Anthropology
gregladen | January 9, 2009I think of her now as the Tea Lady, because she was drinking tea when I met her and had an English accent to go along with her English colonial outfit. She was one of the first native white South Africans I had met on my very first trip to that country. And now the Tea Lady, who was in fact a volunteer for the local historical society of a small town a couple hours drive north of Pretoria, was chugging her way up this steep, gravelly mountain path with the rest of us trailing behind gasping for breath.
This is the view looking up the Mwaridzi Valley from the eastern
entrance of Historic…
gregladen | January 7, 2009Hey I won in the Hippos category!!!!!
Other categories include "Best Blind Date," "Best Spike Lee Joint," and "Best Use of Ritalin."
Have a look. There are a lot of great blog posts linked to here. Like a super mega meta anthro carnival. Enjoy!
gregladen | December 31, 2008Naturalism is a potential source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane decisions such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast.1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach. Naturalism works when it comes to behavior too, but there are consequences. You probably…
laelaps | December 27, 2008Eugene O'Neill's short play, The First Man, is a tale of birth, death, scandal, and family infighting, all involving an anthropologist set to scour Asia in search of the earliest humans. Collected with two other plays (The Hairy Ape and Anna Christie) in a 1922, the play contains a fleeting reflection of the scientific consensus at the time.
For a variety of reasons, from the pattern of fossil finds to racism and "pithecophobia", Asia was the preferred place to look for the earliest humans. (See Peter Bowler's Theories of Human Evolution for a survey, and Constance Clark's God - or Gorilla…
gregladen | December 13, 2008 What was Neanderthal-Modern Human interaction really like? Fifty four teeth (some of which are fragments) and nine other bones dating to about 40-43,000 years ago represent the "most recent, and largest, sample of southern Iberian late Neanderthals currently known."
These and some closely related remains may indicate that these Middle Paleolithic holdouts were kissing cousins of nearby anatomically modern humans. Or maybe not.
We know that Neanderthals occupied all of Europe for over 125 thousand years during a period known (from the artifacts) as the "Middle Paleolithic." During…
gregladen | December 6, 2008Individual animals that live and and forage in groups may not always benefit from a particular move (to or from a foraging site) in the same way as other individuals in the group. Therefore, there must be some kind of negotiation among the critters. Theoretical work almost always seem to show that consensus based group decisions will prevail because this minimizes individual costs. The altnernative, despotic decision (where a dominant individual decides where the group goes) should rarely happen. But the theory is apparently weak because despotic decision making seems to occur in nature.…
gregladen | December 1, 2008This is my best bud Stephanie relaxing in her rock.
I have a whole series of photographs of Stephanie inside rocks. I think it is utterly hilarious that in an entirely unrelated stream of events, a friend of hers (whom I do not know) asked her to model for a photography class she was taking, and ended up shooting her has an earth mother goddess sort of thing emerging from a mossy spot in the ground. And here she is hanging out inside rocks. Must be something about Stephanie.
But wait, there's more...
The rock iteslf is gneiss. In fact, it is very nice gneiss. Gneiss is a metamorphic…
The Scientific, Political, Social, and Pedagogical Context for the claim that "Race does not exist."
gregladen | November 29, 2008These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I'm one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at best misleading when used as it often is with our species. This is why race should be abandoned in favor of other ways of describing human variation.
At the same time, there are political, social, and pedagogical reasons to put aside the race concept. Race is not that useful of a concept to begin with, and beyond that it has…
gregladen | November 20, 2008This is a story some of you know, and the rest of you should. Saartjie (Little Sarah) was a woman variously claimed to have been San, Bushman, or Grikwa (and one can in fact be all three easily) ... but anyway, South African ... and and with a number of physical features typical for the women of her place of origin but that would be very exotic to the ignorant eyes of a typical early 19th century European. She was brought to Europe in 1810, put on display, and you can imagine the rest of the story.
But actually, better than imagining it, read about it here.
edyong | November 1, 2008
In the heart of Bolivia, an Amazonian society is losing its traditional knowledge of the medicinal value of local plants, to the detriment of its children's health. The Tsimane' are a small seven thousand-strong population living in a lowland region of Bolivia, who possess tremendous knowledge about the plants they share their forest with.
