Anthropology

In British Iron Age society, land was inherited through the female line and husbands moved to live with the wife’s community. Strong women like Margaret Thatcher resulted. That was inferred due to DNA sequenced from members of a single community, over 50 ancient genomes from a set of burial grounds in Dorset, that were in use before and after the Romans tried to do in AD 43 what they did to Israel a few decades later. They reconstructed a family tree with many different branches and found most members traced their maternal lineage back to a single woman from centuries before while…

“I am definitely not following the news anymore,” one patient told me when I asked about her political news consumption in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. This conversation happened around the time I talked with a local TV channel about why we saw fewer political yard signs during this year’s election season, compared with past ones. I am a psychiatrist who studies and treats fear and anxiety. One of my main mental health recommendations to my patients during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles was to reduce their political news consumption. I also tried to convince them…

Once upon a time, stories were just stories. They were fantasies that took people to a new world.  In the 21st century, cultural pundits insisted that books, films, video games and television shape our personalities. It began in the 1980s when Democrats wanted to censor lyrics in music, and then video games in the 1990s, and then smoking and guns out of films, and now they ban books by everyone from Hemingway to Chaucer to protect us from being poisoned by content not institutionally controlled.(1) First they came for the Disney princesses, and I said nothing, because I am not a girl...…

Every country has people claiming to be native now, whereas in previous generations if you were born there, you were native. In reality, outside the cradle in Africa, no one is native. Everyone was an immigrant, and over time everyone calling themselves native to an area now stole land from someone else and colonized it. It's impossible to know who were the first to arrive but science can use inference, and new evidence of human occupation in southeast Indonesia dating back 42,000 years provides some idea of the time and the route taken by some of the first humans to arrive in Australia.…

A new analysis has found that cirrhosis, a liver disease that occurs when scar tissue prevents the liver from functioning normally, occurs twice as often in trans adults as those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.   The authors used the Optum Clinformatics Data Mart Database (Optum), that contained medical claims for more than 60 million patients covered by commercial insurance or Medicare between the years of 2007-2022. They first identified all transgender and cisgender adults, and then compared the incidences of cirrhosis among each group as well as…

There are five professions(1) but lots of occupations and trades lay claim to being the oldest one despite predating the concept by millennia. Farming is around 14,000 years old but a new study reveals one less-considered trade predates it by tens of thousands of years: fashion. Humans wore clothing prior to that, but fashion is a different animal skin. It is clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity. Paleolithic eyed needles are now known to be as old as 40,000 years, and with it came the…

Like old media such as newspapers and televisions, content on social media is tailored toward audience engagement. Television and newspapers have long known that 'dead bodies sell' but in social media it can be sold in real-time. It has sped up information - and cynicism. Fifteen years ago Reuters was caught augmenting photos of an Israeli attack on terrorists so it looked like more smoke and destruction than actually occurred and few in media were bothered, more recently outlets pulled a photo of British Princess Kate of Wales because it had been retouched. Only after the audience flagged it…

America is one of the most religiously, racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world, but that doesn't mean Latinos, Asians or Blacks believe that Democrats and Republicans want them as anything more than reliable voting blocs. A new analysis finds that though voting eligible Asians were up 35 percent between 2010 and 2020, Latinos increased 23 percent and the Black population increased by 6 percent even as Whites decreased 2 percent, minorities didn't vote in numbers similar to their eligible voter population. Overall, they are a larger part of the 40 percent of the eligible voters…

If you visit Japan, you may be surprised that Japanese traffic lights have blue on go rather than the green in the U.S. Actually, green is the standard there, just as red is, they just have a different definition of green. It is rather common that things which should be basically the same for everyone, like a color, have not only different words but different meanings. A new study of basic color terms found that in cultures that have remained isolated, there are a lot fewer words for the tens of millions of colors we see. The authors found that members of the Tsimane’ society, who live in a…

At the Hilazon Tachtit cave site, before it was Israel, before King David even fought the Philistines, the area north of Nazareth and west of the Sea of Galilee was populated by Natufians, an early settled people, and in 2008 archaeologists revealed details of a burial site unlike any other found in the Natufian period or the Paleolithic before it - instead of a mass grave, like those remains found nearby, it was a lone woman. Anthropologists speculate her tribe believed she had supernatural powers, because not only was she buried alone, she was buried with a great deal of effort. A human…