Anthropology
gregladen | June 1, 2009Expanding on the discussion from here ...
In the paper Anthropology's "Fierce" Yanomami: Narratives of Sexual Politics in the Amazon, Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams provide the following opening passage:
Imagine a society in which one woman in every three is raped, usually by a man she knows, consider the consequences of living in a society where one third of all women are beaten during pregnancy and 35 percent of women using emergency medical facilities are battered . Since wee are anthropologists, readers may mistakenly think that these appalling data were collected in an exotic society…
laelaps | June 1, 2009In the summer of 1833 Charles Darwin was exploring the South American landscape when he came across the army of the Argentine general Juan Manuel de Rosas. Though Darwin admired the commander's horsemanship and leadership, the general was engaged in the bloody extermination of native people from southern Argentina. As Darwin recounted in the Voyage of the Beagle;
General Rosas's plan is to kill all stragglers, and having driven the remainder to a common point, in the summer, with the assistance of the Chilenos, to attack them in a body. This operation is to be repeated for three successive…
laelaps | May 31, 2009I just watched the BBC's documentary on "Ida" (Darwinius masillae), "Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor", and to be honest I was not very impressed. Rather than dissect the show second-by-second, though, I will only discuss some of the main points that occurred to me while watching it. Heaven knows I have spent plenty of time on Ida already...
While I surely appreciate the show's efforts (however fleeting) to describe the paleobiology of Ida, the show's real hook is the conclusion that Darwinius is one of our earliest primate ancestors. This is a tantalizing hypothesis, but is it true? The…
laelaps | May 28, 2009Saartje Baartman, drawn from a wax cast made in Paris. From The Human Race.On December 31, 1816 Saartje Baartman died in Paris. She had been ill for three days, perhaps stricken with smallpox, before she and her unborn child expired. Better known as the "Hottentot Venus", Baartman was a tragic celebrity in Europe. She was a dark-skinned member of the Khoikhoi tribe of South Africa*, and she had buttocks so large that they mesmerized Europeans. Despite her intelligence and talent with languages she was treated as a sideshow attraction, considered to be the antithesis of the European standard…
laelaps | May 27, 2009The "Hesperopithecus" tooth discovered by Harold Cook.I could see it coming from a mile away. As soon as I heard all the hype surrounding "Ida", the exceptionally preserved specimen of Darwinius announced last week, I knew creationists would soon be citing our old friends "Archeoraptor", "Piltdown Man", and "Nebraska Man" as reasons not to trust evolutionary scientists. Each was a public embarrassment to scientists, that is true, but there is no reason to sweep these mistakes under the rug. Each can tell us something valuable about the way science works and how scientists interact with the…
gregladen | May 26, 2009It is funny how people play with history. If we talk about an important "first" that is viewed in a positive light ... the origin of beer for instance ... the slightest evidence will be used by the people of a given region to claim primacy. Also, since Africa almost always gets the shaft in this regard, all else being equal, an early African occurrence of something good will be assumed as not definitive, but vague evidence of the non-African first occurrence will be taken more seriously. Seriously.
Now, we have an important finding with the opposite effect: Whence did Leprosy first come…
laelaps | May 26, 2009The skull of a tarsier, from The Descent of Primates.At the turn of the 20th century evolutionary biologists faced a significant problem. In 1859 Charles Darwin had expounded the mechanism of evolution, and Eugene Dubois' discovery of "Pithecanthropus" (known as Homo erectus today) illustrated that humans had evolved over time, but the broad outline of human evolution was almost entirely a mystery. There was no doubt that we had evolved from some ancient group of primates, but one of the most frustratingly difficult to resolve questions was what our earliest primate ancestors were like.
The…
razib | May 26, 2009On this week's Science Saturday John Horgan interviews Richard Wrangham. The second half of the conversation focuses on Wrangham's new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I've heard pieces of the arguments mooted in the back & forth before, but it looks like in this book they're all brought together. Humans are a large animal with a very small gut, so we need to maximize the bang-for-the buck when it comes to what we eat. Unlike gorillas and to a lesser extent chimpanzees we just aren't able to process enough low quality vegetable matter to keep ourselves going. Part of this…
bioephemera | May 25, 2009Just when I was wondering why there hasn't been more mainstream coverage of the Jared Diamond/New Yorker lawsuit I blogged about at the beginning of this month, Columbia Journalism Review has an update. And in a recent article in Science, Diamond commented, saying "The complaint has no merit at all."
Oddly, the Science article (which is unfortunately subscription-only) frames this whole situation as a conflict between different disciplines - mainly science and journalism.
Three worlds collide in this case. First is the world of science, specifically anthropology, which uses fieldwork and…
laelaps | May 25, 2009It has been nearly a week since Darwinius, a 47-million-year-old primate heralded as the "missing link", burst on the public scene. (See some of my previous posts about the fossil here, here, and here.) Nicknamed "Ida", the fossil has already spurred comments from nearly all corners of the science blogohedron, but with documentaries about her airing tonight (USA) and tomorrow (UK) there is still plenty to talk about.
