Researchers trace the first farming ant

slowhand

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WASHINGTON - Ants took up farming some 50 million years ago, according to researchers who traced the ancestry of farmer ants. An analysis of the DNA of farmer ants traced them back to an original ancestor — a sort of adam ant, at least for the types that raise their own food, according to a paper in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


In the last 25 million years ants have developed different types of farming including the well-known leaf-cutter ants, according to entomologists Ted Schultz and Sean Brady at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.




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