Anthropology

Laughter plays a crucial role in every culture across the world. But it’s not clear why laughter exists. While it is evidently an inherently social phenomenon – people are up to 30 times more likely to laugh in a group than when alone – laughter’s function as a form of communication remains mysterious. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and involving a large group of researchers led by Gregory Bryant from UCLA, suggests that laughter may indicate to listeners the friendship status of those laughing. The researchers asked listeners to judge the…

Cigarette smoking is a noxious mess of 200 toxic chemicals that are risk factors for all kinds of diseases, and so it is sure to be a burden on a health care system that in the United States is increasingly being funded by the government, and therefore the 80 percent of people who do not smoke. Yet it is also an addiction, and so a small one-year longitudinal study based on surveys which suggests that smokers remain unemployed longer than nonsmokers might seem to be a self-correcting problem. Or it might be that health issues are being used for discrimination, with implicit government…

Scientists have pieced together an early human habitat for the first time, and life was no organic picnic 1.8 million years ago. Nature was out to kill us and the struggle our ancestors face, as all creatures do, is survival. Rather than the myth of ecological balance, if you were going to survive, you got there earlier and were more fit to last.  To accomplish that, our human ancestors, who looked like a cross between apes and modern humans, created stone tools with sharp edges and made sure they had ready access to food, water and shady shelter, according to remnants at Olduvai Gorge,…

Analysis of artifacts found on the shores of Rapa Nui, Chile (Easter Island) declares that the spear points were likely general purpose tools and not weapons of war, disputing one popular belief as to why people left or died off. According to Carl Lipo, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University and lead author of a new paper, the traditional story for Rapa Nui holds that the people, before Europeans arrived, ran out of resources and, as a result, engaged in massive in-fighting, which led to their collapse. One of the pieces of evidence used to support this theory is the…

The Oxford Dictionaries selected "vape"--as in, to smoke from an electronic cigarette or inhalation device --as word of the year in 2014. Internet users' search behavior tells a similar story.   E-cigarettes and other hand-held vaporizers began appearing on American shelves in the mid-2000s. Since then, they've quickly risen in popularity while regulators did not consider them under smoking legislation until late in 2015. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of people in the United States seeking information online about "vaping" rose dramatically,  but since e-cigaretes are not…

In a post-apocalyptic future, what might happen to life if humans left the scene? After all, humans are very likely to disappear long before the sun expands into a red giant and exterminates all living things from the Earth. Assuming that we don’t extinguish all other life as we disappear (an unlikely feat in spite of our unique propensity for driving extinction), history tells us to expect some pretty fundamental changes when humans are no longer the planet’s dominant animal species. So if we were given the chance to peek forward in time at the Earth some 50m years after our disappearance,…

Bullying is a common technique to gain power or prestige, and has been for as long as humans and other animals have existed. It can take many forms. School yard tactics, like taking lunch money, have grown into Internet campaigns, such as tormenting kids on Facebook, and it has even become organized movements, like the dark-money funded group SourceWatch attacking scientists and pro-science groups for their donors. A new review article seeks to outline roles and recommendations for peers, parents, schools and new media platforms to stop bullying.  "The fact that there are so many ways to…

As Europeans spread across the New World, native Americans were overmatched. People who had never even learned how to write were up against soldiers with muskets - and new diseases they had no immunity against. But lost in all of the anthropological speculation is any real evidence; did Europeans wipe out native populations with disease and war shortly after their first contact, and did it happen so fast it left tell-tale fingerprints on the global climate? For obvious reasons, other social scientists dispute such climate change and infectious disease appropriation of the 15th and 16th…

For as much time as Americans spend saying it is the greatest country on Earth, a whole lot of people worry about creating safe spaces where free expression is not allowed, or protesting the behavior of people they don't like. It is likely that only in truly great countries is there freedom from worry about basic needs so that people who feel the need to live in important times can protest; As Science 2.0's Howard Bloom noted, Thoreau was able to rent a house next to a pond and get famous because he had thousands of years of unnatural technological progress making it possible. He wore…

Nearly 25 percent of all teens reported being involved in a physical fight in the past year, with higher rates of violent altercations among African-American and Latin-American adolescents than European-American ones. To find out why, scholars writing in the Journal of Child and Family Studies conducted focus groups with African American and Latino parents regarding teen violence. Result: addressing the parents' attitudes about fighting, involving them in violence prevention programs and tailoring programs to different racial/ethnic groups may improve the effectiveness of prevention…