Anthropology

Dogs successfully migrated to the Americas about 10,000 years ago, according to a new study. That's a long time ago but still thousands of years after the first human migrants crossed the land bridge from Siberia to North America. Dogs have been associated with humans in findings from 11,000 to 16,000 years ago.  Did humans not bring them at first? Did they die? Ancient dogs split off from wolves likely because they learned to tolerate human company and as part of selective evolution - humans let the ones that protected them and were friendly stick around. Dogs benefited from the…

Whether you are a a hipster in Montreal or a Pygmy in the Congolese rainforest, certain aspects of music will touch you the same way. That applies to scores we associates with very different films, and therefore tones, like Psycho, Star Wars, and Schindler's List, according to a team of scholars who arrived at this conclusion after traveling deep into the rainforest to play music to a very isolated group of people, the Mbenzélé Pygmies, who live without access to radio, television or electricity. When they compared how the Mbenzélé responded both to their own and to unfamiliar Western music…

It would be madness today to think of farmers as wimpy - watching a 160 lb. kid throw a giant hay bale around does not make people think of weakness - but skeletally the invention of agriculture made us weak compared to foraging ancestors. As we shifted from foraging to farming, we had more food and that led to more culture and education and progress - but it also brought more sedentary lifestyles and so our skeletons have become much lighter and more fragile since the invention of agriculture. But if a new Ice Age comes, our foraging potential is still inside us. There is no anatomical…

About 10 percent of Asia can claim to be descended from Genghis Khan and they are absolutely correct, genetic studies show; the reason is that part of the benefit to rampaging across Asia, the mid-East and into Europe was a lot of sex. But it isn't just conquering Mongols, even on a small scale violent conflict offers biological rewards to those those who take part in it, say anthropologists who correlated violent raids and combat to reproductive fitness.  In their paper, the authors noted that members of an East African herding tribe who engaged in conflict, in the form of violent…

The shirt Matt Taylor wore while being interviewed about the Rosetta space mission set off a media and online shirtstorm. Youtube/ ESA By Jamilla Rosdahl, University of the Sunshine Coast The European Space Agency made history in November by landing a spacecraft on a comet. However, a furious news debate quickly erupted about the shirt worn by 42-year-old British chief of science for the Rosetta space mission, Matt Taylor. He was interviewed just as the Philae lander was touching down on comet 67P after more than ten years in space, but his shirt got the attention. The shirt featured a PVC-…

Games appear in galleries, does that make them art? blakespot, CC BY By Ashok Ranchhod, University of Southampton and Vanissa Wanick Vieira, University of Southampton. The UK’s video games industry body Tiga has called for the products to be treated like other creative industries such as television or film, rather than mere “software”. There is a good argument for this. Games have been part of human civilisation for thousands of years. Egyptians played the board game senet 3,000 years ago, around the same time that Persians played the Royal Game of Ur with dice. Around 700AD the ancient…

Want something a little different for Christmas this year? Caroline Yeldham, courtesy of the Leeds International Medieval Congress By Iona McCleery, University of Leeds. With Christmas almost upon us, there will be plenty of frenzied present shopping and meal planning. Haven’t made that Christmas cake yet? Fear not. If you were preparing the festive meal 600 years ago you’d have far more on your plate. The picture below is a calendar page from a Book of Hours, a type of prayer book popular among pious rich people in the Middle Ages. Apart from the costumes they are wearing, the people at the…

The Paleolithic diet, eating like our ancient ancestors, is a diet fad that seeks to emulate the diet of early humans during the Stone Age. But what does that mean? Almost anything people want because ancestral diets differed substantially over time and geography, notes a paper in The Quarterly Review of Biology. The review examines anatomical, paleoenvironmental and chemical evidence, as well as the feeding behavior of living animals. While early hominids were not great hunters, and their dentition was not great for exploiting many specific categories of plant food, they were most…

Relational aggression, such as malicious rumors, social exclusion and rejection, are considered something that girls do more often. The movie "Mean Girls" epitomized it to hilarious effect. A trio of scholars used surveys to show that boys are being shortchanged in popular accounts of mean-ness. 620 randomly selected sixth graders were followed through their senior year, filling out an annual survey talking about victimization. Using group-based trajectory modeling the female co-authors determined that boys are actually meaner than girls - or at least they brag about it more on surveys.…

This has as much in common with actual paleolithic culture as the paleolithic diet does. Flickr/George , CC BY-NC-SA By Darren Curnoe We still hear and read a lot about how a diet based on what our Stone Age ancestors ate may be a cure-all for modern ills. But can we really run the clock backwards and find the optimal way to eat? It’s a largely impossible dream based on a set of fallacies about our ancestors. There are a lot of guides and books on the palaeolithic diet, the origins of which have already been questioned. It’s all based on an idea that’s been around for decades in anthropology…