Anthropology
Category archives for Anthropology
I See Dead People Everywhere
Posted by Greg Laden on January 24, 2011 And most of them are boys with their toys
Miss A and Miss W, Sexual Jealousy, and Julian Assange
Posted by Greg Laden on January 1, 2011 Almost Diamonds has two interesting posts on the Julian Assange sexual assault/rape accusation/charges. I want to make a comment on part of the second post, but this may not make a lot of sense to you until you read both of them. They are concise and compelling so you will not regret the time you…
Alan Dershowitz to Mike Huckabee: Enjoy your new orifice!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 17, 2010 First, the video. Then, if you’re good, I’ll tell you an Alan Dershowitz story. It involves Stephen Jay Gould.
Fast, Cheap and Ooops. NASA’s NanoSail may be dead, but it was not that big of a deal.
Posted by Greg Laden on December 13, 2010 Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is part of my own personal enigma. I have shown it to people who don’t know me, who don’t know what I think about, who don’t know much about what I study. Nineteen out of twenty such people react in this matter: A cold stare with underlying anger for…
Elephant Tracks and Child Safety Devices
Posted by Greg Laden on December 10, 2010 It is probably true that every culture has child safety devices. It is also probably true that all of these devices are very limited in their effectiveness.
The Fetish in relation to Skepticism
Posted by Greg Laden on November 26, 2010 I was just glancing through the blog of Katheryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a book about people who were wrong about stuff, often big stuff (for example, she talks about individuals who spent decades in jail owing to false convictions). Meantime, I’m working on posts related to the…
The Feast
Posted by Greg Laden on November 25, 2010 The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent…
Introduction 2 Archaeology
Posted by Greg Laden on November 19, 2010 Video 1: Dan meets Alice, Alice pwns Dan. Video 2: Dan meets Alice, gets her name wrong. Dan pwned again.
Ellen Lutz
Posted by Greg Laden on November 8, 2010 Ellen Lutz, former Executive Director for the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution and for the last six years or so Executive Director of Cultural Survival, has died. I received this rom Cultural Survival:
What is the most important human adaptation?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 22, 2010 Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some…
Why do women shop and men hunt?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2010 Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)? This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The…
A study in dialects
Posted by Greg Laden on October 7, 2010 … of English:
Shamans, Surgery, and the Driveway of Doom
Posted by Greg Laden on September 21, 2010 In which I explore the interface between the Jungian Subconscious and my own primordial anguish.
Those were the days … when a physicist could murder a counterfeiter in the name of the King
Posted by Greg Laden on September 7, 2010 William Chaloner reminds me of a handful of people I’ve known. He possessed a sense of entitlement balanced by a remarkable capacity for greed and tempered with an acute sociopathy. He clearly had a keen intellect and extraordinary manual skill. When Isaac Newton murdered Chaloner (to put it the way Chaloner would put it) he…
Sex at Dawn
Posted by Greg Laden on August 9, 2010 From Skeptically Speaking: We talk to author Christopher Ryan about his new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. We’ll discuss the most recent science and theories, and how social norms compare to our biological impulses. This Friday. Details here. I may have to read this book.
Why did the Tasmanians Stop Eating Fish?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 8, 2010 Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were…
Persistent ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method used to ‘adjust’ the test
Posted by Greg Laden on August 4, 2010 It is well established among those who carry out, analyze, and report pre-employment performance testing that slope-based bias in those tests is rare. Why is this important? Look at the following three graphs from a recent study by Aguinis, Culpepper and Pierce (2010):
Barry Glassner, Fear, Poor people and their babies: Friday!
Posted by Greg Laden on July 29, 2010 I’ve been interested forever in human perceptions of risk and culturally mediated fear. I got to work with some of the cook risk perception people at the Kennedy School of Government for a while (as a bystander), and as an archaeologist, I find the question of risk and fear important in human foraging (and other)…
Sociosexually, what is “safe”?
Posted by Greg Laden on July 29, 2010 Are you a “safe guy”? Or do you know someone who (you or he or some else thinks) is? Stephanie Zvan has written about this at Quiche Moraine, and I think I might have been living in a different world than Stephanie’s because my experience has always been that the attribute of “safeness” is a…
Putting Exodus into Words: The sed Bible Translation Project
Posted by Greg Laden on June 21, 2010 So, a while ago, Ben Zvanwas talking about doing something with the Bible, which would involve processing the text through some filters and recompiling it. This sort of thing has always interested me: Not recompiling the bible, but rather, textual analysis in general using the basic material stripped of intended meaning by classifying and ordering…
The Queen Cares about the English Language
Posted by Greg Laden on June 10, 2010 The Queen’s got a point: (Hat tip, Jennifer Ouellette)
I don’t mind that you don’t really understand the term “passive aggressive.”
Posted by Greg Laden on June 9, 2010 Or … What I had for breakfast. I just got the Caribou Coffee trivia question wrong. I got it so wrong that the Barista stared at me in disbelief for a moment, then blurted out the correct answer with audible snark and disappointment. If I told you what the question was (and that is not…
A run in my stocking is not a worn out salmon: Response to Mark Liberman
Posted by Greg Laden on June 1, 2010 I’m very please that my discussion of the “we can’t ever know what a word is” Internet meme has elicited a response from Mark Liberman at Language Log. (here) Mark was very systematic in his comments, so I will be very systematic in my responses.
Minifalsehood: We can’t tell what a word is!?!?
Posted by Greg Laden on May 31, 2010 I am looking at the question: How many words are there in a language? I’d like to know for languages in general, comparatively, and for pedagogical reasons, in some well known western language which may as well be English. What I found quite incidentally is a hornets nest of curmudgeonistic pedanticmaniacal jibberishosity. (There. Whatever the…
The Actual Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival
Posted by Greg Laden on April 1, 2010 And now, it is time for the April 1st edition of Four Stone Hearth, the four field Anthropological Blog Carnival. Our first submission is from Somatosphere, a blog about Science, Medicine and Anthropology, and it is about the discover of Big Foot in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania! No kidding, this time they REALLY FOUND…
Chimpanzee Food Sharing
Posted by Greg Laden on February 10, 2010 Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex? One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the…
Where Blacks, Whites and Orientals Fall on Various Traits
Posted by Greg Laden on December 29, 2009 This is Chart 1 from Race, Evolutoin and Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton, originally published in the Unabridged Edition of same.
Neolithic Cannibalism
Posted by Greg Laden on December 6, 2009 Cannibalism has been documented again and again in archaeological contexts, as part of normative human behavior. Here’s a recent report (I’ve not looked yet at the original) from the German Neolithic: Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports. The authors say their…
The Taming of the Shrewd: “Get her drunk then get her done”
Posted by Greg Laden on December 1, 2009 “Get her drunk then get her done.” So reads one of the decals on the F-150 pickup truck parked in my new neighbor’s driveway. Of all the objectionable aphorisms on that particular truck, that’s the mildest one. I wonder what my daughter will think of that when she notices it some time over the next…
Every Culture Has A ….
Posted by Greg Laden on November 13, 2009 … has a what!?!?
, which is now available for the 
