Anthropology
gregladen | February 13, 2008Eventually, the Beagle headed south to the area of Uruguay and Argentina, still on the Atlantic Coast, where extensive mapping of the coastal waters was required.
The Parana and Uruguay Rivers meet in the Atlantic estuary known as Rio de la Plata. On the north side of this huge body of water is Montevideo, Uruguay, and on the south side, the northern coast of Argentina. There is an interesting story linked with early European exploration of this area. A Spanish ship is the first known European craft to explore La Plata. The ship's captain and a small crew went inland, and never came…
laelaps | February 7, 2008I know today has been a little light on posts (I've been working on a lab report and on a presentation I'll be giving on "Evolution Sunday"), but I thought I would write up something. Given that I'm taking a course in Human Osteology, osteometric points on the skull are important to know and are essential to making measurements, so I'm pondering putting up a brief description of an osteometric point every once in a while.
Today's point is Bregma (b), a point right along the midline on the outside of the skull where the coronal and sagittal sutures intersect. The bones at this intersection are…
gregladen | January 31, 2008
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name ... the Anthropocene ... are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to "Anthropocene" and I propose that we adopt that term instead.
The pithy title of the paper making this proposal is "Are we now living in the Anthropocene" (sic: no question mark is included in this title, enigmatically).
It is not an entirely stupid idea. The paper argues that there are major changes of the type often used to distinguish between major…
gregladen | January 30, 2008Color is funny. Anthropologists have long known that different cultures have different relationships, linguistically and in day to day practice, to the color spectrum. For example, the Efe Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers of the Ituri Forest describe things as white, black, or red, and that's it. They live in a world of green. Going with the model for "Eskimos" having a hundred words for snow because snow is so important in their environment, one would expect that the Efe would have a hundred words for green. On the other hand, the Efe Hunter-Gatherers must have a fairly primitive culture,…
gregladen | January 25, 2008
Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal of Human Evolution concludes that many Pleistocene megafauna managed to go extinct by themselves, but that humans were not entirely uninvolved.
The paper by Pushkina and Raia ("Human influence on distribution and extinctions of the late Pleistocene Eurasian megafauna") examines sources in the literature and a number of databases for Eurasian…
neurophilosophy | January 24, 2008The operation of Trepan, from Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism and Lithotomy, by Charles Bell, 1815. (John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.)Trepanation, or trephination (both derived from the Greek word trypanon, meaning "to bore") is perhaps the oldest form of neurosurgery. The procedure, which is called a craniotomy in medical terminology, involves the removal of a piece of bone from the skull, and it has been performed since prehistoric times. The oldest trepanned skull, found at…
gregladen | January 10, 2008 Why is there no Birth Control Pill for men?
This latest "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question will certainly engender a wide range of responses from the Scienceblogs.com team. Answers may address physiology, endocrinology, pharmacology, economics, and other areas of scientific thinking and practice. The answer I'd like to propose can be summed up in two closely linked words pilfered from the question itself:
Men. Control.
Myriad aspects of life can be understood by recognizing a single critical fact, and the layered, sometimes complex, deeply biological effects of that fact. Males, by…
gregladen | December 19, 2007African 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 | December 18, 2007I'm putting this bit of human biogeography under the "species coming and going" category:
Greenland DNA could hold key to migration mysteries: researchers from PhysOrg.com
Danish researchers are to sieve through human and skeletal remains on Greenland in a quest to explain an enduring enigma over the island's settlement over thousands of years, one of the scientists said Tuesday.
[...]
This is a very large change in diet over a very short period of time. I call Macro Evolution!
Study links success of invasive Argentine ants to diet shifts from PhysOrg.com
The ability of Argentine ants…
gregladen | December 18, 2007I wanted to point out two interesting posts both having to to with the nature of knowledge, or as we call it here in Minnesota (where the "k" in "Knute" is proudly pronounced).