That's why I am organizing a one-time-only blog carnival all about Ida. Whether you want to tackle the media hype, the more technical aspects of her discovery, or something else…
laelaps | May 22, 2009The exceptionally preserved skeleton of Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One.
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It has been three days now since an international team of paleontologists promised to deliver the change we need change everything, but when I woke up this morning I was pleased to find that things had still not gone "Bizarro World" around here. There is still a lot going on with Darwinius (better known as "Ida"), though, and while I am sure we will still be talking about her for some time to come I wanted to take a moment to step back and answer a few questions that keep cropping up about this…
gregladen | May 20, 2009You probably know that there is a new primate fossil, nicknamed "Ida," and that there is quite a buzz about it.
Darwinius masillae, aka Ida
Ida comes from fossil deposits in Germany, and was originally excavated in two different parts by private collectors, and only recently rejoined and recognized for the amazing fossil it is. This is considered to be a new genus, and is named Darwinius masillae
...holotype skeleton in right lateral view...
Ida is a 47 million year old adapid primate of outstanding, unprecedented state of preservation that seems to have some very interesting and…
laelaps | May 19, 2009A restoration of the extinct adapid Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One.
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So the big day is finally here. "Ida", a 47-million-year-old primate skeleton from Messel, Germany has finally been unveiled on PLoS One and in a flurry of press releases, book announcements, and general media hubub. Under different circumstances I would be happy to see an exceptional fossil receiving such treatment, but I fear that Ida has become a victim of a sensationalistic media that values audience size over scientific substance.
Before I jump into my criticisms of the paper describing Darwinius…
laelaps | May 18, 2009Late last week I received a rather curious e-mail. It read;
WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING
Ground-Breaking Global Announcement
What: An international press conference to unveil a major historic scientific find. After two years of research a team of world-renowned scientists will announce their findings, which address a long-standing scientific puzzle.
The find is lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times. History brings this momentous find to America and will follow with the premiere of a major television…
gregladen | May 18, 2009Every place is different, and some places are more different than others.
... So we're channel surfing and working at the same time ... Amanda is working on her Transitive Phosphorescent Anisotopy or whatever the heck it is she's working on, and I'm messing around with making networks work, and Super Nanny comes on. They're in Boston and they're bowling, and Amanda looks up and goes "What the f*ck kind of bowling is that?"
So I look up and see the nine pin bowling and say "That's nine-pin bowling. That's how they do it in Boston"
"Uffda." Eyes Roll. Click off TV. Back to the anisotopy…
edyong | May 13, 2009
Image by Nicholas Conard
This sculpture may look a little bit like a roast chicken, but don't let that distract you - it's an incredibly important artistic find. This small figurine is arguably the oldest representation of the human body yet discovered.
The figure is clearly human, with short arms ending in five, carefully carved fingers, and a navel in the right position. But its most obvious features show that it depicts a woman, and very explicitly at that. She has large protruding breasts, wide hips and thighs, accentuated buttocks and pronounced vulva between her open legs. In contrast…
gregladen | May 13, 2009American politicians, some parents, and a few others have previously expressed the concern that learning more than one language muddles the mind. This is, of course, absurd, and it is hard to believe why anyone really thought this. In fact, it could be said that having more than one language under your belt makes it easier to learn yet another language, a demand Americans often place on foreigners or immigrants to the US which is less often placed on the Americans (see this discussion).
Now, to support the idea that having more languages is good for the mind is being demonstrated at the…
gregladen | May 9, 2009Under the present circumstances, it is clear that I now have to tell my one Welsh Corgi story. This is about a corgi named Dillon.
Dillon was Irv and Nancy DeVore's Corgi. (Irv was my advisor in graduate school.) They had two corgi's, Dillon and another one with a similarly Welsh name that I can't recall at the moment. One or both of them came from amateur breeders whom I happen for entirely unrelated reasons to know, who in turn get their corgis directly from the Queen of England. Or the Queen of England gets her corgi's from them. I can never remember.
Anyway, you all know what a…
laelaps | May 5, 2009The Calaveras skull, front view. From Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America.In February of 1866 the Illinois-born blacksmith James Mattenson* decided to try his luck beneath Bald Hill in Calaveras County, California. There was a chance that the subterranean depths of the hill were streaked with gold, and to this end Mattenson sunk a mine shaft into the rock. For one hundred feet below the surface the hill was nothing but solidified lava, but fifty feet below that the hill was made up of interspersed layers of gravel and volcanic tuffs. Mattenson had little…
gregladen | May 5, 2009First, write a reasonably good thesis. Write a brilliant one if you can manage. Then....
Give birth to the President of the United States of America!!!!
A dissertation written by President Barack Obama's late mother is being published.
Duke University Press said Monday that an edited version of Ann Dunham's anthropological study about rural craftsmen in Indonesia is scheduled to reach stores this fall. Dunham completed the study three years before she died in 1995.
source
I don't mean to sound snarky. I think it is a great idea for a number of reasons.
HT: Stephanie