accuracy. So many lichens have gone through a number of name revisions in the last decade, and N. tropicum is no different. In fact, this guy became the type species for an entire new genus in 2016! Way to go, little pal! An example for all! This pantropical species has a smooth, olive-green or yellowish-brown thallus crowded with black ostioles (pores) connected to sunken, barrel-shaped apothecia. 

images: source | source | source

info: source | source

[deepinifhell]

I need you to know that the night before Pax, definitely concussed and standing naked in the bathroom because she decided that's the least likely place to have any sort of monitoring device, boosted the signal on her phone so she could text Verda and ask him if he checked the DNA results from under Garrett' s fingernails against the Farris Warehouse sample for genetic relatedness beyond just the strangeness of the blood. Verda does not answer, because he is asleep like you would expect someone to be at this time of night.

[horizon-verizon]

I found the reddit post about the actual relatedness between Targs in HOTD.

Viserys(Daemon) and Aemma were Double first cousins/Quadruple second cousins and they share 35% DNA making them essentially cousin-siblings.

Viserys and Daemon are Full siblings/Double first cousins/Quadruple second cousins

Viserys and Rhaenys are Double first cousins/Quadruple half first cousins once removed /Quadruple second cousins

Daemon and Rhaenyra are uncle-niece/Quadruple first cousins once removed/Octuple second cousins once removed. They share roughly 67% of DNA due to inbreeding (equal to full-siblings+half-siblings, more than father-child relationship)

Daemon and Laena are Double first cousins once removed/Quadruple half second cousins/Quadruple second cousins once removed/Quadruple third cousins which equals to roughly 24-25% of shared DNA, she was genetically his niece or half-sibling or a double-cousin.

Daemon and Jace-Joffrey are Grand-uncle -- grand nephews/Quadruple first cousins twice removed/Octuple second cousins twice removed. Genetically he shares around 33-35% DNA with them that make them more than his full nephews or roughly equal to 3/4 siblings.

Rhaenyra and Baela+Rhaena are First cousins/Quadruple second cousins/Triple second cousins once removed/Octuple third cousins/Sextuple half third cousins. Share roughly 40% of their DNA, similar to sibling-cousins (3/4 siblings).

Rhaenys and Jace/Luke are Triple first cousins twice removed/Sextuple half first cousins 3 times removed/Sextuple second cousins twice removed. She shared with them roughly 20% of DNA that is a low-range of usual grandparent-grandchild dna relatedness or aunt-nephews. They were her own blood, although she rejected them. It is sad, actually. She was also as related to Rhaenyra as 3/4 sibling too. More than her full aunt.

Jace and Baela (Luke and Rhaena) are First cousins once removed/Quadruple second cousins once removed/Triple third cousins/Octuple third cousins once removed. They share 22% of DNA and are similar to usual half-siblings or double-cousins.

Daemon and little Jahaerys - Maelor Double grand-uncle grand-nephews/Quadruple first cousins twice removed/Octuple second cousins twice removed. They share 39% of DNA, like 3/4 siblings.

Rhaenyra and Baela's children would have the same shared percent of DNA (21-22%) as usual aunt-nieces or grandparent-grandchild. (The author considered Alyn as Corlys' son).

Blood of the dragon runs thick.

I'm not going to calculate the genetic sharing in any family tree, much less the Targs. I shan't, thank you very much. So I will cautiously keep this in mind for when it may come up again and ask others about it to verify. I also already and frequently forget what a first cousin once removed even is and have to look it up. (The child of your cousin).

But then this happens:

I once said the Targ tree wasn't a tree but a wreath. I was wrong. It's a vine system that grow from one shaft into others and are more tightly interconnected than other. And truly, it is one of those things in the ASoIaF world that tickles me with its ironic boldness.

[odkrycia-nauce-i-foldery-online]

Elusive leporids and pikas:  rare survey

Tomasz Q. Pietrzak

  Populations of uncertain origin and relatedness are called recondite populations. Their common feature is also the fact that there weren’t studied before. Many populations look like similar despite that they may differ from each other enough to be grouped to the other taxas. Populations less similar to each other genetically and morphologically are distinct units. Enigmatic groups or populations within disturbed areas are least understood. These rules fit many vertebrate populations including small furbearer mammals.   Leporidae consists above 60 species living around the world. Some populations were never before investigated. This subject is investigated for detection in gaps of their ecology.

