Anthropology

The first people to arrive in America traveled as at least two separate groups to arrive in their new home at about the same time, according to new genetic evidence published Current Biology. After the Last Glacial Maximum some 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, one group entered North America from Beringia following the ice-free Pacific coastline, while another traversed an open land corridor between two ice sheets to arrive directly into the region east of the Rocky Mountains. (Beringia is the landmass that connected northeast Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age.) Those first Americans later…

In a recently conducted study, a multidisciplinary French-American research team reported that Neanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change.  The study in PLoS ONE tackles the reasons behind the eventual disappearance of Neanderthal populations, which occupied Europe prior to the arrival of human populations like us around 40,000 years ago.   The authors reached their conclusion by reconstructing climatic conditions during this period and analyzing the distribution of archaeological sites…

Even 60,000 years ago men had the wanderlust more than women.   Or they left families behind until they knew what they would find. For one reason or another, the modern humans left Africa in a migration that many believe was responsible for nearly all of the human population that exist outside Africa today didn't have men and women as equal equal partners in that exodus. By tracing variations in the X chromosome and in the non-sex chromosomes, researchers from Harvard say they have found evidence that men outnumbered women in that migration. The scientists expect that their method…

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, Spencer WellsRandom House, 2002 Spencer Wells, in his short, accessible book designed to accompany a similarly titled documentary film, describes the deep history of humans as it has been inscribed in Y chromosomes. This history has only recently become decipherable through modern genetic tools, and the results have settled some centuries-old controversies about how humans in different parts of the world have become so diverse. The biggest surprise is that our differences are recent: the dramatic differences that distinguish Kenyans, Swedes, Han Chinese…

Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body.  University of Chicago researchers will describe the discovery, a testimony created by an Iron Age official that includes an incised image of the man, on Nov. 22-23 at conferences of biblical and Middle Eastern archaeological scholars in Boston. The Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago found the 800-pound basalt stele, 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide, at…

Researchers dated remains from four multiple burials discovered in Germany in 2005 and found that the 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other – an unusual practice in Neolithic culture.  One of the graves was found to contain a female, a male and two children. Using DNA analysis, the researchers established that the group consisted of a mother, father and their two sons aged 8-9 and 4-5 years: the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family in the world (so far). The burials, discovered and excavated at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, were…

Scientists in Madagascar, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Vienna Natural History Museum and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst now have a nearly complete skeleton of a rare species of extinct lemur to study thanks to a century-long discovery and reconstruction effort. Laurie R. Godfrey, professor of anthropology at UMass Amherst and lemur expert, played a key role in the process in which contemporary researchers were able to match newly found bones with those discovered in a cave in Madagascar in 1899 to construct much of the skeleton of a rare species of…

A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that serial cohabiters are less likely than single-instance cohabiting unions to result in marriage and, if serial cohabiters do marry, divorce rates are very high. Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University and Zhenchao of Ohio State University used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to track the experiences of serial cohabiters, or women who have cohabited with more than one partner.   Using cohort data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the study found that serial cohabiters were less likely than…

A 19th-century historian traveling in southern Ohio later wrote about his first glimpse of Union Village, a Shaker community located near Harrison, Ohio: "When I caught sight of the first house, my opinion was confirmed that I was on the lands of the Shakers, for the …style of architecture, solid appearance and want of decorative art was before me. The style of architecture and the construction methods used by the Shakers throughout Middle America and New England were unusual – reflecting an ascetic living and working structure that was both communal and gender-segregated.   Much of…

The ability to make fire millennia ago was likely a key factor in the migration of prehistoric hominids from Africa into Eurasia, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology believes on the basis of findings at the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov archaeological site in Israel.  Earlier excavations there, carried out under the direction of Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar of the Institute of Archaeology, showed that the occupants of the site – who are identified as being part of the Acheulian culture that arose in Africa about 1.6 million years ago -- had mastered fire-…