Anthropology
Excavations of tools at two neighboring Paleolithic sites in southwest France have made the blurred lines between modern humans and Neanderthals more blurry.
Two research teams from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands have jointly reported the discovery of Neandertal bone tools unlike any others previously found in Neandertal sites - but similar to a tool from later modern human sites and still and still used even today.
This tool, called a lissoir or smoother, is shaped from deer ribs and has…
In the 19th century,
following the Enlightenment, the process of secularization seemed to be on a
slow but unstoppable roll. One consequence of this was the development of a
view of history, whereby religion in general, Christianity in particular, and
above all the Roman Catholic church, assumed the rôle of the enemy of all
progress, and progress was by definition good. Clerics were pictured as Asuras
(in Hindu epic titanic beings perpetually at war with the Devas or gods) always
opposing the scientists with their own Clerisy.
Hank
has taken on manfully those who distort the…
How would you measure the 'evolution' - that is to say, changes - in human culture and psychology over the last 200 years?
Psychologist Patricia Greenfield of the University of California, Los Angeles used the Google Ngram Viewer to examine the frequencies of specific words in a corpus of over 1,160,000 English-language books published in the United States between 1800 and 2000. At least it tells us how linguistics evolved.
The result, says Greenfield, is that people have shifted from rural environment to urban.
She has coined this hypothesis the "Theory of Social Change and…
There is a "thrifty phenotype" hypothesis which suggests that economic conditions present during fetal development that then improve dramatically during a person's childhood lead to poorer health in adulthood.
In other words, if people are poor, it might be healthier if they stay poor. The evidence: the strikingly high prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in the American South, which the author of a new paper suggests can be partially traced to rapid economic growth between 1950 and 1980.
According to the thrifty phenotype hypothesis, children whose parents endured being poor were…
Hemp (Cannabis sp.) has been a fundamental plant for the development of human societies. Its fibers have long been used for textiles and rope making, which requires prior stem retting.
This process is essential for extracting fibers from the stem of the plant but can adversely affect the quality of surface waters. The history of human activities related to hemp - its domestication, spread, and processing - is frequently reconstructed from seeds and pollen detected in archaeological sites or in sedimentary archives, but this method does not always make it possible to ascertain whether retting…
Hank |
When most people think 'green' in America, they think of liberal Democrats. It's a carefully crafted image. Conservatives who deny global warming conserve energy just as much as liberals who accept it but that gets little attention. Sociologists in a new paper instead found that the idea of the 'green' Christian is the environmental trope they need to spend their time debunking.
The 'greening' of Christianity hasn't really happened, they found by statistical analysis of survey results - though most among the public were probably not aware of the un-greening of Christianity, because that was…
Women are waiting longer before getting married - if they get married at all, according to a new analysis.
The U.S. marriage rate is now at 31.1 - which in statistical terms means roughly a rate of 31 marriages per 1,000 married women, not 31 percent. That rate is 60 percent lower than 1970. In 1920 the marriage rate was 92.3. The wave of gay marriage legislation across the US will likely cause a temporary blip in that, at least until expensive gay divorces kick in, but the overall trend will remain downward.
The new Family Profile from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (…
Do looks matter in the work place? There are a lot more unattractive people running departments and entire companies than there are pretty ones - but a new paper by academics says just the opposite. Pretty people have an easier time on the job.
The paper by Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, and Brent Scott from Michigan State University, is the first to link attractiveness to cruelty in the workplace.
In their Human Performance paper, the scholars sought to examine counterproductive work behavior and its effect on employees. After surveying 114…
Despite the horrors of the Maoist regime, the Communist Party dictatorship in the People's Republic of China continues to exist and retain control, even though tens of millions of people suffered from persecution or were executed for political reasons while he lived.
Even less likely, the perpetrators and victims have managed to continue living together long after the death of Mao Zedong and the beginning of the reform era in 1978.
Was there a reckoning with the Maoist past? And how did the Communist Party succeed in keeping hold of its monopoly on power despite its disastrous…
Our prehistoric close cousins, the Neandertals, were more similar than science used to think in a variety of ways.
And according to a new paper, they had something resembling modern speech and language, which can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.
Neanderthals have fascinated the academic world and the general public ever since their discovery almost 200 years ago. Initially thought to be sub-human brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were later found to be a successful form of…