The Eurasian badgers (Meles spp.) are widespread in the Palaearctic Region, occurring from the British Islands in the west to the Japanese Islands in the east, including the Scandinavia, Southwest Asia and southern China. The morphometric variation in 30 cranial characters of 692 skulls of Meles from across the Palaearctic was here analyzed. This craniometric analysis revealed a significant dif...

Discussions of animal domestication in Southwest Asia often describe a homogenous process in which sheep, goats, cattle and pigs were domesticated in relatively rapid succession producing a productive and integrated ‘barnyard complex’ which then helped fuel the rapid expansion of Neolithic farmers into neighboring regions. A critical examination of the data, however, suggests that the developme...

Archaeological research in Central Eurasia is exposing unprecedented scales of trans-regional interaction and technology transfer between East Asia and southwest Asia deep into the prehistoric past. This article presents a new archaeobotanical analysis from pastoralist campsites in the mountain and desert regions of Central Eurasia that documents the oldest known evidence for domesticated grain...

Today, farmers in many regions of eastern Asia sow their barley grains in the spring and harvest them in the autumn of the same year (spring barley). However, when it was first domesticated in southwest Asia, barley was grown between the autumn and subsequent spring (winter barley), to complete their life cycles before the summer drought. The question of when the eastern barley shifted from the...

Sphagnum jensenii, S. fallax var. isoviitae, and pylaesii were found as new to Turkey Southwest Asia following a bryological field trip the Giresun province of Turkey. isoviitae was also Asia. Descriptions, illustrations, world distribution, ecology, comparisons with related species are presented.