Anthropology
Category archives for Anthropology
Does Your Genealogy Reveal Amazing Anthropological Stories?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 26, 2013 
I gave a talk at the Brookdale Public Library last night as part of the celebration of DNA day. DNA Day, or DNAD for short, was created about the time of the “completion” (more or less) of the Human Genome in 2003, and is set to be on the date of the publication of the…
Meat Eating in Human Prehistory
Posted by Greg Laden on April 20, 2013 
All human hunter-gatherer groups that have been studied incorporate meat in their diets. Studies have shown that the total dietary contribution of meat varies a great deal, and seems to increase with latitude so that foragers in subarctic and arctic regions eat a lot of meat while those living near the equator eat less. It…
Noble Savages: Napoleon Chagnon’s Fierce Book
Posted by Greg Laden on April 5, 2013 
Napoleon Chagnon spent years living among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and wrote, among other things, a classic ethnography still used widely in anthropology classes. It came to pass that Chagnon and his ethnography came under scrutiny, actually a few waves of scrutiny, from practitioners of cultural anthropology in part because his monograph depicted the Yanomamo…
What the heck is Vocal Fry?
Posted by Greg Laden on January 7, 2013 
Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t even know what the heck Vocal Fry is. Apparently some people have gotten really annoyed about it, as it is a speech mannerism that has emerged among young folks, who are always annoying, and especially females, who are always annoying. Apparently. (I also did not know that until…
Palaeowomaen: Barbara Isaac, Women in The Field, and The Throwing Hypothesis
Posted by Greg Laden on January 5, 2013 
Following on discussion arising from this post, here is a revised discussion of throwing in human evolution. The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this sort of topic, they are very often…
How many people were killed as Witches in Europe from 1200 to the present?
Posted by Greg Laden on December 2, 2012 
I recently came across a reference to the total number of people killed for being Witches in Europe since the historically documented practice began in the early Middle Ages. (The idea of Witches is much broader than the European practice.) The number was in the tens of thousands. Looking at the reference for this in…
The Feast (A Thanksgiving Day Story)
Posted by Greg Laden on November 22, 2012 Today is Thanksgiving in the US. Happy Thanksgiving. Let us being with a word of advice: TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER NAO!!! And now … a feast.
A word or two about tobacco, and some neat and new research
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2012 Over the last few weeks I’ve run into a few misconceptions about tobacco, as well as some interesting news, so I thought I’d share. If you already know some of this, forgive me, not everyone else does. First, tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum, is a member of the Solanaceae family of plants, which from a human perspective…
The argument that different races have genetically determined differences in intelligence
Posted by Greg Laden on December 26, 2011 This post started out as a comment that would have gone here, but it became sufficiently long and possibly interesting that I figured it would make a good, if somewhat rough, blog post.
soda. pop. snap.
Posted by Greg Laden on November 30, 2011 The other day, and I kid you not, I saw someone say to someone else “would you like a soda” and the person stared back and said “why would I want a soda” and a third party repeated the question, only saying “would you like a pop” and the person said “yes, very much, thank…
Culture and Tradition
Posted by Greg Laden on November 26, 2011 Science Education Researcher Marie-Claire Shanahan, primatologist Eric Michael Johnson, and I joined Desiree Schell on on Skeptically Speaking to have a conversation very apropos this time of year in The West: The concept of Tradition. We said a number of very smart things which you can hear by clicking here and listening to the podcast.…
Tradition!!!!
