Anthropology

The next time you need to get a creative boost, try playing a video game. Not all day, that is the road to unemployment, but taking a break to play an open-ended building game, like Minecraft, has been found to increase creativity. Especially if you just do whatever you'd like. An experimental study compared the effect of playing Minecraft to watching a TV show or playing a race car video game. Those given the freedom to play Minecraft without instruction were most creative. If you are not familiar with it, Minecraft was originally created in 2009 as a brilliantly fast generating world,…

The fossilized skull of a Paleolithic adult man from around 33,000 years ago and known as the Cioclovina calvaria has been extensively studied. But there was controversy over trauma on the skull--specifically a large fracture on the right aspect of the cranium and whether that specific fracture occurred at the time of death or as a postmortem event. Computer simulations using twelve synthetic bone spheres tested scenarios such as falls from various heights as well as single or double blows from rocks or bats. Along with these simulations, the authors inspected the fossil both visually and…

It was said there was a 'rainbow wave' of LGBTQ voters after the Trump presidency and a new survey analysis set out to find what makes them tick.  To do so, authors distilled results a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults collected by Survey Sampling International after the November 2018 polls. They hoped to gain a deeper understanding of the political motivations of LGBTQ people and identify sexual, gender and queer identity gaps in liberalism.  The authors found both. Tensions between trans individuals and liberalism were evident, while confirming lesbian/gay liberalism…

If revenue numbers are true, gun manufacturers don't like when Democrats are in the White House. During the Clinton and Obama administrations gun sales did quite well, because Democrats are perceived by Republicans as more inclined to ban things and people who may not have been motivated to buy guns did, because they worried about bans. Yet it may not be Democrats causing an uptick in purchases, it could be media making the public think mass shootings will cause Democrats to ban them.  A new paper says they are first to quantify the influence of news media stories on firearm prevalence.…

When choosing a halal holiday, Muslim travel destinations are based on more than the location and the hotel. They also factor in Islamic religious values, such as Iman (faith) which may mean halal food, segregated facilities for men and women, prayer facilities and avoiding haram - things forbidden or proscribed by Islamic law. A recent paper in the International Journal of Tourism Research suggests that if companies want a bigger piece of the halal Muslim market they should develop products and services that are Sharia- compliant. Halal tourism market is estimated to grow to $186…

Many people feel the need to live in important times, so they complain about how much worse things are today. But scientists studying the ancient ruins of Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, found that its inhabitants - 3,500 to 8,000 people at its peak - experienced overcrowding, infectious diseases, violence and environmental problems. And that was 9,000 years ago. Sorry readers of The Guardian, it wasn't better then. One ne of the world's first large farming communities were also among the first humans to complain about modern urban living. Excavations of Neolithic buildings at Catalhoyuk.…

The Neolithic period, the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of civilizations, began about 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture in the Epipalaeolithic Near East. It spread to other parts of the world. It provides not just the first evidence of farming, it also provides early evidence of gender inequality. according to a paper by researchers from the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Seville who study prehistoric societies in the Neolithic Period in the Iberian Peninsula. They conclude that the Neolithic is the first evidence of gender differences…

In a recent paper, Lehigh University anthropologist Professor Allison Mickel says archaeological excavations are often led by foreigners from the West while dependent on the labor of people from the local community, a relic of Western colonial and imperial pursuits.  Examining some of this history specifically in the context archaeological excavations undertaken in the Middle East, Mickel wrote: "Even well into the 20th century, locally hired excavation workers continued to benefit little from working on archaeological projects, still predominantly directed by European and American…

Beinecke MS 408, commonly called the Voynich manuscript (after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who bought it in Italy), has long been dismissed as gibberish by most, but beginning in 1915, and certainly since the 1960s, it has also been a source of fascination for people who believe it must be a code. Or a recipe book. Or something. It is actually a proto-Romance language, according to a new paper. It just had never been written before because educated people used Latin, says Dr. Gerard Cheshire. So uneducated people wrote in a language from 2000 years earlier? Cheshire claims it took "lateral…

Do you vape? A new paper suggests you may have been abused as a child - at least in statistical parsing of a small survey. A sample of 208 people aged 18-21 was used to create a correlation between childhood maltreatment and e-cigarette use, and explored the potential role of impulsivity in linking childhood maltreatment to e-cigarette use via a series of models controlling for demographic characteristics. Other papers have claimed that smoking is caused by childhood maltreatment but this is the first to claim a link between nicotine vapor and child abuse. "Young adults exposed to [childhood…