Evolution articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    An electrifying evolutionary radiation has evidently occurred among elephant fish in Africa's Ivindo basin. An implication is that open niches for communication can result in species diversification.

    • Manuel Leal
    •  & Jonathan B. Losos

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Nina Veselka
    • , David D. McErlain
    •  & M. Brock Fenton

  • Letter |

    The earliest direct evidence for stone tools is between 2.6 and 2.5 million years old and comes from Gona, Ethiopia. These authors report bones from Dikika, Ethiopia, dated to around 3.4 million years ago and marked with cuts indicative of the use of stone tools to remove flesh and extract bone marrow. This is the earliest known evidence of stone tool use, and might be attributed to the activities of Australopithecus afarensis.

    • Shannon P. McPherron
    • , Zeresenay Alemseged
    •  & Hamdallah A. Béarat

  • News & Views |

    How far back in the human lineage does tool use extend? Fossil bones that bear evidence of butchery marks made by stone implements increase the known range of that behaviour to at least 3.2 million years ago.

    • David R. Braun

  • Letter |

    A spectacular adaptive radiation among notosuchian crocodyliforms in the southern continents of Gondwana led to all manner of strange forms; in particular, their teeth, rather than being undifferentiated conical fangs, were often differentiated into biting and crushing types, as seen in mammals. These authors describe a new form from the Cretaceous period of Tanzania in which upper and lower dentitions were capable of occlusion, a feature otherwise known only from mammals.

    • Patrick M. O’Connor
    • , Joseph J. W. Sertich
    •  & Jesuit Temba

  • Article
    | Open Access

    These authors report and analyse the draft genome sequence of the demosponge Amphimedon queenslandica. Sponges lie on the earliest branching lineage in the animal kingdom and thus have been important in studies of the origins of multicellularity. Comparative genomic analyses presented here provide significant insights into evolutionary origins of genes and pathways related to the hallmarks of metazoan multicellularity and to cancer biology.

    • Mansi Srivastava
    • , Oleg Simakov
    •  & Daniel S. Rokhsar

  • News |

    Russell L. Ciochon and his team are in Indonesia investigating the geological source and age of one of the world's biggest caches of Homo erectus.

    • Miriam Frankel

  • Letter |

    Climate change can affect the phenology, population dynamics and morphology of species, but it is difficult to study all these factors and their interactions at once. Using long-term data for individual yellow-bellied marmots, these authors show that climate change has increased the length of the marmot growing season, leading to a gradual increase in individual size. It has simultaneously increased the fitness of large individuals, leading to a rapid increase in population size.

    • Arpat Ozgul
    • , Dylan Z. Childs
    •  & Tim Coulson

  • Letter |

    The fossil record of primates is sparse, and many gaps remain in our knowledge. One gap relates to the divergence within the catarrhines — the ancestors of hominoids (apes and humans) and Old World monkeys. The discovery of a previously unknown catarrhine in Saudi Arabia, dated to 29–28 million years ago, helps to fill in some details. This specimen shows very few catarrhine specializations, suggesting that the divergence between Old World monkeys and hominoids must have occurred after this date.

    • Iyad S. Zalmout
    • , William J. Sanders
    •  & Philip D. Gingerich

  • Books & Arts |

    Samir Okasha is intrigued by a proposed universal law of biology: that complexity inevitably increases in the absence of other evolutionary forces.

    • Samir Okasha

  • Letter |

    Cooperation in evolutionary games can be stabilized through punishment of non-cooperators, at a cost to those who do the punishing. Punishment can take different forms, in particular peer-punishment, in which individuals punish free-riders after the event, and pool-punishment, in which a fund for sanctioning is set up beforehand. These authors show that pool-punishment is superior to peer-punishment in dealing with second-order free-riders, who cooperate in the main game but refuse to contribute to punishment.

    • Karl Sigmund
    • , Hannelore De Silva
    •  & Christoph Hauert

  • Letter |

    Birds and mammals have distinct sex chromosomes: in birds, males are ZZ and females ZW; in mammals, males are XY and females XX. By sequencing the chicken Z chromosome and comparing it with the human X chromosome, these authors overturn the currently held view that these chromosomes have diverged little from their autosomal progenitors. The Z and X chromosomes seem to have followed convergent evolutionary trajectories, despite evolving with opposite systems of heterogamety.

    • Daniel W. Bellott
    • , Helen Skaletsky
    •  & David C. Page

  • News Feature |

    Finds in Turkey could answer key questions about ancient human origins, but palaeoanthropologists there must first bury their disputes. Rex Dalton reports from the field.

    • Rex Dalton

  • News Feature |

    A once-threatened population of African fish is now providing a view of evolution in action. Laura Spinney asks what Lake Victoria cichlids have revealed about speciation.

    • Laura Spinney

  • News & Views |

    Interpreting truly ancient fossils is an especially tricky business. The conclusion that 2.1-billion-year-old structures from Gabon are the remains of large colonial organisms will get palaeobiologists talking.

    • Philip C. J. Donoghue
    •  & Jonathan B. Antcliffe

  • Letter |

    The European corn borer consists of two sex pheromone races, leading to strong reproductive isolation which could represent a first step in speciation. Female sex pheromone production and male behavioural response are under the control of different genes, but the identity of these genes is unknown. These authors show that allelic variation in a gene essential for pheromone biosynthesis accounts for the phenotypic variation in female pheromone production, leading to race-specific signals.

    • Jean-Marc Lassance
    • , Astrid T. Groot
    •  & Christer Löfstedt

  • News & Views |

    Speciation can occur even when the incipient species coexist and can interbreed. An extensive analysis of two fruitfly strains suggests that many genomic regions contribute to speciation in such cases.

    • Erin S. Kelleher
    •  & Daniel A. Barbash

  • News |

    Four-legged creatures may have gained a foothold by ditching genes guiding fin development.

    • Janelle Weaver

  • Letter |

    One of the steps in the evolution of tetrapod limbs was the loss of the distinctive fringe of fin rays and fin folds found in the fins of fishes. It is now shown that two novel proteins, actinodin 1 and 2, are essential structural components of fin rays and fin folds in zebrafish, and are also encoded in the genomes of other teleost fish and at least one species of shark, but not in tetrapods. It is suggested that the loss of these genes may have contributed to the fin-to-limb transition in tetrapod evolution.

    • Jing Zhang
    • , Purva Wagh
    •  & Marie-Andrée Akimenko

  • Letter |

    Genomic data from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities are here compared with data from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations, to investigate the demographic history of the Jewish people. Analyses shed new light on relationships between communities, reveal unappreciated genetic substructure within the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.

    • Doron M. Behar
    • , Bayazit Yunusbayev
    •  & Richard Villems

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