Reversible visual hemineglect.

We have identified a limited region in the posterior, but not anterior, half of the cat's middle suprasylvian region which, when cooled and inactivated unilaterally, results in a profound visual neglect of stimuli introduced into the contracooled hemifield. The severity of the deficit matches that induced by unilateral cooling of the superior colliculus. The cortical region is located at the temporo-occipito-parietal junction and is believed to be equivalent to a region centered on or close to the area V5 complex of primates.

Genetics and the origin of European languages.

A new set of European genetic data has been analyzed to dissect independent patterns of geographic variation. The most important cause of European genetic variation has been confirmed to correspond to the migration of Neolithic farmers from the area of origin of agriculture in the Middle East. The next most important component of genetic variation is apparently associated with a north-south gradient possibly due to adaptation to cold climates but also to the differentiation of the Uralic and the Indo-European language-speaking people; however, the relevant correlations are not significantly different from zero after elimination of the spatial autocorrelation. The third component is highly correlated with the infiltration of the Yamna ("Kurgan") people, nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse and who have been claimed to have spread Indo-European languages to Europe; this association, which is statistically significant even when taking spatial autocorrelations into account, does not completely exclude the hypothesis of Indo-European as the language of Neolithic farmers. It is possible that both expansions were responsible for the spread of different subfamilies of Indo-European languages, but our genetic data cannot resolve their relative importance.