The first is The Problem with Google's Knol Initiative (aha, you see, there's that "k" again...). This is about Google's idea of starting up it's own version of Wikipedia. Pierre Far of BlogSci questions the wisdom of Google's approach. The Google version of a wiki that is an encyclopedia promises to be better because it will recruit, and rely on, expertise. However, Far suggests that this could backfire, and asks…
laelaps | December 18, 2007PrefaceI originally wrote this post during the late summer of this year, a piece that was fraught with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and an overall cumbersome attribute that made me admire anyone who was able to get through the whole thing. I have revised and edited the text starting with the first word, adding in some new information along the way, and I hope you enjoy what I feel is a better and more cohesive review of how our own species has seen itself during from the early days of natural history to the present. Some of the major debates (i.e. the origins of bipedalism) are…
gregladen | December 17, 2007
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 | December 16, 2007
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:
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…
gregladen | December 14, 2007From a UC Santa Cruz Press Release:
The infamous Indian Ocean tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004, caused tragically high mortality--from 10 to 90 percent of the population at various locations. Yet in 1930 a tsunami of similar size, generated by an earthquake near the Ninigo Islands, struck northern Papua New Guinea and killed just 0.1 to 1 percent of the population on the coast there.
Why were these islanders living earlier in the century better protected?...
Tsunami expert Simon Day proposes that oral traditions made the difference.
Day and colleagues were investigating historic…
gregladen | December 13, 2007The Central African Rainforest (as distinct from the West African Rain Forest) spans an area from the Atlantic coast to nearly Lake Victoria in Uganda and Tanzania. In fairly recent times (the mid Holocene) this forest was probably continuous all the way to Victoria, and probably extended farther north and south than one might imagine from looking at its current distribution.
Within the forest are major rivers, including the Congo. The Congo River is the only major river in the world that crosses the Equator twice. This trans-equatorial configuration guarantees that the rivers picks up…
gregladen | December 11, 2007There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted by the researchers who wrote this paper. These conclusions typically come from press releases, and then are regurgitated by press outlets, then read and reported by bloggers, and so on. Here is, in toto, the press release from the University of Wisconsin, where John Hawks, one of the authors of the study, works. I reproduce the press release here without further comment.
Genome study places…
laelaps | December 7, 2007Yesterday was a little light on posts as I was in transit for most of the day to a lecture at NYU by Kevin Hunt of Indiana University called "The inferred forest home of the earliest hominins: Firm foundation or house of cards?" The talk was much more narrow in scope than what it might sound like from the title however, and there were good points and relatively weak points made throughout the presentation. Here I present a few thoughts from notes I took during the lecture and conversations with the Rutgers professors and grad students that also attended after the lecture;
When I hear the term…
laelaps | December 5, 2007
In honor of the presentation I'm delivering today (which comprises about half the subject of my term paper), here is the skull of a baboon (Papio sp.), baboons sometimes eating meat when they can get it. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), however, incorporate much more meat into their diet and have been known to steal kills from baboons at Gombe, the famous location in Tanzania. There is a problem with these observations, though, and that is that the events took place in the provisioning area where chimpanzees and baboons often had antagonistic interactions and don't try to steal baboon kills…
gregladen | December 3, 2007In the latest round of conflict over anthropologists' cooperation with the U.S. military, members of the American Anthropological Association voted on Friday to ban certain kinds of secrecy in ethnographic work. In a motion passed by a voice vote during the organization's annual business meeting here, members decreed that "no reports should be provided to sponsors [of research] that are not also available to the general public and, where practicable, to the population studied."[source]
Anthropologists are so full of shit.
This quote from a CHE news blog is the tip of an iceberg that has been…
gregladen | November 28, 2007The origin and early history of Native American people has always been an issue of debate and contention. There has never been a moment when all, or even most, interested parties agreed on anything close to a single story. New research published in the Open-Access journal PLoS Genetics tends to support a very traditional (among archaeologists) view of a single relatively simple migration from Siberia across the New World, more or less from north to south.
Studies of genetic variation have the potential to provide information about the initial peopling of the Americas and the more recent…