Month: September 2024

Enlarge / View of the Las Gobas cave site. (credit: Miguel Sotomayor via Getty)

In a new study, we have sequenced DNA from a Christian community in medieval Spain that lived in artificial caves carved into a rocky outcrop.

This is one of several medieval cave communities known to have lived on the Iberian Peninsula—which includes both Portugal and Spain. Why these groups favored caves over more conventional village dwellings is a subject of longstanding debate for archaeologists. While it may be tempting to speculate about hermits or religious groups, there’s scant evidence to support such theories.

Our study, published in Science Advances, explores the possibilities, adding genetic analysis to what we know about the physical remains of people from the site’s cemetery. DNA was able to shed light on the ancestry of this community, their relationships to each other and the diseases that afflicted them.

Enlarge / Refrigerated delivery with an E-Transit is now feasible, as the onboard power is now available while the van is in motion. (credit: Ford)

America's tradespeople have steadily been getting more van-curious over the years, helped no doubt by Ford beginning local production of the already Euro-popular Transit in Kansas City in 2014. In 2022 Ford debuted the E-Transit, which has been steadily growing in sales over the past few quarters. Now the Blue Oval has started deliveries of the model-year 2024 E-Transit, and there are some worthwhile improvements compared to the MY23 van.

The opprobrium that is now starting to stick to supersized pickup trucks has mostly ignored the humble van. It's contradictory, on the face of it; even a low-roof Transit takes up more volume on the road than most pickups. But then, there aren't leather-and-chrome special edition Transit vans driven more as commuter cars or weekend toys like there are pickups—at least for now.

EV vans ought to be even more immune, for they maintain their working class credentials and burnish them with a side helping of environmentalism. For example, Ford says that data from its telematics show that since its introduction in 2022 until the end of Q2 2024, E-Transit customers in the US and Canada had avoided burning more than 3 million gallons of gas (11.3 million L) and reduced their output of CO₂ by 25 million kg.