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Zooarchaeological research has contributed greatly to our understanding of animal use in the Bronze Age Central Plains in northern China, where remarkable social transformations occurred in the second millennium BCE. However, limited work has been done for the contemporaneous Jing and Wei River valleys, another crucial region in dynastic and imperial history of China that witnessed the political transition from the Shang Dynasty to the Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1050 BCE). In particular, the Zhou subsistence economy leading up to the emergence of the region as a centre of Zhou political authority is still poorly understood. Here, we present a zooarchaeological analysis of Zaoshugounao and Zaolinhetan, two sites associated with the predynastic Zhou, in present‐day central Shaanxi dating to before and around the Shang–Zhou transition. Results show that the Zaoshugounao and Zaolinhetan residents practiced intensive farming and animal husbandry in and around the settlements complemented by extensive caprine management on marginal lands. Along with other lines of archaeological evidence, our zooarchaeological data demonstrate that the economic developments in the Jing River valley in the late second millennium BCE, in terms of the diversified use of animal resources, underpinned the economic foundation behind the Zhou rise and their eventual conquest of the Shang.

The clarification of the genetic origins of present-day Tibetans requires an understanding of their past relationships with the ancient populations of the Tibetan Plateau. Here we successfully sequenced 67 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes of 5200 to 300-year-old humans from the plateau. Apart from identifying two ancient plateau lineages (haplogroups D4j1b and M9a1a1c1b1a) that suggest some ancestors of Tibetans came from low-altitude areas 4750 to 2775 years ago and that some were involved in an expansion of people moving between high-altitude areas 2125 to 1100 years ago, we found limited evidence of recent matrilineal continuity on the plateau. Furthermore, deep learning of the ancient data incorporated into simulation models with an accuracy of 97% supports that present-day Tibetan matrilineal ancestry received partial contribution rather than complete continuity from the plateau populations of the last 5200 years.

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Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the most common histological type of lung cancer. Altered expression of centromere protein F (CENPF), a transient kinetochore protein, has been found in a variety of human cancers. However, its clinical significance in NSCLC remains unknown. In the present study the results of quantitative PCR and western blot analyses demonstrated that CENPF and Forkhead box M1 (FOXM1) were significantly higher in NSCLC tissues than in the non-cancerous controls at both transcriptional and translational levels. Immunohistochemical staining results showed 58.7% (44/75) and 64.0% (48/75) of NSCLC tissues displayed high expression of CENPF and FOXM1, respectively. CENPF protein expression showed a positive correlation with tumor size (P=0.0179), vital status (P=0.0008) and FOXM1 expression (P=0.0013) in NSCLC. Poor overall survival was correlated with high levels of CENPF and FOXM1 in NSCLC patients as evaluated by Kaplan-Meier and log rank test. Multivariate analyses showed that CENPF expression was an independent prognostic factor for NSCLC. In conclusion, our study provides evidence of the prognostic function of CENPF in NSCLC.