Anthropology
laelaps | October 14, 2007In 1978, a paleoanthropological team including Mary Leakey, Richard Hay, and Tim White made a startling discovery at Laetoli, Tanzania; in a bed of volcanic ash that would later be dated to about 3.5 million years old were the footprints of ancient hominids. The preserved trackway, found to contain the footprints of three individuals of the same species walking in the same direction during a very short period of time (possibly walking together as a group), would become one of the most important and iconic of hominid fossils, the fact that hominids were walking upright 3.5 million years ago…
laelaps | October 9, 2007Category: Anthropology
As I mentioned just prior to my move to Sb, I spent this past Saturday at NYU at the "Evolutionary Anthropology at the Interface" conference, which was primarily a celebration of the work of Cliff Jolly. I'm still a bit over my head when it comes to knowing the full "Who's Who" of evolutionary anthropology, but I do know that Cliff Jolly is most well known for his "seed-eaters" hypothesis of human origins, in which extant baboons (Papio sp.) are proposed to be better primates to study when considering primate origins and a seed-eating diet is put forward as one of the…
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2007The 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology has just been published, and is freely available online.
It includes reviews called The Archaeology of Religious Ritual, The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia, Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees and Anthropology and Militarism.
neurophilosophy | July 29, 2007Black peoples' brains are, of course, no more or less peculiar than those of any other people. The human brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, and there are just as many differences between the brains of people from the same ethnic group as there between the brains of people from different groups.
Some racial peculiarities of the Negro brain is the title of a long and technical paper by the anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean, published in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1906. It is one of a series of scientific papers written by Bean in the early 20th Century, in which he tried to…
chaoticutopia | June 26, 2007I sent this petroglyph photograph to SmartGirlsRock for my recent interview, despite the fact that I've never posted it on my site. There is a bit of background story to it. My mom, who teaches high school anthropology, has always been a big fan of ancient rock art. A few summers ago, we drove cross country to California, and stopped in Utah to check out a few carvings along the way. While we were there, I found a lizard warming himself on a rock, not too far from a rock covered in petroglyphs. The clearest picture on the rock was a lizard. I was delighted to find prehistory repeating. This…
chaoticutopia | June 17, 2006Endless miles of canyon stretch across the landscape, cutting deeply through cake-like layers of red and gray stone--the San Rafael Swell. I've always felt this hint of anticipation while traveling west along I-70. As the road drops into Green River, Utah, there's a sign that reads: "NO SERVICES NEXT 110 MILES" That sign always seemed like a taunting dare. Are you willing to enter this rugged, barren land, void of your beloved "services"?
I'm not sure if it is the remoteness or the beauty of the Swell which calls me, or the mysteries that lie within, but I find myself returning, year after…