Their botanical know-how trickles down through the generations and allows them to use the local plant-life for construction, tool-making, medicine and food. These plants account for over half of their household consumption of goods, while those…
gregladen | October 24, 2008Welcome to the 22 October Edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival. The previous edition of this carnival was on Clashing Culture. The Home Page of Four Stone Hearth is here, and the next edition will be at Archaeoporn.
And now, on with the show!
Archaeology
What is "The relevance of archaeology?" According to A very remote period indeed...
archaeology is the only discipline that can provide us with a relatively objective measure of how things were in the past, even following the advent of writing.
"But don't archaeologists, being academics, often eat their own…
gregladen | October 21, 2008It has always been suggested, by a wide range of evidence, that australopiths in general, and robust australopiths in particular, have a higer degree of sexual dimorphism than chimps, and possibly, dimorphism in body size as high as one sees in any ape. Resent research on growth patterns, just published in Science, examines this.
In dimorphic primates, the larger size of the male is usually obtained by an extended period of growth of the males, so they essentially "grow past" the females. In addition, there are usually additional traits that the larger, adult males have that re not seen in…
gregladen | October 21, 2008
Every few years a paper comes out "explaining" short stature in one or more Pygmy groups. Most of the time the new work ads new information and new ideas but fails to be convincing. This is the case with the recent PNAS paper by Migliano et al.
From the abstract:
Explanations for the evolution of human pygmies continue to be a matter of controversy, recently fueled by the disagreements surrounding the interpretation of the fossil hominin Homo floresiensis. Traditional hypotheses assume that the small body size of human pygmies is an adaptation to special challenges, such as…
gregladen | October 20, 2008African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper.
Is this evidence of a racial difference?
The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included more than 200 children aged 6-12 living in Chicago, and followed these children over seven years. The study controlled for poverty, and interestingly, poverty was not found to be a good predictor of differences in verbal ability.
The researchers consider…
gregladen | October 19, 2008 The North End, Boston, Massachusetts I'm standing outside Luigi's restaurant having a smoke, and Luigi's doorman had joined me. Across the street yellow stingray is parked, as usual, to block the alley. The word is, the fire escape down into that alley leads directly from Baronelli's office. The stingray is an escape pod.
Almost every restaurant on Hanover street and the dozen side streets is like Luigi's: owned by a family from a particular part of Italy or Sicily, with a local cuisine variant, and for the most part, run by the third generation in the family that originally…
gregladen | October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like to examine two cases of gene-culture interaction: One of the earliest post-Darwinian Synthesis examples addressing malaria and sickle-cell disease, and the most recently published example, the worm-grunters of Florida, which it turns out is best explained…
laelaps | October 8, 2008
The Boneyard #24 is now up over at The Other 95%, and the latest edition of the anthropology carnival Four Stone Hearth is up at Clashing Culture. Be sure to give both of them a look!
The 25th edition of the Boneyard will be up at The Big Dinosaur Lie next month.
gregladen | October 7, 2008The Science Museum of Minnesota recently developed an exhibit called "Race: Are we so different?" This exhibit is now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and will be in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Kalamazoo, Boston and Washington DC between now and June 2011.
If you get a chance, go see it.
In the meantime, a review of this exhibit has just been published in the current issue of Museum Anthropology, authored by Mischa Penn, Gil Tostevin, and yours truly, Greg Laden.
As one of the authors, it is obvious to me that this paper is brilliant! But I…
gregladen | October 4, 2008Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey.
A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences that can emerge in how people see things, even how people think.
The following is from a PLoS press release:
Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism universal among humans. However, by using analyses inspired by…
gregladen | October 4, 2008Mythbusters, factcheck.org, and Snopes have become sources of a special kind of truth for people around the world. Dedicated to undoing legend and independently analyzing political or other rhetoric, these and other sites, as well as various news segments and print media spots, are to be commended for their efforts to turn down the BS meter, which all agree has been running on high ever since the old days, when there was no BS at all.
(Which, of course, is an urban myth.)
However, what you may not know is that these sites are not necessarily politically neutral, can be quite biased (in non-…