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In northwestern Africa, lifestyle transitioned from foraging to food production around 7,400 years ago but what sparked that change remains unclear. Archaeological data support conflicting views: (1) that migrant European Neolithic farmers brought the new way of life to North Africa1,2,3 or (2) that local hunter-gatherers adopted technological innovations4,5. The latter view is also supported by archaeogenetic data6. Here we fill key chronological and archaeogenetic gaps for the Maghreb, from Epipalaeolithic to Middle Neolithic, by sequencing the genomes of nine individuals (to between 45.8- and 0.2-fold genome coverage). Notably, we trace 8,000 years of population continuity and isolation from the Upper Palaeolithic, via the Epipaleolithic, to some Maghrebi Neolithic farming groups. However, remains from the earliest Neolithic contexts showed mostly European Neolithic ancestry. We suggest that farming was introduced by European migrants and was then rapidly adopted by local groups. During the Middle Neolithic a new ancestry from the Levant appears in the Maghreb, coinciding with the arrival of pastoralism in the region, and all three ancestries blend together during the Late Neolithic. Our results show ancestry shifts in the Neolithization of northwestern Africa that probably mirrored a heterogeneous economic and cultural landscape, in a more multifaceted process than observed in other regions. This project was supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (to M.J.), Vetenskapsrådet (grant nos. 2018-05537 and 2022-04642 to M.J. and 2017-05267 to T.G.) and Ramón y Cajal (grant no. RYC2018-025223-I to C.V.). The Spanish–Moroccan archaeological team was supported by the European Research Council (no. ERC AdG 230561).

This paper uses interdisciplinary methods to investigate responses to the Little Ice Age in regions where livestock farming was dominant, a neglected subject due to the scarcity of detailed written records regarding pastoral land use. It argues that landscape-level histories which include pollen evidence and archaeology can address this challenge and reveal local processes of climate adaptation. Here we focus on Ireland and Scotland and a fascinating rise in small-scale cereal cultivation on upland pastures during the Little Ice Age. Bayesian modeling is used to test the chronological resolution of field evidence and compare it with climate reconstructions. We can see that the cultivation emerged in late medieval times, when cattle were facing climate-related stresses, and increased in early modern times during the Little Ice Age’s main phase. We suggest that it started in an indirect adaptation to climate change, supplementing supplies of food and fodder for pastoralists, but increased as rural populations and external market demands grew. There is a need for finer temporal resolution in pollen records and archaeology, as well as greater integration with socio-economic history, if we are to be more certain about changes in the relative significance of climate in pastoral land use.

The introduction of a child day-care system is one of the early welfare interventions targeted towards mothers and young children that over time gained great prominence in the Swedish welfare state. Because quantitative research on day-cares in historical settings is generally scarce, in this study, we focus on the determinants of day-care enrolment in southern Sweden during the early twentieth century. We use unique individual-level records of day-care attendance for children born between 1900 and 1935 which have been linked to longitudinal micro-level data for the city of Landskrona obtained from the Scanian Economic Demographic Database. Event-history techniques are employed to analyse the importance of factors such as household composition, parental socio-economic background, marital status of the mother, and mother’s occupation. Of the studied children, 8% were ever enrolled in day-cares, most of them around the ages 3 to 6. The results show that the mother’s marital status, household SES, number of siblings, the presence of other adult females in the household and mother’s occupation are all significant determinants of day-care attendance for children. In this study, we show that in the early twentieth century in southern Sweden, day-care attendance followed a negative SES gradient and was most common among children of single mothers.

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage (Canis familiaris) lived. Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT88 40,000–30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located. 313-320 7918 200

Abstract The economic complexity index's environmental implications have been thoroughly investigated in this study. In particular, an effort is made to determine the index's utility in explaining and filling in the gaps left by experimental studies on the effects of renewable energy on CO2 emissions. The study sampled 29 Asia-Pacific countries over the period 2000–2018. The relationship between the complexity index and CO2 emissions has been investigated using panel data models and estimation methods. According to the findings, increasing the intensity of energy use, trade openness, and urbanization all increase CO2 emissions, although the effects of urbanization eventually became insignificant in the long run. Furthermore, while the logarithm of GDP per capita’s coefficients for the level and squared forms confirmed the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, the economic complexity index shifted the curve. The results indicate that economic complexity in countries enhances economic growth effects to increase CO2 emissions through increased production scale and energy demand. On the other hand, increasing economic complexity through increased energy efficiency demonstrates its beneficial effects on the environment. According to the findings, increasing wind and solar energy share has reduced CO2 emissions in countries with lower economic complexity. In comparison, in more complex countries along with these substitution effects, there is also a scale effect associated with increasing renewable energy use, which eventually results in increased CO2 emissions.

BackgroundAs per the United Nations Women data, the maternal mortality rate in war-affected countries is critical and more than 800 million people live in war-affected countries (ICRC). External and internal conflicts such as foreign pressure, war and cross-border, civil disorder, terrorism, and civil war, are characteristics of Middle Eastern and African countries. Therefore considering the rapid increment of political risks and internal and external conflicts in Africa and the Middle East during the last decade, and considering warfare as a key contributor to maternal mortality; This paper seeks to evaluate the factors that have caused significant rates of maternal mortality in Middle Eastern and African countries by emphasizing the contributions of a number of political risk aspects as Civil Disorder Index, Terrorism Index, Civil War Index, Foreign Pressures Index, Cross-Border Conflict Index, War Index along with other socio-economic factors.MethodData were collected from forty-six countries during 2011–2016 to explore the regional contributions of political risk aspects to the maternal mortality rate through spatial approaches.ResultsIt was found that GDP per capita, energy intensity, and urbanization strongly impacted maternal mortality. Also, it was observed that natural resource rents and economic growth significantly influenced the reduction of mortality by expanding healthcare services. The urban expansion was found to have elevated maternal mortality. A majority of external and internal conflicts reduced the orientation of production toward healthcare services and thus raised maternal mortality. On the other hand, war and cross-border were found to pose opposite impacts.ConclusionThe findings revealed that political risks arising from terrorism, foreign pressure, and war in the adjacent countries would elevate the rate of mortality in the original country. This implies the spillover impacts of regional conflicts on maternal mortality elevation at the regional scale.JEL Classification Codes: C23; I10; I18; N37: