Anthropology
gregladen | September 29, 2008Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation across populations are interesting and, in fact, seem to conform to expectations (in a "we don't' really care about statistical significance" sort of way, for now) regarding human social organization.
Before examining the paper, we should…
laelaps | September 24, 2008
During his 1876 tour of the United States, the famed anatomist and popularizer of science Thomas Henry Huxley stopped to see the American paleontologist O.C. Marsh at Yale. Marsh provided his esteemed guest with access to his ever-growing stores in the Peabody Museum, showing Huxley toothed Cretaceous birds and an array of fossil horses that convinced Huxley that the horse was a creature that had evolved in the New World, not the Old. Indeed, Marsh had collected an impressive array of fossil horses, from tiny forms with many toes to the familiar one-toed Equus. Given the transitions that…
edyong | September 23, 2008Imagine that you have been given responsibility over a tract of land. Your goal is to maintain its precious biodiversity (increasing it if at all possible), prevent the local habitats from becoming degraded and among all that, find a way to eke out a way of life. Of the many possible ways of doing this, regularly and deliberately setting fire to the local plants might be low on the list. But that's exactly what Aborigine populations in Australia have been doing for centuries and a new study shows that this counter-intuitive strategy does indeed work.
A team of American anthropologists led by…
gregladen | September 17, 2008This is almost National Lampoon Vacation Movie funny, except that it is not funny. As five of you, who have read my piece at the new blog A Vote for Science know, the ultimate outcome of events ... and how society reacts to them ... may depend on the level at which were are set up to respond, and by level, I mean level in the hierarchy of government. So one of the most threatening dangers to which our children are exposed ... ice cream trucks ... are ignored. Meanwhile, Killer Clothing, which is actually quite rare, is under lock down at the Federal Level.
I have not even learned to "…
gregladen | September 17, 2008
A car bomb and rocket attack on the US embassy in Yemen has killed at least 16 people, including civilians and Yemeni security guards, Yemen officials said. -bbc
Why Yemen?
You might not know this, because the Bush Administration prefers you not, but Yemen is one of those places that is a major training ground and stopping off point for al-Qaeda linked (= can be hired by al-Qaeda at discount rates) groups. Yemen is more of a threat to US 'interests' in the middle east than Afghanistan, if we measure in numbers of crazy anti-US terrorists per cave or in absolute numbers. The entire time…
gregladen | September 2, 2008How do athletes in Olympic level endurance competition do it?
From the abstract of a paper -- How Do Humans Control Physiological Strain during Strenuous Endurance Exercise?:
To evaluate the physiologic strain during competitions ranging from 5-100 km, we evaluated heart rate (HR) records of competitive runners (n = 211). We found evidence that:
1) physiologic strain (% of maximum HR (%HRmax)) increased in proportional manner relative to distance completed, and was regulated by variations in running pace;
2) the %HRmax achieved decreased with relative distance;
3) slower runners had…
gregladen | August 16, 2008Watching (collecting data for the boycott) men's Olympic water polo, it occurred to me that the little tiny bathing suits the men wear were absurd. Why not just skip the bathing suit and get on with it? As I was thinking this, the commentators on the TV were learnin' me something new closely related to these thoughts ... regarding Terry Schroeder's body. Schroeder is the team coach, and I'll tell you about his body below the fold.
For some reason this all made me think of the National Anthem. You see, today, part of the Olympic scene is the often forced voyeurism of nationalistic pride re-…
gregladen | August 14, 2008Stephen Jay Gould and David Pilbeam wrote a paper in 1974 that was shown ten years later to be so totally wrong in its conclusions that it has fallen into an obscurity not usually linked to either Gould or Pilbeam. However, they were actually right in ways that they could not have anticipated. And even if they were not right, this paper still has much to contribute, including the opening words of that publication in Science, which are very much worthy of consideration for many reasons:
It is no longer true that there are more practitioners than pieces. In fact, when I encountered this…
gregladen | August 14, 2008A remarkable find in North Africa is reported in PLoS. Information has just been released on this new archaeological site in a formerly much greener Sahara. This will provide an interesting physical unerpinning for the recent work on a "Genetic Map of Europe" (see this summary by Razib) and a new perspective on the movement of humans in and around North Africa and adjoining areas. Here I am passing on the press release and photos without comment, so that you can have the information right away.