One of the population is European hare (Lepus europaeus) living in Caucasus Azerbaijan region or anatolian hares of the same species. It is believed that these population are more genetic distant to other hare populations occurred in Western Europe. French or German population is more related to South American or Australian populations than those living in siberian regions. It is documented that hares living in South America occupied various habitats from bushy steppes to wooded savannahs and humid forests. This is very interesting fact related to occupied free-niches in habitats. Various pelage variations of European hare is known throughout it’s range. e.g. in Turkey it is believed to have at least six kind of pelage variations depend geographically including pale wheat or blackish. In southern Poland I documented the same variations depend on locations even on small range. In Pogórze Tarnowskie area there are more brownish hare than in mountains of Beskid Wyspowy, where exist paler brownish and wheat hares. 

 Conservation is kind of scientific approach for protection of species. Conservation take themselves sources of ecological science. Many of leporid forms are threatened by extinction. Little is known about asiatic wooly hare (Lepus oiostolus). There are much gaps in knowledge of  tropical kinds of these animals.  Chinese lands are inhabited by almost unknown small lagomorphs pikas. Glover’s pika (Ochotona gloveri)  live in central China in harsh places and moupin pika (Ochotona thibetana) is enigmatic animal. Other species was not yet investigated in broader sense. There are six species of pikas within pakistani wildlife. One of them is Afghan red pika (Ochotona rufescens), reddish lagomorph living in mountains. It is species living in fragmented populations for many times. Little is known on populations from Turkmenia or Armenian population.Ochotona roylei  is better known species.Some research was conducted studies on population abundance of this such little-known animal. Population data of that species elsewhere apart of known range e.g. in China is undelivered. Populations of some other species was not yet evaluated in these countries of central Asia. Some researchers provided mysterious news on medical uses “mumeo” of pikas un Kazakhstan. Many species of pikas live throughout central Asian worlds, and plenty of populations could be inhabited in regions not yet surveyed. Creatures black or very dangerous is known in asiatic countries and it could be species of pikas. Many of pika populations was enigmatic. 

 New species of leporid, Venezuelan lowland rabbid (Sylvilagus varynaensis) was unknown up to 2001, despite that is the largest species of its own genus. This silvilagus rabbit is endemic to open habitat of Fundo Millano and Chorrosco Bajo in state of Barinas and is described based on three aspects of taxonomic evaluation. It is probably there possible exist more endemic mammals of this genus or family in not-recognized areas of tropical thick forested regions of South America in such countries as Columbia, Suriname or northeastern Brasil. More reports of that rabbits in forested regions was noted.

   On the opposite part of world, on two small islands of Japan, Amami Ōshima and Toku-no-Shima, located between southern Kyūshū and Okinawa  live inhabitant, primitive living fossil similar to animals living in Miocene, namely Amami rabbid once widely distributed throughout mainland Asia, in nowadays survived as nocturnal forest-dweller. It have outlandish appearance and is rarely seen by natives. Furthermore this nocturnal species also leads a sort of unusual lifestyle. Although endangered, based on fecal pellet count and resident survey it is estimated to be almost 5 thousand individuals on both Islands. Predators is threat for surviving this uncertain populations and are responsible for decline in their size. There is lack of survey of more isolated populations. Very low abundant species living elsewhere in surrounding or distant asian Islands is not yet detected.

 Bunyoro rabbit (Poelagus marjorita) monothypic and endemic to central african is incredible rare in museum and gathered in two relic populations living in quite-well available conditions in unexplored habitats. Absolutely little was known about population. Once determined in 2006 as population very restricted into four countries, but in 2013 carried out estimation that it could live in high abundance as provided by night-road surveys. It is probable that in one habitats or regions it could live in high or low abundance, respectively. There are more living endemic rabbits, those living in Mexico volcano, on southeastern Asian rainforest and elsewhere not yet reported by zoologists. Electrise reports are not yet provided.  