Posted by Greg Laden on November 18, 2011 Tradition. Not just a song from Fiddler on the Roof. You know the refrain: “The Papa, the Papa! Tradition.” It’s a great play but it is firmly rooted in the patriarchy, as “tradition” often is. There are many ways to define “tradition” and we can look it up somewhere and have a flameware over dictionary…
“Copiale Cipher” Cracked
Posted by Greg Laden on October 25, 2011 It is a document linked to a secret society. Here is the translated text
Cannibal, Native, Indigenous
Posted by Greg Laden on September 28, 2011 Three words used to describe “others” in Western literature. This topic came up in a previous post, and made me wonder what Google Ngram had to say about it. I made three different graphs because the scales are so vastly different (owing among other things, I’m sure, to multiple uses of the words). Here they…
You come from Cannibals
Posted by Greg Laden on September 28, 2011 A man “lies crumpled on the sand … Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even to check…
Among Cannibals
Posted by Greg Laden on August 7, 2011 I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the “tribal” people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or…
Driving The Patriarchy: Demonic Males, Feminism, and Genetic Determinism
Posted by Greg Laden on July 7, 2011 Behaviors are not caused by genes. There is not a gene that causes you to be good, or to be bad, or to be smart, or good at accounting, or to like bananas. There are, however, drives. “Drives” is a nicely vague term that we can all understand the meaning of. Thirst and hunger are…
“Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper
Posted by Greg Laden on May 29, 2011 Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. “Richard Tokumei” is the pen name of a ‘writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley” and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who…
The Apocalypse really is happening and the Rapture went off without a hitch
Posted by Greg Laden on May 22, 2011 It’s all just a matter of calibration. Let me ‘splain.
On the Move
Posted by Greg Laden on May 20, 2011 On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups, edited by Sue Boinski and Paul Garber is a compendium of academic research on … well, on how and why animals travel in groups. Notice of this book is a fitting start to a series of reviews of migration-related books that is part of Migration…
The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living
Posted by Greg Laden on May 10, 2011 A lot of paleolithic diet and exercise books, many how to be a hunter-gatherer guides for the suburbanites, and numerous biologically-based-sounding self-help volumes based mainly on woo have been produced since The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living was published in 1989. To my knowledge, none of the…
Falsehood: “If this was the Stone Age, I’d be dead by now”
Posted by Greg Laden on May 1, 2011 It is generally thought that life expectancy in the past was less that it is today for our species as a whole and in the case of industrialized countries in particular. However, this belief counts as a falsehood not because it is untrue (it is, in fact, true) but because many people get this idea…
How did humans get so smart?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 17, 2011 There is no evidence that they did, but abundant evidence that they didn’t. One example of this is found in how business in the US handle the inevitability of future rising costs of energy, and along with this collection of individual behaviors, the way the free market, the most intelligent and powerful of human activities,…
What is your comfort zone?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 13, 2011 Today, I took out the trash. I may or may not have taken the trash out last week, but I can tell you that the last time I did take it out, whenever it was, I had to drag the trash barrel across ice. Yesterday I went to the gym without a coat or jacket.…
Patricia Ryan: Don’t insist on English!
Posted by Greg Laden on April 2, 2011 At TEDxDubai, longtime English teacher Patricia Ryan asks a provocative question: Is the world’s focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages? (For instance: what if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL?) It’s a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas.
Jamie Jones on The Anthropology Maneno
Posted by Greg Laden on March 9, 2011 I did not have a chance to write about the Anthropology fracas that erupted several weeks ago, and I probably won’t for a while. But Jamie Jones did. When I met him Jamie was a grad student in the Anthro department at the small eastern college I got my PhD at. He and I taught…
How long is a generation?
Posted by Greg Laden on March 1, 2011 How long is a generation, you ask? Short Answer: 25 years, but a generation ago it was 20 years. Long answer: It depends on what you mean by generation. In US-biased Western culture there is a Biological Generation, the Dynamic Generation, the somewhat different Familial Generation, what is sometimes called a Cultural Generation but that…
How to carry your monkey home once you’ve killed it
Posted by Greg Laden on February 2, 2011 Once you’ve killed the monkey, you need to carry it back to camp. Slit the tail, near the end, and poke the head through the slit, so the tail makes a handy strap. Here’s a detail:
How to kill a monkey
Posted by Greg Laden on January 31, 2011 An Efe (Pygmy) man making poison arrows for use in killing monkeys. Ituri Forest, Zaire. Photograph Copyrighted 1986 Greg Laden
Falsehoods: Human Universals
Posted by Greg Laden on January 26, 2011 There are human universals. There, I said it. Now give me about a half hour to explain why this is both correct and a Falsehood. But first, some background and definition.
, which is now available for the 