TWO SKULLS. (Dark Skull, left) Radiocarbon dated at 9,500 years old, the skull of this mature…
neurophilosophy | August 14, 2008Here's a nice follow-up to my article about prion diseases. It's an excerpt from Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health, by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Rhodes. The book documents the work of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the American physician who provided the first description of kuru. Gajdusek travelled to Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and lived among the Fore peoples. He studied their culture and performed autopsies on kuru victims. William Arens, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University, notes that Gajdusek didn't actually witness the Fore's ritual…
gregladen | August 5, 2008
Its all about selection for flight distance. (Oh, for plants, that's dispersal distance!)
gregladen | July 30, 2008Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I'm not sure when this lemur went extinct, but I think it was not long before Franz found the fossil.
The bones found in 1899 as well as other material have been sitting in an Austrian museum since.
Excavations at the same locality in 2003 recovered much more material from this species. Now, a team working mainly at a lab…
gregladen | July 29, 2008 An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis I'm not mentioning any names, and don't ask me any details. In fact, don't repeat this story.
Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the activities of an ancient very pre-human hominid, is one of the oldest well dated, in situ objects of its kind known.
The stone had some yeck on it, and for giggles, this stone got passed on to a physicist who had invented a new way of…
gregladen | July 22, 2008Plants and their herbivores have an interesting and complex relationship. It has been true for quite some time (many tens of millions of years) that terrestrial plants do not move around while animal herbivores do (though I've got friends from Texas who claim that there is a Texan tree that will move from one side of your yard to the other if it is pleased to do so). Generally speaking, a plant can not avoid being consumed by the herbivores by running away. So, it must have a defensive strategy or two that work in situ, and most likely these strategies evolved in relation to the also-…
gregladen | July 14, 2008Sadly, Charles Lockwood of UCL died today as the result of a motorcycle accident, it is reported by John Lynch (who in turn was notified earlier today). Lockwood was a morphologist trained at Wits in South Africa with a post doc at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University (formerly of Berkeley). I think he moved fairly recently to the University College London.
Here's a recent (late last year) story in the Times on Lockwood's work.
Please read John's blog post on Lockwood.
gregladen | July 13, 2008It has become axiomatic that the use of adornment by humans is some sort of symbolic act, and thus is linked to the human symbolic and linguistic mind. The human symbolic and linguistic mind is the trait that we axiomatically believe to be the derived human feature ... the cladistic apomorphy that makes us human (as opposed to other-ape). Therefore, the use of adornment is seen by early 21st century archaeologists as evidence of modern human behavior.
Some artifacts from early archaeological sties might be adornment, or they might be 'art' (or at least "arty") and they might be related to…
gregladen | July 7, 2008This:
Professor wants to observe illegal assisted suicides
Academic seeks understanding of the right-to-die movement
Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, July 03, 2008
Canada's university professors are preparing to defend the right of a Metro Vancouver researcher to witness illegal assisted suicides in the name of increasing understanding of the right-to-die movement.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has formed a high-level committee to investigate claims that Kwantlen Polytechnic University sociologist Russel Ogden was unjustly denied the chance to research…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 (... makes me laugh .. )
The previous Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival was Four Stone Hearth Number 43, here, at Swedish Extravagaza. It was the Lard Edition. Go check it out. The home page for Four Stone Hearth is here. The next edition, due on or about July 16th, will be at YOUR blog if you want it to be (the position is still open). Just let Martin Know at the 4SH home page.
BIOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY
Neuroanthropology
Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1
In our continuing exploration of facile examples of 'evolutionary' explanations for human…
gregladen | June 24, 2008Sometimes boys are worth more, sometimes girls are worth more. In an evolutionary sense. Or, more correctly, the value of a certain sex ... as an offspring ... can be measured in fitness terms. Fisher noted this and hypothesized this was the explanation for the 50-50 sex ratio we usually see. As one sex becomes more rare, it becomes more valuable, and thus parents (mothers, perhaps, usually) bias towards that sex. Then the disparity goes away and thus the differential value goes away.
Of course, the truth is that we don't actually see the 50-50 sex ratio all the time ... many species…
laelaps | June 12, 2008Over at The World's Fair, David asks readers to share a moment in which they were "humiliated in the name of science." Fortunately I haven't had any "D'oh! I put the head on the wrong end!" moments as yet, but I'll briefly share a recent story of how I almost humiliated myself in a room full of professors and friends.
About a month and a half ago Brian Richmond came to present a lecture about the evolution of hominid bipedalism at Rutgers, specifically dealing with Orrorin. As he went through the introductory material, mentioning the evidence for bipedalism in the earliest known hominids, I…