Anthropology

Each year the holidays bring with them an increase in both the consumption of alcohol and concern about drinking’s harmful effects. Alcohol abuse is no laughing matter, but is it sinful to drink and make merry, moderately and responsibly, during a holy season or at any other time? As a historical theologian, I researched the role that pious Christians played in developing and producing alcohol. What I discovered was an astonishing history. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Religious orders and wine-making Wine was invented 6,000 years before the birth of Christ, but it was monks who largely…

Surveys of students in two Canadian provinces have led scholars to warn that e-cigarettes, also called vaping, are causing cigarette uptake in high school students. This will be a surprise to American and British public health officials, who know cigarette smoking has plummeted and even among those who get hooked, vaping is considered a viable harm reduction and smoking cessation alternative. What is Canada doing so wrong?  Dr. David Hammond, in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at University of Waterloo, says e-cigarettes may help to re-normalize smoking before conceding…

There is a different kind of 1 percent, and it isn't people who can afford to buy organic food. It's Americans who carry a handgun on a daily basis.  It's not a surprise, given American history and horrific events like a psychopath in Las Vegas wounding or killing 500 people while police waited 70 minutes to attack him. A nearby hotel guest with a gun could have ended that more quickly.  Up to 7 million have concealed carry permits while up to 9 million might carry a handgun on a monthly basis (not all states require a license for a concealed weapon). That is alarming to …

The dominant Australian community would very much like to keep Indigenous communities from alcohol, but indigenous communities aren't having it. A giant black market has sprung up and such non-government alcohol sells for up to 1100 percent of the retail price. To learn about these "sly grog traders", as James Cook University humanities scholars deemed them, they interviewed more than 380 people living and working in remote Indigenous communities in Queensland where there was either a total or partial alcohol ban. Illicit suppliers were motivated by a sustained demand for alcohol and…

A new paper claims the size and shape of your nose evolved in response to local climate conditions.  The nose is one of our distinctive facial features. It conditions the air we breathe so it is warm and moist when it reaches the lungs, which helps prevent infections. And that may be why people whose ancestors lived in hot, humid places tend to have wider nostrils than people whose ancestors came from cold and dry environments. In a new paper, anthropologists examined the size and shape of noses on people with West African, South Asian, East Asian, or Northern European ancestry and…

If you are against the exploitation of Blacks, stop mislabeling, or do not stuff humans into dual categories at all. Look at each individual in her own right. Black revision of history comes up with the funniest nonsense: Chemistry textbook introductions are rewritten (see “Chemistry for Changing Times” – changing times indeed!) and now pretend that George Washington Carver was one of the main pioneers of chemistry as if squeezing peanuts is chemistry at all, let alone worth mentioning compared to the astounding achievements of the true pioneers of chemistry, who were almost all Whites of…

One-third of science is not published in the common language of science, English, and that prevents uptake of the results and citations for the researchers, according to a new analysis. Language barriers mean science missed at international level and practitioners struggling to access new knowledge, because all major scientific journals publish in English. What science needs is true globalization, but the authors at Cambridge instead argue for more fragmentation, a warmed over version of cultural relativism. They even posit that funding bodies need to encourage translations as part of their '…

Modern diet fads, like paleo, farm-to-fork, the weird Food Babe's if-she-can't-spell-it-you-shouldn't-eat-it beliefs, harken back to a simpler time when people lived off the land, and nothing had  preservatives and it was all Whole Grain. In reality, ancient people could not work hard enough or fast enough to create food science that would prevent booms and busts of starvation and rationing. They wanted their food processed, to turn unpalatable or even toxic foodstuffs into something that could be consumed, and they even made progress doing it 10,000 year ago. First was the use of fires…

Neanderthals modified their survival strategies even without external influences like environmental or climate changes, according to an analysis using carbonate isotopy in fossilized teeth that 250,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern man were more advanced in their development than previously thought. The fossils were from the excavation site at Payre in southeastern France. Carbonate is an essential mineral component of the hard tissue in bones and teeth. Among other things, the isotope composition in the carbonate reflects an organism’s drinking and feeding habits. If the climate becomes…

Our most beloved works of fiction hide well-trodden narratives - people want them, people expects them by now - and big data analysis can determine them. And most fictions is based on far fewer storylines than you might have imagined. To come to this conclusion, big data scientists have worked with colleagues from natural language processing to analyze the narrative in more than a thousand works of fiction. By deconstructing some of the magic of narrative in fiction books, they have also confirmed that there are six different, common ways of telling a story that can be found time and time…