Anthropology

In the 19th century, the Rosetta Stone allowed scholars to translate symbols left by an ancient civilization and decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics.  But many mysteries remain about the symbols found on other ancient artifact, including those of a people that inhabited the Indus valley on the present-day border between Pakistan and India. Some experts question whether the symbols represent a language at all, or are merely pictograms that bear no relation to the language spoken by their creators.  The Indus people were contemporaries of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian…

I promised myself that I would try to do a regular Wednesday blog about some aspect of my researches.  I thought I would start out with something I've been considering for awhile -- methodologies of studying large user communities on the Internet. Only a few researchers such as Nick Yee have ventued into the complex realm of studying large communities online -- and they can get vast and complex.  MMORPGs such as the World of Warcraft that Yee studied can have over 10 million users worldwide and require a lot of time and human resources to maintain.  Even message boards listed…

It's Earth Day, in case you can't tell by our swanky green Earth logo in the header, and that means people will be thinking about Nature (the bitch, not the magazine) and our impact on her.   I didn't say people would be thinking clearly, but they will be thinking. So instead of shocking and awing you with my dark humor and divine genius, I will instead ask a question; what kind of science could you do if you got sent back to 10,000 BC? I ask because a whole lot of people who are interested in Earth Day are also interested in making us more primitive.   There was once an America…

In 1930, in the Highlands of New Guinea, a group of Australian brothers looking for gold stumbled across thousands of Stone Age people who had no concept of the outside world. They happened to bring a movie camera.   And that's probably all I need to say.

Molecular anthropology—you probably haven’t heard of this discipline by name but I guarantee that you already find this particular field fascinating.  Therefore, I’d like to formally introduce to you the field of molecular anthropology which includes such areas of research as; genetically reconstructing man’s ancient migration from Africa to the Americas, resurrecting Neanderthal genomes and identifying ancestral origins through DNA ancestry. For those of you who find my guarantee to be not applicable, then chances are you reject most, if not all of this field’s research-derived…

The Rock And The Hard Place Of Homer The well-known expression: 'between a rock and a hard place' almost certainly has its earliest origins in Homer's Odyssey. In that saga, Ulysses has to take his ship between Scylla and Charybdis, two rock-monsters which are a bow-shot apart. It is impossible to avoid both monsters - a course must be steered which leads to the least loss of life. Unravelling Homer's YarnIt is strange how many words which describe the art of story-telling are derived from spinning, weaving and the use of fibres. Perhaps, before the invention of writing, people would tell…

The central African belt is a fascinating look back in time for humanity because the largest group of hunter–gatherers of Africa, the Pygmies, still inhabit the region and they coexist with neighboring farmers.  All African Pygmies, inhabiting a large territory extending west-to-east along Central Africa, descend from a unique population who lived around 20,000 years ago, according to an international study led by researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The research concludes that the ancestors of present-day African Pygmies and neighboring farmers separated ~60,000 years ago.…

Before the invention of boxed chocolates, Corvettes and bling-bling, all a man had to do for sweet lovin' was provide his special ladies with meat.  Studies of extant hunter-gatherer societies show that literally bringing home the bacon leads to greater reproductive success.  Highly skilled hunters also partake in more extra-marital affairs and in polygamous societies, have more wives. In order to explain the correlation between hunting skill and reproductive success observed in societies that are reminiscent of our ancestor's culture, anthropologists…

Long before they became famous as barbaric raiders, Vikings played nice with British and Irish culture, according to findings at a recent Cambridge University conference. The conference, entitled "Between the Islands", was organized by the University's Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and its Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and had more than 20 cutting-edge studies which reveal how the Vikings shared technology, swapped ideas and often lived side-by-side in relative harmony with their Anglo-Saxon and Celtic contemporaries. "The latest…

A couple of years back I read a theory in Charles Pellegrino's book "Ghosts of Vesuvius" that has fascinated me since, that the Biblical story of Cain and Abel is an echo of the genocide of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens. It is known that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens lived around the same time.  Doesn’t it only seem reasonable that this story may be the story, passed down from fireside to fireside, of the end of neanderthals? Note the similarity. Homo sapiens were farmers, like Cain, while Neanderthals were herdsman, like Abel. The story, instead of being about how murder first…