 There are one hare species occurred in northern and western Africa, namely Cape Hare (Lapus capenesis), occurred elsewhere in African continent. Although, there are plenty of local forms of this such kind of leporid, many of them are different to others, including (L.c. whitakeri) in Mahgreb lands. These forms was once recognized, but due to lack of genetic evidence and no any conservation or taxonomic evaluation are forgotted for years. 

 Recondite populations of leporids are globally widespread and inhabits isolated regions in data-poor countries. Summarized, many populations was never before investigated due to lack of supports. Small detection probability and rarity within populations are enigma problem and further cryptozoological investigations show points where those populations and species of uncertain position exist. There are many more unknown populations of leporids and pikas. Investigations devoted its existence and moreover population parameters remain unresolved.

References:

Haleem A.,  Ilyas O., Syed Z.,  Arya S. K. 2009. Abundance of Royle's pika (Ochotona roylei) along an altitudinal gradient in Uttarakhand, Western Himalaya. Hystrix It. J. Mamm. 20(2): 111-119

Bonino N., E.D. Cossíos & J. Menegheti. 2010. Dispersal of the European hare, Lepus europaeus, in South America. Folia Zoologica 59:9-15

Demirbaş Y.,  Albayrak İ. and A. Yilmaz. 2013. Studies of ecomorphological variations of the European hare (Lepus europaeus) in Turkey. Arch. Biol. Sci., Belgrade, 65 (2), 559-566

Durant P. and Guevara M. A. 2001. A new rabbit species (Sylvilagus, Mammalia: Leporidae) from the lowlands of Venezuela. Revista de Biologia Tropical 49(1): 369-381.

Durant P. and Guevara M. A. 2000. Habitat of a Venezuelan lowland rabbit, Sylvilagus varynaensis (Lagomorpha: Leporidae). Revista de Ecologia 7(1-2): 1-10.

Happold D. C. D. and Wendelen, W. 2006. The distribution of Poelagus marjorita (Lagomorpha: Leporidae) in central Africa. Mammalian Biology 71(6): 377-383

Sert H., Suchentrunk F. and  Erdoğan A. 2005. Genetic diversity within Anatolian brown hares (Lepus europaeus Pallas,1778) and differentiation among Anatolian and European populations. Mammalian Biology 70, 171-186.

online sources:

http://www.adventureandscience.org/2/post/2013/03/the-mysterious-mumeo.html

[max1461]

Strongly wish that historical linguists would use the term genealogical instead of genetic for language relatedness, just because of the difficulties the latter causes in public communication.

[robertbelarmino56281]

Good day everyone, are you aware about what's happening in our world? If yes then that's nice! If no, let's talk about it. But first what is our topic all about ?our topic for today is we're going to talk about the Israel vs Palestine conflict. Come with me!

So first what is the root of war? but before that let me give you a short background of the war.

BACKGROUND

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which sought to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was created, sparking the first Arab-Israeli War. The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory, but 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and the territory was divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip. In 1917 Arthur bacflour declares that the israel is "national home for jewish people" that resulted to mandate the Palestine under the U.S. government.

The first war was on May 14, 1947. Hundreds of people's died on that war and over a decade the conflict between the Israel and Palestine was not still over yet. On october 9, 2023 the war has began, Israel declared a war to Gaza's Strip that cause of blocking of food, water, fuel and other natural resources. The blockade came response to the beginning of 2023 Israel and Hamas war attacks.

Eversince the two states have a conflict and they're still fighting for their rights until now but why we need to declare a war? why we need to end up like these? The conflict is driven in several factors: religion, border, territory, natural resources, origin of the people (ethnecity) and the latest is the nova music festival. Let's find out.

ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE.

Palestine

The genetic profile of Palestinians has, for the first time, been studied by using human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene variability and haplotypes. The comparison with other Mediterranean populations by using neighbor-joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses reveal that Palestinians are genetically very close to Jews and other Middle East populations, including Turks (Anatolians), Lebanese, Egyptians, Armenians, and Iranians. Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times.

