Anthropology

As promised in my previous post, I would like to bring to people’s attention one of the best reviews of scientific investigations of religion as a social phenomenon, a paper published in Science (3 October 2008) by Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff of the University of British Columbia. The article is chock full of fascinating, empirically based, insights into the relationship between religion and prosocial behavior, and is a must read for anyone seriously interested in this topic. Here, I will point to some of the highlights that will hopefully stimulate discussion and direct reading of…

Cremation, "air burial," grave cairns, funeral mounds, mummification, belief in life after death – death practices sacred to one culture are often considered "odd" or even terrifying by another. The Greeks were fascinated with the historian Herodotus' description of the ancient Issedonians chopping up their dead into a mixed grill and devouring them in a communal barbeque, something entirely contrary to the Greeks' treatment of their own dead. In every social group throughout history, the disposal of the dead has special significance, and ways of death always fascinate those on the outside…

Want to cause a fight between anthropologists and evolutionary biologists? Throw out an opinion on whether early societies were heirarchical or egalitarian. Great apes societies are very heirarchical despite the presence of alliances and 'political' maneuvering but a new paper in PLoS says the first coalition-based societies of equals (they use the term 'egalitarian') occurred tens of thousands of years ago, and that has implications for the context of social networks and cognitive evolution. Great apes' societies have each animal occupying a particular place in the existing dominance…

Belief in God encourages people to be helpful, honest and generous, but only under certain psychological conditions, according to University of British Columbia researchers who analyzed the past three decades of social science research. Religious people are more likely than the non-religious to engage in prosocial behavior – acts that benefit others at a personal cost – when it enhances the individual's reputation or when religious thoughts are freshly activated in the person's mind, say UBC social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff The two-part paper first reviews data from…

Countries with strict social rules and behavioral etiquette may foster unruly drinking cultures and characteristic bad behavior, according to a new report on alcohol and violence released today by International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP). The report also lists 11 cultural features that may predict levels of violence such as homicide and spousal abuse. And the culprit is, of course, not just alcohol, but men. We cannot change the male propensity for aggression, but we can channel it into appropriate and socially acceptable forms. In particular, we need rites of passage for young people…

Researchers say they have found evidence that supports the idea that the emergence of agriculture in prehistory took much longer than originally thought. Until recently researchers say the story of the origin of agriculture was one of a relatively sudden appearance of plant cultivation in the Near East around 10,000 years ago, spreading quickly into Europe and dovetailing conveniently with ideas about how quickly language and population genes spread from the Near East to Europe. Initially, genetics appeared to support this idea but now there are questions about the evidence underpinning…

The University of Southampton is launching the world's largest-ever study of near-death experiences this week. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study is to be launched by the Human Consciousness Project of the University of Southampton - an international collaboration of scientists and physicians who have joined forces to study the human brain, consciousness and clinical death. The study is led by Dr Sam Parnia, an expert in the field of consciousness during clinical death, together with Dr Peter Fenwick and Professors Stephen Holgate and Robert Peveler of the University of…

COLUMBIA, Mo. -Without a way to measure religious beliefs, anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion. Now, two anthropologists from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University have developed a new approach to study religion by focusing on verbal communication, an identifiable behavior, instead of speculating about alleged beliefs in the supernatural that cannot actually be identified.  "Instead of studying religion by trying to measure unidentifiable beliefs in the supernatural, we looked at identifiable and observable behavior - the behavior of people…

One day soon, you may be able to pinpoint the geographic origins of your ancestors based on analysis of your DNA. A study published online this week in Nature by an international team that included Cornell University researchers describes the use of DNA to predict the geographic origins of individuals from a sample of Europeans, often within a few hundred kilometers of where they were born. "What we found is that within Europe, individuals with all four grandparents from a given region are slightly more similar genetically to one another, on average, than to individuals from more distant…

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) did not become extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens), says a research team that has shown that early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals. They say their discovery debunks a textbook belief held by archaeologists for more than 60 years. The team spent three years flintknapping (producing stone tools). They recreated stone tools known as 'flakes,' which were wider tools originally used by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and 'blades…