Anthropology

Celebrities and environmentalist jetting off to exotic locations to talk about climate change, renewable energy, and organic food may make you feel like the modern world is killing the planet but a huge collaborative study reveals that early humans across the entire globe were ruining their environments as far back as 10,000 years ago. Farther back, 12,000 years ago, humans were mainly foraging, meaning they didn't interact with their environments as farmers do. By 3,000 years ago, farmers were feeding nations and causing free trade in many parts of the globe. Humans in these time periods…

If you insist your baby has to breastfeed for a year you have a cultural heritage to justify it. Extinct species such as Australopithecus africanus likely breastfed for that long. How could scholars determine how long A. africanus  breastfed? Like trees, teeth contain growth rings that can be counted to estimate age. Teeth rings also incorporate dietary minerals as they grow. Breast milk contains barium, which accumulates steadily in an infant's teeth and then drops off after weaning. In a new study, researchers analyzed trace minerals in two sets of fossilized A. africanus teeth…

A recent paper found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) refugees and asylum seekers from Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan reported they were often expected to be "flamboyant" and "outspoken" in their asylum interview, and that overall, asylum seekers were more successful if they could prove their 'gayness' by being involved in gay/queer activism in their country of origin, visiting gay bars, being members of lesbian and gay groups and attending gay pride marches. University of Bristol anthropologist Dr. Mengia Tschalaer interviewed 15 lesbian, gay,…

A recent paper uses neuromarketing techniques - basically, electrodermal activity to detect fluctuations in the emotional and attentional state of subjects in response to commercial stimuli - to try and deduce a relationship between the hand and the use of stone tools, and the cognitive functions associated to the sensory and exploratory process of manipulation, in addition to the spatial relationship between hand and object. Yes, by seeing how people sweat now they think they can tell us about Lower Paleolithic Oldowan and Acheulean manufacturing. paleoanthropology and archaeology for how…

"Lebensraum" said German Chancellor Adolf Hitler when he appealed to citizens for why they needed to expand.  A new computer simulation says climate change may have been a factor, and it could get even worse this century. The authors of the numerical model estimate between 3 percent and 20 percent of armed conflict risk during the last hundred years was caused by climate and that its influence will increase dramatically in the 21st century. That's such a broad range it is meaningless but that doesn't stop them from positing that in a scenario with 4 degrees of warming, it could mean a 26…

On surveys, parents believe they are doing a great job helping teens be more independent, but today's kids are just too immature. That last part is probably not true. It was overwhelmingly people in their mid-20s who won World War II and put man on the moon, we're the ones who've now decided that age is not mature enough to buy health insurance. If we want to do the dishes it is the nature of other human beings to let us do the dishes, because other people think that makes us happy. Believing that someone else will eventually want to do the dishes when they mature is wishful thinking. We're…

Gorilla teeth are large and high crested when compared to other great apes, believed to an adaptation to them spending a large amount of time chewing tough fibrous plant material - they have a vegetarian diet consisting almost exclusively of leafy vegetation and fruit. The high crests on their molar teeth are at risk of damage if they eat hard objects, such as nuts encased in a woody shell, but they do it anyway. And an anthropology paper seems surprised a primate might engage in behavior that is not a force of evolution.  Coula edulis nuts are available a few months each year in…

A new paper in JAMA Network Open takes using epidemiological statistics to support ideological goals to the next level. It suggests that since it seems to have happened in 2016, if a Republican even campaigns for President in 2020 Latina women will have more preterm births.  Well, a Republican is guaranteed to campaign so while we can't prevent all that psychological damage if it's really going to happen, we can at least show this is more politicization of epidemiology. In their comparison of the Obama years (let the partisan dog whistling begin) to the beginning of the Trump…

German was once the language of engineering and science, but as the world became more scientific, English became the common tongue. The reason may be German's notoriously irregular nouns. A new analysis of more than two thousand languages has found that languages with more speakers are usually simpler than less popular languages. Many English nouns can be turned into plurals by simply adding -s, whereas the German system requires much more memorization. Is that why English has become the dominate language worldwide? Perhaps popular languages have simpler grammars because they cover larger…

An analysis of a 160,000-year-old archaic human molar fossil discovered in China points to a different evolutionary path a rare trait primarily found in modern Asians than previously accepted timelines after Homo sapiens dispersed from Africa. The study centers on a three-rooted lower molar and reveals the first morphological evidence of interbreeding between H. sapiens and the Denisovans, a sister group of Neanderthals.  In a previous study, Shara Bailey, a professor of anthropology at New York University and the paper's lead author,  and colleagues concluded that the…