nationalpost:

Uranium City is small-town Canada taken to the extreme
Northern Saskatchewan’s Uranium City may be a life too isolated for the likes of most city dwellers, but as photographer Ian Brewster and anthropologist Justin Armstrong discovered on their trip to the ghost town, the city’s sense of community has kept its remaining 70 inhabitants going strong.

“The idea of the abandonment wasn’t as interesting as the people who stayed,” Brewster says. “You know, I don’t really view this as a story about the town and all the people that left, I view the story more about the people that have stayed and why they stayed and that was sort of the more interesting aspect of it for us.” (Photos: Courtesy of Ian Brewster)

sciencecenter: Modern human evolution observed in French-Canadian town It is quite commonly claimed that human evolution is done - we no longer have natural predators, modern medicine can cure or stave off many diseases, and people who might not have cut it in the caves and jungles are today reproducing happily and healthily. It’s plausibly true that selective pressure on humans has decreased in modern times, but the power of natural selection combined with the puny length of time that the ‘modern era’ composes means that human evolution is certainly still occurring. Geneticists in Canada believe they have one more clear example. The study took place in Ile aux Coudres, an isolated island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with detailed records stored in the local Catholic church. Researchers digging through the birth records show that, from 1800 to the 1940s, mothers first gave birth at a younger age - from an average of 26 years old down to 22. Age of first birth is a proxy for measuring fertility, and the town data fits the profile for a genetic, and not environmental, change (remember that, for evolution to occur, adaptations need to be heritable). Detailed records reassures the scientists that no other factors - nutrition, cultural changes, etc - could account for the data. The authors of the study postulate that increased fertility, and larger families, would have been adaptive for rugged rural life.
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sciencecenter:

Modern human evolution observed in French-Canadian town

It is quite commonly claimed that human evolution is done - we no longer have natural predators, modern medicine can cure or stave off many diseases, and people who might not have cut it in the caves and jungles are today reproducing happily and healthily. It’s plausibly true that selective pressure on humans has decreased in modern times, but the power of natural selection combined with the puny length of time that the ‘modern era’ composes means that human evolution is certainly still occurring. Geneticists in Canada believe they have one more clear example.

The study took place in Ile aux Coudres, an isolated island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with detailed records stored in the local Catholic church. Researchers digging through the birth records show that, from 1800 to the 1940s, mothers first gave birth at a younger age - from an average of 26 years old down to 22. Age of first birth is a proxy for measuring fertility, and the town data fits the profile for a genetic, and not environmental, change (remember that, for evolution to occur, adaptations need to be heritable). Detailed records reassures the scientists that no other factors - nutrition, cultural changes, etc - could account for the data. The authors of the study postulate that increased fertility, and larger families, would have been adaptive for rugged rural life.