Anthropology

Compared to most languages in the developed world, Icelandic is quite conservative. Formal German is almost useless in actual German society due to slang and informal terms, for example, while English has few rules but so many exceptions and colloquial phrases it can be difficult for tourists to understand eating in a restaurant. Icelandic, by contrast, has a vocabulary well preserved in Old Norse roots and Icelanders want to keep it that way.  The purist tradition of preferring native words to foreign ones is thought to be connected to Iceland’s long process of liberation from Denmark,…

One of the dominant hypotheses of evolution is that our genus, Homo, evolved from small-bodied early humans to become the taller, heavier and longer legged Homo erectus that was able to migrate beyond Africa and colonize Eurasia. Not so, according to a new anthropology paper.  Small-bodied Homo erectus. averaging less than five feet and 100 pounds, lived in Georgia in southern Europe 1.77 million years ago but the timing and geographic origin of the larger body size that we associate with modern humans was less clear. A new study used mathematical formulas to determine the size of…

The "average" Australian according to statistics is a 37 year-old woman with two kids, a mortgage and three bedroom house. But how "typical" are her consumer choices? Image from Shutterstock Who is the “typical” or “average” consumer? Is there such a thing? What do they look like? How do they make decisions? Am I an average (or perhaps a below average) consumer? It’s something that comes up a lot in discussions around consumer protection, consumer advocacy, and regulation. Judges in consumer cases, for example, often ask whether the average person would understand their obligations in…

A thankless task? Image: rob colonna, CC BY-SA In the wake of the racist behavior of a group of Chelsea supporters on the Paris Métro last week, a range of excellent critical commentaries emerged, pondering what these actions signified and how English football should respond. The argument has been made in the Guardian newspaper that a range of organizations need to intensify and co-ordinate their efforts in eradicating racism from the professional game: clubs, the Football Association, the Premier League and UEFA. In reality, though, it will all boil down to one crucial part of the game: the…

The connections between technology, urban trading, and international economics which have come to define modern living are nothing new. Back in the first millennium AD, the Vikings were expert at exploring these very issues. While the Vikings are gone their legacy is remembered, such as at the annual Jorvik Viking Festival in York. The Norsemen’s military prowess and exploration are more often the focus of study, but of course the vikings were more than just bloodthirsty pirates: they were also settlers, landholders, farmers, politicians, and merchants. Between the 8th and 11th century (the…

Why did the first human populations migrate out of Africa? It is the biggest debate in anthropology but no one can be sure of the answer. When it happened can at least be an informed debate and two hypotheses dominate the cultural landscape - but they both involve a common denominator that might shed light on why. One popular belief is that human populations expanded rapidly from Africa to southern Asia via the coastlines of Arabia 50,000 or 60,000 years ago while another is that dispersal into the Arabian interior began 75,000 or even up to 130,000 years ago, but during multiple smaller…

Early hominids didn’t have a lot of time to whip up coconut flour pancakes. Credit: United Artists Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something to say. Like much of our understanding of early hominid behavior, the imagined diet of our ancestors has also been over-simplified. Take the trendy Paleo Diet which draws inspiration from how people lived during the Paleolithic or Stone Age that ran from roughly 2.6 million to 10,000 years…

In Manot, a karstic cave in the North of Israel close to the Lebanese border, excavations that began in 2010 have documented the peopling of the cave for over 100,000 years. Around 30,000 years ago, the roof of the cave collapsed and sealed the archaeological layers until the 21st century. Beside stone tools and animal bones, some few human remains were preserved. The most spectacular finding was made on an elevated shelf within a small chamber of the cave: a very well preserved "calotte", the upper part of a braincase. The facial bones which contain a lot of diagnostic traits were missing…

Bits of the self have historically been un memoire emotional aides. Cristiana Gasparotto As Valentine’s Day approaches, many of us will think about sharing a token of our affection. The ubiquitous card is often teamed with a staple of the season: chocolate, perfume or flowers. These gifts have become accepted expressions of romantic love in Western cultures and yet they often fail to embody a real emotional connection between the giver and recipient. Gift giving has been a subject that has interested scholars for centuries. The influential French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950)…

By Joel N. Shurkin, Inside Science -- Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome. What's for dinner? You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat…