Anthropology
Networking and prompt sharing of knowledge are aspects commonly associated with the development of the Internet but intense intellectual exchange and joint work on projects over large distances happened as early as Habsburg times.
The manuscripts of Court Librarian Peter Lambeck, head of Vienna´s Hofbibliothek (Imperial Library), show he was an expert in content management and social networking. The evaluation of his life and work now traces Austria´s role in the "Republic of Letters" - the combined expertise of Europe´s intellectual elite - as early as the 17th century.
Lambeck is…
In claims about math performance among females, and the sociological implication that unknown cultural pressure in schools made the mentally malleable fairer sex believe they couldn't do math even if they could, there was always one inconvenient truth - in America, over 70% of teachers are women, so if there was sexism women were doing it.
A study at the University of the Basque Country finds a more pervasive link between the sexist attitudes of mothers and that of children - and gender and the family's socio-economic and cultural level to sexism. Mothers teach more gender than…
Researchers have sequenced the genome of a man who was an Aboriginal Australian and used that to show that modern day Aboriginal Australians are the direct descendants of the first people who arrived on the continent some 50,000 years ago and that those ancestors left Africa earlier than their European and Asian counterparts.
Although there is good archaeological evidence that shows humans in Australia around 50,000 years ago, this genome study could rewrite the story of their journey there. The study provides evidence that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of the earliest modern…
People communicate in bursts. In communication, our behavior does not happen in a homogenous way over time, but rather there is universal behavior in which there is no communication, followed by short intervals, says a new study.
A new study analyzed around 9,000 million calls throughout a nearly one year period and identified features of the communication process and attempted to quantify their impact in the diffusion of information.
The effect of the bursts is that it slows down the information diffusion since the large periods of inactivity in the communication between two…
Hank |
Haute couture through history? It is when St. Pölten takes the Catwalk!
If your only knowledge of Stone Age fashion is stricly limited to old Flintstones cartoons, you are in luck. On September 23rd the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) in St. Pölten, Austria
will be parading clothing from over ten millennia, a journey through time and
the world of fashion.
Wilma Flintstone - fashion maven from the Stone Age. © Hanna-Barbera.
The Museum of Natural History Vienna will be showing faithfully reconstructed garments from the Stone Age through Roman times and, if you are…
Hank |
Cooking is not a modern invention, concludes new research. It likely originated 1.9 million years ago, according to results they determined using statistical analysis and evolutionary trees.
How so? They estimated, in their analysis, how long we should spend feeding every day, based on our body sizes throughout evolutionary history. Sure, it might seem at first glance like cooking would add more time than directly eating but their results say we would need to spend almost half of our time in the 'feeding' process given our current sizes - cooking basically made food easier…
G.D.W. |
Francis Thackeray, a South African anthropologist and the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has asked permission from the Church of England to exhume the remains of William Shakespeare. This would allow a team of researchers to study the cause of death of the Bard of Avon, as well as look for evidence of drug use, which depends on the presence of hair and finger or toe nails.
A study by Thackeray, performed in 2001, found remains of pipes in Shakespeare’s garden which carried traces of marijuana (Thackeray et al., 2001). In…
Newswire |
Little is known of the ancestry of Africans captured and transported by Europeans and Arabs during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A new website launched at Emory University this week, African-Origins, provides some of the identities of Africans aboard early nineteenth-century slaving vessels. This information might make it possible to trace the the origins of Africans forcibly transported to North America before President Thomas Jefferson signed the law banning importation of slaves in 1807, and to other countries well after that. Public participation will be…
Thousands of artifacts made from chert, a flint-like rock used to make projectile points and other stone tools, are in some cases so delicate that their only practical use would have been on the water, says Jon Erlandson, professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, who has been conducting research on California's Channel Islands for more than 30 years.
In their study, they describe the discovery of scores of stemmed projectile points and crescents dating from 12,200 to 11,400 years ago. The artifacts are associated…
Between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago, the first farmers from Asia were already cultivating land in what is now Greece, according to archaeological remains, but in places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and Northern Germany farming did not happen until around 3,000 years later.
One of the most significant socioeconomic changes in the history of humanity started taking place around 10,000 years ago, when the Near East went from an economy based on hunting and gathering (Mesolithic) to another kind on agriculture (Neolithic) and farming rapidly entered the Balkan Peninsula and then advanced…