Anthropology

If you are a tourist and visit California in the United States or Bavaria in Germany, you will quickly notice it is not like a lot of other places in those countries. A cultural mentality exists and people who identify with the stereotype are more likely to stay or even move there. A new paper finds that people who live in mountain regions of the U.S. maintain more of that sensibility even in the modern era. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, a Harvard academic, presented his thesis on the US frontier in 1893, describing the "coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and…

Are smiles, scowls, or sympathetic sighs universal across cultures? Studies from Namibia to Bhutan have attempted to find out, but the findings have been too inconsistent to take seriously. It may be because asking asking participants in a remote culture to match depictions of Western facial, bodily, or vocal expressions to situations or words in their native language is not the way to go. A recent analysis instead looked at facial expressions in ancient Mesoamerican sculptures. They find that some emotions expressed in art match the emotions that modern U.S. participants would recognize,…

In a 1972 book, "The Mountain People", Colin Turnbull deemed the the Ik ethnic group of hunter-gatherers in the Uganda mountains  There was a huge confounder in his work that scientists would've noted immediately and now fellow anthropologists have caught; since the observations were done during a severe famine in the mid-1960s, they did not uncover typical behavior of the Ik. Instead, sharing and cooperating re-emerged once resources were plentiful enough. Turnbull did his fieldwork between 1964 and 1967 and due to his conclusions he advocated that the group be rounded up forcibly…

A new Hastings Report compilation is based on the notion that genomics are the reason we still have medical inequality. Since genomics is a field that exists to sequence our DNA content and therefore help understand disease, it seems odd to posit that it could promote inequality when studying biology we all share. I'll get to that in a moment but first, we all realize that equality is a relative term because ethics and morality are relative. I'm certainly no moral relativist but I'm a realist in that regard. In 1895, Emile Durkheim wrote in "The Rules Of Sociological Method" how when a level…

Social justice warriors in the feminist movement often fail to advocate for the rights of black women, according to new research, and it's for a reason that highlights hidden bias problems in modern performative activism - social justice for the Instagram photo - movement. Social justice warriors see black women as less like white women and more like black men. Some surveys have found that "blackness" is associated with masculinity, leading to errors when categorizing gender or recognizing the faces of women of color. Other surveys have found that black women and girls are more associated…

On August 30 2019, a comet from outside our solar system was observed by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Crimea. This was only the second time an interstellar comet had ever been recorded. Comet 19 or C/2019 Q4 , as it is now known, made its closest approach to the sun on December 8 2019, roughly coinciding with the first recorded human cases of COVID-19. While we know that this is merely coincidence, in medieval times authorities regarded natural phenomena such as comets and eclipses as portents of natural disasters, including plagues. One of the most learned…

When the coronavirus pandemic really started to take hold in the UK in March, news consumption increased, as in many other countries. But, since then, our research shows that an increasing share of the UK population is switching off from the news. The proportion of people who say they often or always avoid news increased from 15% in mid-April 2020 to 22% in mid-May. If we include those who say they sometimes actively avoid news, then the share reaches 59%. The vast majority of these who often or always avoid news, told us that they actively avoid news about coronavirus (87%). When asked…

 Isotope analysis, ancient pathogen genomics, plus a dash of human population genetics have revealed the deeper connection to date between the early peoples of Siberia and the Americas.  During the Early Bronze Age, people were expanding.  Humans have lived near Lake Baikal in Siberia since the Upper Paleolithic, the last days of the Old Stone Age that ended 12,000 years ago. That means a lot of archaeological history. The transition from the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age happened after the periodic global warming that occurred throughout recent geological history.…

Why is Homo neanderthalensis gone while Homo sapiens have bent the world to our will?  In recent years, there has been speculation that climate change wiped out Neanderthal people, or interbreeding with us, since many of us have DNA shared by Neanderthals (we also share 60 percent of our DNA with a banana) but a new paper affirms the earliest belief about survival of the fitter, commonly called survival of the fittest; competition between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. And Neanderthals lost. Cro-Magnon became a common name for homo sapiens when the first fossil to be recognized as belonging…

In Ukraine and the west Russian Plain, there remain mysterious bone circles made from the remains of dozens of mammoths long ago.  About 70 of them are known to exist. One, outside the modern village of Kostenki 250 miles south of Moscow, has been dated to 20,000 years in the past, making it the oldest such circular structure built by humans. A total of 51 lower jaws and 64 individual mammoth skulls were used to construct the walls of the 30 foot by 30 foot structure, now called Kostenki 11, and scattered across its interior. The bones were likely sourced from animal graveyards, and the…