ISRAEL

Quote from Charles Krauthammer - The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."

The people of Israel (also called the "Jewish People") trace their origin to Abraham, who established the belief that there is only one God, the creator of the universe (see Torah). Abraham, his son Yitshak (Isaac), and grandson Jacob (Israel) are referred to as the patriarchs of the Israelites. All three patriarchs lived in the Land of Canaan, which later became known as the Land of Israel. They and their wives are buried in the Ma'arat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron (Genesis Chapter 23).

(https://www.science.co.il/israel-history/)

Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not in genetic, differences. The relatively close relatedness of both Jews and Palestinians to western Mediterranean populations reflects the continuous circum-Mediterranean cultural and gene flow that have occurred in prehistoric and historic times. This flow overtly contradicts the demic diffusion model of western Mediterranean populations substitution by agriculturalists coming from the Middle East in the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition.

Some of these are jews and some of these are arab and there's a lot of genetics that they have including the Egyptian and their other ancestral who attacks the israel in the past they have different cultures, people's that makes them have a different social beliefs too and because of that the conflict begins.

RELIGION

Everyone have a different beliefs base on our different environment where we belongs to. Israel and Palestine have a different religion and culture that they're still preserving.

Israel

Majority of the israeli have a (78%) of jews followed by muslims, their religion called judaism. Judaism is the first and one of the oldest of the great monotheistic faiths.

Jewish people's serving their God by study and prayer and by the observance of the commandments. This faithfulness to the biblical Covenant can understood as the "vocation", "witness" of the Jewish people.

The Land of Israel is central to the history, life, hopes and aspirations of the Jewish people. It is toward Jerusalem that observant Jews turn in prayer, and it is here, in the Land promised in the Bible, that Jewish custom and tradition, as well as the identity of the Jewish people, can be most fully realized.

Palestine

The majority of Palestinians are Muslims. All the residents are required to declare a religion on an identification card issue by israeli government.

Jerusalem is a very holy city held sacred to Palestinians, as well as Jews, Muslims and Christians alike across the world. The city is home to two important Islamic sites: the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Both sites, located in close proximity, commemorate the place where the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have prayed during his night journey and ascended into heaven (Isra and Miraj).

Both of them have a different culture and beliefs one of those is the holy land which is the Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the capital of the Israel but Palestine believes that they're the one who's living there before the Jews.

TERRITORY

After the world war 1 the Palestine is devided to two regions the West Bank and the Gaza's Strip and the borders between Palestine and Israel is the Jordan in the east, Lebanon and part of the modern Israel to the north.

The two states have a different natural resources, Palestine is rich in oil while Israel is rich in gold and copper.

And one of the cause of conflict is when the Jewish people goes behind the borders the people of the Gaza's Strip executing the people of Israel.

Gaza strip is known for militant group controlled by "hamass" a militant group of people that the U.S. and European Union considered as "terrorist".

Ever since they're still bargaining about the land that they're wanted to have but Israel wins. Palestine believes that they're the first people living in the Israel but the Jews believes that the land of Israel gave it to them by the God they called it as the "Land of the promises" but these Canaan people or the Palestinian people they're not believing to them because they're the one who lives first on that land and it makes the Jewish people become wrath until the battle has begun.

NATURAL RESOURCES

The two nations have their own natural resources that makes their economy productive Palestine is rich in oil while the Israel is rich in copper, gold,silver and other natural resources if they wanted to have an oil or any essentials they need to surpass the borders of each country that they wanted to go in order to have what they need.

NOVA MUSIC FESTIVAL

Nova music festival is located near the border of Gaza's Strip. The music festival of the israeli was attended of thousands people in the holiday of Sukkot. This party was supposed to be fun and memorable but there's an unexpected tragedy happen. This festival was intended to help those people of the Gaza's Strip the fund was supposed to be donated to the Gaza's strip since the Gaza's strip doesn't have enough natural resources or any resources including food, medicine, clothes and so on.

At sunrise on Saturday morning, Hamas gunmen launched hundreds of rockets and breached the border between Gaza and Israel, speeding through farmland towards a psychedelic trance music festival that had continued through the night, into the morning.

