Anthropology

Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they’ve learned. In today’s issue of the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests it’s possible to help children learn difficult concepts by providing gestures as an additional and potent avenue for taking in information. “We’ve known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a conversation even when we’re not entirely clear how that information relates to what we’re saying,” says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoral fellow at…

The driving forces behind major shifts in recent human evolution and adaptation have been the subject of intense debate for more than 100 years. A group of researchers believe using records from the past can help understand how to meet the challenge of climate change today. A five-year project named RESET (Response of Humans to Abrupt Environmental Transitions), funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, is bringing together scientists from Oxford, the Natural History Museum in London and the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton with expertise in human…

New research has proved the single origin of humans theory by combining studies of global genetic variations in humans with skull measurements across the world. The research, at the University of Cambridge and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), represents a final blow for supporters of a multiple origins of humans theory. Competing theories on the origins of anatomically modern humans claim that either humans originated from a single point in Africa and migrated across the world, or different populations independently evolved from homo erectus to…

By looking at temperature fluctuations and reduced agricultural production in eastern China's past, David Zhang from the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues say they can predict the geopolitics of global warming's future. They found that warfare frequency in eastern China, and the southern part in particular, significantly correlated with temperature oscillations. Almost all peaks of warfare and dynastic changes coincided with cold phases. Looking to the future and applying their findings, Zhang and colleagues suggest that shortages of essential resources, such as fresh water,…

Freeloaders can live on the fruits of the cooperation of others, but their selfishness can have long-term consequences, reports an evolutionary biologist from The University of Texas at Austin in a new study. “There is a historical dimension to cooperation,” says Dr. Sam Brown, the Human Frontier Science Foundation Fellow in the Section of Integrative Biology. “The act of a cooperator can continue to give benefits even after the cooperator is dead. Conversely, cheating will have consequences in the future.” Standard models of the evolution of cooperation assume that the benefits of…

African societies, including those of the Bwaba of Burkina Faso and the Bassar of northern Togo, consider certain natural sites located on their territory as sacred. With each of these places these communities associate supernatural beings, kinds of spirits, that they have to come to terms with. Maintenance of relations with these spirits requires strict preservation of the sites that they occupy. This is the case notably for the sacred groves, where wood cutting and all forms of removal of materials or organisms are strictly forbidden. IRD ethnologist Stephan Dugast (1) describes other…

The Genographic Project is studying the genetic signatures of ancient human migrations and creating an open-source research database. It allows members of the public to participate in a real-time anthropological genetics study by submitting personal samples for analysis and donating the genetic results to the database. In the first scientific publication from the project they report on genotyping human mitochondrial DNA during the first 18 months of the project. To making sorting and cataloguing so much data easier, they created the Nearest Neighbor haplogroup prediction tool. The accurate…

Toddlers learn their first words better from people than from Teletubbies, according to new research at Wake Forest University. The study was published in the June 21 issue of Media Psychology. Children younger than 22 months may be entertained, but they do not learn words from the television program, said Marina Krcmar, associate professor of communication at Wake Forest and author of the study. “With the tremendous success of programs such as ‘Teletubbies’ that target very young children, it has become important to understand what very young children are taking away from these programs,”…

When white Americans were asked in a new study to pick a dollar amount they would have to be paid to live the rest of their lives as a black person, most requested less than $10,000. A minor thing. In contrast, study participants said they would have to be paid about $1 million to give up television for the rest of their lives. This would seem to state that white people don't think being black is such a big deal in 2007. Not the case at all, says Philip Mazzocco, co-author of a new study study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus. Instead, he…

Women cheat on men for their own needs but superb starling females stray from their mates for the sake of their chicks, according to recent Cornell research. This reasoning includes being able to know if mates are too 'genetically similar' for breeding. That gives 'doing it for the kids' a whole new layer of meaning. The study found that superb starling females (Lamprotornis superbus) cheat on their mates based on these factors: Superb starlings are cooperative breeders, meaning breeding pairs get help in raising chicks from other family group members. Some females mate with subordinate…