Anthropology

Tattoos and body piercings are so ubiquitous in western societies that they are more cliché than  edgy, but social scientists in France say they may be more than fashion trends - they may be harbingers of doom. Individuals who get them  are also more likely to engage in risky behaviors that include substance and alcohol use.  They conducted this truly first-of-its-kind survey on four different Saturday nights, when most French youth frequent bars and clubs before dancing, collectively approaching a total of 2,970 individuals (1,710 males, 1,260 females) as they were exiting…

We created clocks and calendars to give people a common way to communicate about the future and the past and about when to have dinner.  But time is, as they say, relative.  A clock on top of a mountain moves differently than one at sea level - that's gravitational time dilation. NIST researchers have even been able to show that tall people age differently than short ones. And if you lived your life in a car traveling 20 miles per hour, you would age slower than people who just walk around. Time is not only relative in physics, it is relative in culture.  We feel like time…

New York University cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor Allen Feldman is visiting the University of Sydney, notes the blog site of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI) - they named the site SOPHIstry, which may be a little too clever, since sophists in ancient times were the people real philosophers made fun of because they were trying to be too clever and prove up is down and other nonsense. What exactly is a 'cultural anthropologist', since anthropology studies culture?  I have no idea, but then again my Ph.D. is in Theoretical Phys Ed so someone…

Mus musculus, the common mouse, can happily live wherever there are humans. When populations of humans migrate the mice often travel with them and apparently that has long been the case. New research used evolutionary techniques on modern day and ancestral mouse mitochondrial DNA to show that the timeline of mouse colonization even matches that of the Viking invasions. During the Viking age (late 8th to mid 10th century) Vikings from Norway established colonies across Scotland, the Scottish islands, Ireland, and Isle of Man. They also explored the north Atlantic, settling in the Faroe Islands…

  The FDA puts a lot of stock into studies done on mice and many a warning label has been the outcome. Seems most of the really bad side effects hit pregnant rats the hardest. So, you can feel pretty safe as long as you are not pregnant or an upset rodent Myomancy was a method of divination by mice. Their behaviour was observed and taken as a omen of what was to come. If their movements were calm, agitated or aggressive, much was read into it.  Modern scientists study the movements of mice more than the ancient myomancers did, but for ends that are not dissimilar. If you look at…

Photo: Michele Pokrandt Orchidaceae get their name from the Greek ὄρχις (órkhis), which literally means "testicle", a nod to the naughty nub shape of their roots. In Greek mythology, Orchis was the son of an ugly nymph and a satyr who came upon a festival for Dionysios deep in the woods.  Liking his fermented grapes a wee bit too much, he overindulged on wine then tried to have his way with a priestess of Dionysios. As a result the Bacchanalians tore him limb from limb. His grieving father prayed to the Gods for him to be restored. Not that keen on men who assert themselves on…

A number of midwives believe modern births rely too heavily on medication and technological intervention and they instead have created 'birthing rituals' to send the message that women's bodies know best and that birth is about female empowerment. It's no surprise the Pacific Northwest, home of progressive anti-vaccine efforts, is also on the vanguard of this latest fad in anthropology. In Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Melissa Cheyney,  assistant professor of medical anthropology at Oregon State University, documented rituals used by midwives and conducted interviews with midwives and…

A common belief among club-going men is that women choose less attractive friends to make themselves look better. See this clip from that important anthropological documentary "Hall Pass" for context: Not so, says a group of scientists who have observed the opposite strategy in the Trinidadian guppy, a species of small freshwater fish  - instead, the uglier friends are choosing the prettier females to avoid unwanted male attention.  Male guppies are well known for frequent and sometimes constant harassment of females. This puts a significant burden on females, sometimes…

An East Asian human fossil from Maba, China and dated to the late Middle Pleistocene age has provided evidence of interhuman aggression and human induced trauma occurred 126,000 years ago. A report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that a 14 mm ridged, healed lesion with bone depressed inward to the brain resulted from localized blunt force trauma. Was it an accident or interhuman aggression? The Maba cranium was discovered with the remains of other mammals in June 1958, in a cave at Lion Rock in Guangdong province, China. The Maba cranium and associated animal…

When domesticated agriculture was invented, it took off and revolutionized human expansion but a study of ceramic pots from 15 sites dating to around 4,000 B.C. shows humans may have undergone a gradual rather than an abrupt transition from fishing, hunting and gathering to farming. The researchers analyzed the cooking residues preserved in 133 ceramic vessels from the Western Baltic regions of Northern Europe to establish whether these residues were from terrestrial, marine or freshwater organisms.  The research team found that fish and other aquatic resources continued to be exploited…