Assailants who broke through barricades at the border drove down Route 232, cutting a deadly path through rural kibbutzim communities. They blocked off the road to the festival from the north and the south, before swarming the sprawling site on foot, videos show. Then the militants encircled crowds on three sides like a scythe, gunning them down and forcing them to flee over fields to the east.

The Islamist militant group’s terror attack on the rave was not only highly coordinated, but designed for maximum carnage, the scale and scope of which is only just beginning to come to light now, one week on. Heavily armed gunmen choked off almost all avenues of escape, trapping crowds, while simultaneously targeting shelters where people were hiding, killing them en masse, CNN’s analysis of more than 50 videos and interviews with 13 survivors shows.

Thousands of Israelis and foreign nationals had descended on the Negev desert in southern Israel for the music festival, known as Nova, marking the Jewish holiday Sukkot and touted as an event celebrating “unity and love.”

When the booms of rockets rang out overhead around 6:30 a.m., few noticed over the whomping electronic beats. Others, accustomed to rocket fire from Gaza, thought little of it. But not long after organizers stopped the music, and security ushered people towards the exits, the chaos started.

After that case the president of Israel made a decision to declare a war to defend his country from the terrorist and for the other foreigns that involves to the case.

THE DECLARATION OF WAR

In response to the attack, Israel has declared war and launched “Operation Swords of Iron,” striking suspected Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza.

Between October 7 and 12, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on the impoverished territory – that’s equivalent to the total number of airstrikes on Gaza during the entire 2014 Gaza-Israel conflict, which lasted 50 days.

On october 9, 2023 Israel made their final decision to declare a war to Gaza's strip.

We don't have to end like these some of them are innocent and they are clueless about what's happening. The war of these two nations becomes intense to the point that the anger that they're carrying on makes them arrogant instead of making a propaganda we should do it in a good communication to avoid the war and to protect your fellow citizens too.

How about you? what is your opinion about our topic? are you a pro Israel? or a pro Palestine?

[strathoa]

Twitter turbulences and their impact on Altmetric scores: a follow-up

Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian at U Strathclyde

As stated in the previous post on this topic a month and a half ago, we continue to look into this issue of the possible impact of the "twitter instability" on Altmetric scores as a proxy for social impact of research.

The bad news first: the Altmetric score for the March 2023 paper in the European Journal of Human Genetics that the previous post was looking into has barely climbed despite all the media attention. As of May 6th, 2023 the score for this paper is "just" 124. This is of course one order of magnitude higher than it was a month and a half ago, but it's still rather low (see the good news bit below). The silver lining is that all the references in the news seem to have been incorporated to the score – there's 14 of them recorded in the Altmetric page.

The good news is that some publications are still able to grow very high Altmetric scores quite quickly. See for instance this PLoS Genetics paper "Imputed genomes and haplotype-based analyses of the Picts of early medieval Scotland reveal fine-scale relatedness between Iron Age, early medieval and the modern people of the UK" by A Morez (Liverpool John Moores University) et al at.

This paper, also on the topic of paleogenetics/ancient DNA and also with a key input from the University of Aberdeen (by Linus Girdland-Flink and his team), was only published on Apr 27th, 2023, i.e. just over a week ago. Its Altmetric score as of May 6th is 1,363, resulting from 166 identified mentions in news outlets and 152 tweeters. This means first and foremost that Altmetric scores seem to remain a reliable proxy for social impact of research (though the exploration continues).

It also means that the authors of this more recent paper in PLoS Genetics have probably taken a more proactive approach to dissemination within a closely-knit international community in the discipline. The journal of choice also plays an important role here – the Public Library of Science is an Open Access publisher and pioneered the adoption of article-level metrics quite a long time ago. On top of all this, the publication has been picked by AlphaGalileo, who have published and interview with the first author at Liverpool John Moores University.

A short introductory talk "Exploring Prehistory with Ancient DNA" delivered within the Aberdeen Little Lectures by Linus Girdland-Flink back in 2020 is available on YouTube, proving the point on proactiveness and international collaborative work in the discipline.