A fascinating example of evolution in action: the world’s largest (and smelliest) flower, which can weigh 15lb (7kg) started out at one-eightieth that size.
Rafflesia is unusual in several ways: It has a carcass-like appearance, reeks of decaying flesh, and in some cases emits heat, much like a recently killed animal. These traits help the flower attract the carrion flies which pollinate it. Because rafflesia lacks the genes most commonly used to trace plant ancestry, the scientists had to delve deeper into its genome, looking at some 11,500 ”letters” of DNA.
advertisement
This determined that the giant flower’s closest relatives are in the Euphorbiaceae family, many of which have blossoms just a few millimetres in diameter.
Tis a wonderful world. And modern humans proved remarkably adept at exploring it, as a discovery of our direct ancestors in southern Russia about 45,000 years ago, before we were supposed to have been there, and much further north than expected, suggests. There’s also a piece being claimed as the oldest (known – the vital word The Times misses out) piece of figurative art. (Although reading between the lines it sounds like you need quite a lot of imagination to see the “figure”.)
“The big surprise here is the very early presence of modern humans in one of the coldest, driest places in Europe,†said John Hoffecker, of the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States.
“It is one of the last places we would have expected people from Africa to occupy first.â€
Animal bones uncovered show that the inhabitants were expanding their diet to include small mammals, fish and other aquatic creatures. This, the researchers said, suggests that the people were “remaking themselves technologically†and may have used snares to trap hares and Arctic foxes, and nets for fish….
Evidence of early trading networks was thrown up by the realisation that the shells the inhabitants used for jewellery had come from the Black Sea, more than 300 miles away.
About