Andre Costopoulos

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Over the past 8,000 years on the southwest coast of British Columbia there is a transition from assemblages dominated by chipped stone to assemblages that include more ground and polished stone, bone, and antler. In this study, we combine the plentiful data being produced by archaeological consultants and archived in provincial reports with that of more traditional academic sources to assess the nature of the documented transition and specifically determine if there is a major transition ca. 4850 cal B.P. as suggested by Moss et al. (2007). Our results show that not only is there a major transition between 5000 and 4500 cal B.P. but the long-standing conception of a gradual replacement of assemblages dominated by chipped stone to ones dominated by ground stone and faunal tools is inaccurate.

We show a mechanism by which chaperone proteins can play a key role in maintaining the long-term evolutionary stability of mutation rates in prokaryotes with perfect genetic linkage. Since chaperones can reduce the phenotypic effects of mutations, higher mutation rate, by affecting chaperones, can increase the phenotypic effects of mutations. This in turn leads to greater mutation effect among the proteins that control mutation repair and DNA replication, resulting in large changes in mutation rate. The converse of this is that when mutation rate is low and chaperones are functioning well, then the rate of change in mutation rate will also be low, leading to low mutation rates being evolutionarily frozen. We show that the strength of this recursion is critical to determining the long-term evolutionary patterns of mutation rate among prokaryotes. If this recursion is weak, then mutation rates can grow without bound, leading to the extinction of the lineage. However, if this recursion is strong, then we can reproduce empirical patterns of prokaryotic mutation rates, where mutation rates remain stable over evolutionary time, and where most mutation rates are low, but with a significant fraction of high mutators.

The shoreline displacement history of the eastern James Bay lowlands in the last 7 ka has been investigated by means of AMS radiocarbon dating of sediments cored from wetlands. We present twelve radiocarbon dates on macrofossils from six sites spread along a gradient of increasing land age and elevation. Palynomorph analysis (pollen, spores, and dinoflagellate cysts) was used to define the isolation stratigraphy. During the last 7 ka the shoreline elevation has regressed at a decreasing rate. The rate of shoreline emergence was initially rapid (6. 5 m/ 100 yr) between 6850 and  6400 cal yr BP then slowed down to 1.4– 2 m/ 100 yr during the late Holocene. Examination of previous relative sea level data based upon mollusc shells reveals high levels of uncertainty that mask potential temporal variability.