Anthropology
An intrepid archaeologist is well on her way to dislodging the prevailing assumptions of scholars about the people who built and used Maya temples.
From the grueling work of analyzing the “attributes,” the nitty-gritty physical details of six temples in Yalbac, a Maya center in the jungle of central Belize – and a popular target for antiquities looters – primary investigator Lisa Lucero is building her own theories about the politics of temple construction that began nearly two millennia ago.
Her findings from the fill, the mortar and other remnants of jungle-wrapped structures lead her to…
Vivid colors, flowing silk ribbons, and glittering bits of mirrors - the Vikings dressed with considerably more panache than we previously thought. The men were especially vain, and the women dressed provocatively, but with the advent of Christianity, fashions changed, according to Swedish archeologist Annika Larsson.
"They combined oriental features with Nordic styles. Their clothing was designed to be shown off indoors around the fire," says textile researcher Annika Larsson, whose research at Uppsala University presents a new picture of the Viking Age.
She has studied textile finds from…
Human migration from Africa to Europe more than 30,000 years ago is still visible in the genes of Europeans today - and because the numbers were small, the harmful variations were magnified as time passed.
A study in the Feb. 21 issue of Nature compared more than 10,000 sequenced genes from 15 African-Americans and 20 European-Americans. The results suggest that European populations have proportionately more harmful variations, though it is unclear what effects these variations actually may have on the overall health of Europeans.
Computer simulations suggest that the first Europeans…
A 40,000-year-old tooth has provided scientists with the first direct evidence that Neanderthals moved from place to place during their lifetimes.
In a collaborative project involving researchers from the Germany, the United Kingdom, and Greece, Professor Michael Richards of the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and Durham University, UK, and his team used laser technology to collect microscopic particles of enamel from the tooth.
By analysing strontium isotope ratios in the enamel - strontium is a naturally occurring metal ingested into the body through…
The human journey from Asia to the New World was interrupted by a 20,000-year layover in Beringia, a once-habitable region that today lies submerged under the icy waters of the Bering Strait.
Furthermore, the New World was colonized by approximately 1,000 to 5,000 people — a substantially higher number than the 100 or fewer individuals of previous estimates.
The developments, reported by University of Florida Genetics Institute scientists, help shape understanding of how the Americas came to be populated — not through a single expansion event that is put forth in most theories, but in three…
According to a study in Molecular Biology and Evolution, the Vikings never left Northwest England - up to 50 percent of the DNA they found in men had Scandinavian ancestry.
The 100 men in the study were primarily from the Wirral in Merseyside and West Lancashire and their surnames were in existence as far back as medieval times. Results revealed that 50 percent of their DNA have Norse origins.
Stephen Harding, Professor of Physical Biochemistry at the University of Nottingham said, “DNA on the male Y-chromosome is passed along the paternal line from generation to generation with very…
Lice from 1,000-year-old mummies in Peru may unravel important clues about a different sort of passage: the migration patterns of America’s earliest humans, a new University of Florida study suggests.
“It’s kind of quirky that a parasite we love to hate can actually inform us how we traveled around the globe,” said David Reed, an assistant curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus and one of the study’s authors.
DNA sequencing found the strain of lice to be genetically the same as the form of body lice that spawns several deadly diseases, including typhus,…
In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed.
In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we talked about how even the most primitive components of the universe had a sort of retained memory; the culture of quarks, if you will. The universe had the beginnings of culture and kept them as it evolved because it wasn't stored in the cosmic train, it was stored in the rails.
Now we get into how that retained memory and supersynchrony really kicked things into overdrive.
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In a random universe…
Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that languages change and evolve in rapid bursts rather than in a steady pattern.
The research in Science investigates thousands of years of language evolution, and looks at the way in which languages split and evolve. It has long been accepted that the desire for a distinct social identity may cause languages to change quickly, but it has not previously been known whether such rapid bursts of change are a regular feature of the evolution of human language. The findings show that initially, the basic vocabulary of newly formed languages…
Evolution is shouting a message at us. Yes, evolution herself. That imperative? Get your ass and the asses, burros, donkeys and cells of your fellow species—from bacteria and plants to fish, reptiles, and mammals—off this dangerous scrap of a planet and find new niches for life.
Take The Grand Experiment Of Cells And DNA, the 3.85-billion-year Project Of Biomass, to other planets, moons, orbiting habitats, and galaxies. Give life an opportunity to thrive, to reinvent itself, to turn every old disaster, every pinwheeling galaxy, into new opportunity.
Do this as the only species Nature…