Anthropology

Twenty years before the Pilgrims, the first events which could be called thanksgiving days in the history of English speaking America occurred in Virginia in the early 1600's. They follow a time of cutthroat politics and war on the tip of contact between two very different cultures.  The Algonquian and the Anglo-Saxon were not completely ignorant of each other.  Recent finds from Virginia have shown that a basic understanding of the Algonquian language family  was available to Europeans.   That said, great cultural misunderstandings on the part of the English settlers…

There's no mystery like the mystery of folk lore. Scientists will find the missing link and dark matter before historians will definitely figure out the phylogeny of ancient tales - but for only $1,200 you can write a paper and get it published in a journal. Oral histories are suspect. The reason we know so little about native Americans is that they never learned to write so the stories passed down changed from year to year. Once you go past the common age of the written word, to the time when only religious people wrote books and those books were primarily science and theology, oral…

It's a common enough tale, told throughout the history of literature. A parent prefers their 'real' children and the life of the step-child is miserable as a result, compared to the biological child. That "Cinderella effect" claims that it is biologically inevitable that parents care less for stepchildren because they do not spread their genes - as you might expect, actual biologists did not come up with it, anthropologists did. And the authors of a new paper recognize something you knew all along; in many cases, the value and personality of a step-child matters more than biological…

'Huh?' - what you tell your children not to say when they did not understand what you just told them - has nonetheless taken over the word.  Linguists have determined the word is both vital and universal. Without words 'huh' they believe we would be unable to signal when we have problems with hearing or understanding what was said, and our conversations would be constantly derailed by communicative mishaps - biologists instead know that it became such because it is so simple and that humans would have come up with a different word instead. But the European Research Council wanted…

It's not correlation-causation but a new study has found that, among those with mental illnesses, left-handers are far more likely to suffer from psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.  Scientists and psychologists have long been interested in handedness because the brain develops asymmetrically and some cognitive processes develop from the left or right side. Since hand dominance is a convenient measure it has been a focus for decades, with some research finding a great prevalence of psychosis in left-handed people. The authors of the new paper examined 107 individuals from a…

Centuries of economic hypotheses have been based on the premise of rational actors: when given a choice between two items, people select the one they value more. But as with many simple premises, this one has a flaw in that it is demonstrably untrue. Yet that was never really the case. Too many exceptions mean a rule was never a rule anyway - there are lots of examples where people act against their own apparent interests. One of these biases — the mere fact of possessing something raises its value to its owner — is known as the "endowment effect."   A new paper seeks to address…

Having children early and in rapid succession lead to high infant mortality rates in the South Asian countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, according to a paper in the International Journal of Gynecology&Obstetrics. 1 in 14 births to young mothers in those countries ends with the death of the child within the first year, say researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.  Infant mortality is a significant public health issue in South Asia. According to United Nations data, the infant mortality rate worldwide is 49.4 deaths per 1,000 live births…

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is a common human virus, you get a cold sore near the mouth, but a study of the full genetic code of HSV-1 shows a dramatic confirmation of the "out-of-Africa" pattern of human migration., according to their paper. Geneticists explore how organisms are related by studying changes in the sequence of bases, or "letters" on their genes. From knowledge of how quickly a particular genome changes, they can construct a "family tree" that shows when particular variants had their last common ancestor. Studies of human genomes have shown that our ancestors emerged…

In the early parts of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" he spends a great deal of time outlining how both art history (no, really) and his particular brand of religious revisionism are legitimate ... but repressed by Big Religion. In science, we see that all of the time; X says he can invent perpetual motion or has overturned some aspect of medicine or biology and "dogma" keeps it hidden. It's the myth of the oppressed underdog. Americans love it, it's good reading, David vs. Goliath stuff. It is the story of how America came to be. But more often than not, it isn't oppression as much as just…

Marijuana use continues to be on the upswing in the United States. A public relations campaign claiming health benefits while ignoring health risks have led to diminishing public disapproval and more lenient legislation. People who disapprove of a particular drug are unlikely to use it, but what about the gateway affect? Does the use of one drug affects people's attitudes toward using other drugs? Do personality traits matter? High school seniors who frown upon the use of drugs are most likely to be female, nonsmokers or hold strong religious beliefs, according to a paper by Joseph…