Anthropology
A computer analysis of nearly 2 million Tweets on the Twitter online social network revealed another divide in the religious culture war - while atheists engage in more analytical thinking, Christians use more positive words and fewer negative words.
To identify Christian and atheist Twitter users, the researchers studied the tweets of more than 16,000 followers of a few prominent Christian and atheist personalities on Twitter. They analyzed the tweets for their emotional content (the use of more positive or negative words), the frequency of words (such as "friend" and "brother") that are…
For the past the 1,000,000 years the global climate has cycled every 100,000 years, between long glacial periods (with great masses of ice covering the continents in the northern hemisphere) and shorter interglacial periods, lasting around 10,000 years. It has been 12,000 years since the last one so enjoy that while it lasts.
However, within the long periods there have been abrupt climate changes, sometimes happening in the space of just a few decades, with variations of up to 10º C in the average temperature in the polar regions caused by changes in the Atlantic ocean circulation. These…
In the last two generations, the designation 'spiritual but not religious' has become popular. It's hard to know what it means - atheists and religious people are at least taking some sort of stand - but one thing sociologists say they do know: Young adults who deem themselves "spiritual but not religious" are more likely to commit both violent and property crimes than young people who self-report religious belief ("religious and spiritual" or "religious but not spiritual").
The authors of "Is Being 'Spiritual' Enough Without Being Religious? A Study of Violent and Property Crimes Among…
Some Paleo Diet believers think neither food nor humanity has evolved but anthropologists disagree. They have found that diets were a 'game changer' in ancient African hominid evolution, even 3.5 million years ago.
Tests on tooth enamel indicate that prior to about 4 million years ago, Africa's hominids were eating essentially chimpanzee style, likely dining on fruits and some leaves, said University of Colorado Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, lead author of the study. Though grasses and sedges were readily available back then, the hominids seem to have ignored them for an…
Modern human mothers wean their babies earlier than our closest primate relatives - well, not all human mothers. As a TIME magazine cover made famous, some mothers never stop.
But what about our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals? Teeth tell the tale.
Just as tree rings record the environment in which a tree grew, traces of barium in the layers of a primate tooth can tell the story of when an infant was exclusively milk-fed, when supplemental food started, and at what age it was weaned.
A team of researchers writes in Nature that they can now use fossil teeth to calculate when a…
What was the diet and movements of the first New Zealanders like?
Isotopes from their bones and teeth can tell us. Researchers say they have been
able to identify what is likely to be the first group of people to colonize Marlborough's Wairau Bar, possibly from Polynesia around 700 years ago. They also present evidence suggesting that individuals from two other groups buried at the site had likely lived in different regions of New Zealand before being buried at Wairau Bar.
The researchers undertook isotopic analyses of samples recovered from the koiwi tangata (human…
Hunter-gatherers living in ice age conditions cooked fish, according to the findings of a team from the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan, who carried out chemical analysis of food residues in pottery up to 15,000 years old from the late glacial period, the oldest pottery so far investigated.
The research team was able to determine the use of a range of hunter-gatherer "Jōmon" ceramic vessels through chemical analysis of organic compounds extracted from charred surface deposits. The samples analyzed are some of the earliest found in Japan, one of the first centers for ceramic…
Do people form into tribe-like communities on social network sites such as Twitter?
Well, sure, that is the nature of people.
An analysis has found that these communities have a common character, occupation or interest and have developed their own distinctive languages. The authors have produced a map of communities showing how they have vocations, politics, ethnicities and hobbies in common. In order to do this, they focused on the sending of publicly available messages via Twitter, which meant that they could record conversations between two or many participants.
To group these users into…
Why is the world so full of "morons" and "degenerates" and what, if anything, can be done to fix them?
These are questions that Robert W. Sussman, PhD, a professor of anthropology in Arts&Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, explored Feb. 15th at the AAAS meeting in Boston.
Sussman's lecture, "The Importance of the Concept of Culture to Science and Society" during the session titled 'The Whole of Culture: Anthropology Back on Track', said that science has struggled to understand the mysteries of "less-than-human" beings since the late 1400s when the Spanish Inquisition first…
Sociologists have settled an important debate - namely, do women really want a man that does housework. The answer is 'no', according to an important new paper which found that married men and women who divide household chores in traditional ways report having more sex than couples who share the women's work.
Other studies have found that husbands got more sex if they did more housework, implying that women appreciated that in their spouse, or, since sociologists usually find the worst way to spin everything, that the sex was in exchange for doing housework. But those studies did not…