Anthropology
laelaps | June 29, 2009Against all hope I brought my camera along with me. Special exhibitions do not usually let you take photos, and soon after I arrived at the Discovery Times Square Exhibition with Amanda and her boyfriend J I was forced to hand over all my equipment. No cameras, no cell phones, no food, keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, &c.
Despite my disappointment, however, it was hard to be sad. I was going to see "Lucy", perhaps the most famous hominin fossil ever discovered, and the B-slab of "Ida", a much older fossil primate that kept me rather busy during the past month. I…
gregladen | June 27, 2009In case you didn't know, the marriage proposal launched by Jodi (asking Jason) and largely organized by Stephanie, has resulted in an answer.
Congratulation Jodi and Jason!
Not long before this internet round robin was launched, Jodi made a limited distribution, organized by Stephanie, of some background on their situation, and a version of this is what you see in the proposal itself.
That prompted me to think about marriage related issues a bit, which in turn prompted me to sit down with Jodi and have a private little talk with the girl. Which, of course, I will now share with the entire…
gregladen | June 25, 2009It was a rare day that I was at the Ngodingodi research station at all ... usually I was off in the forest with the Efe Pygmies, up the road excavating an archaeological site. It was also rare that Grinker, my cultural anthropologist colleague, was at the research station. He was spending most of his time in the villages learning language and waiting around for the other shoe to drop (he studied conflict, so on the average day ... not much conflict).
But then an even rarer thing happened.
As we sat, being rare and chatting about the weather, we heard a the sound of a distant truck…
ejohnson | June 24, 2009
In the course of anthropological history, several developments served to set humans apart from other mammals: Tools, language, and domestication all played an instrumental role in shaping our evolution. Now, Razib of Gene Expression reviews a recently published book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, that argues that the ability to extract maximum energy from food through cooking was the crucial factor in making Homo sapiens the planet's dominant species. In addition to releasing a greater number of calories per unit consumed, cooking also helped free up time and energy. "Instead of…
edyong | June 24, 2009Thirty-five thousands years before the likes of Kraftwerk, Nena and Rammstein, the lands of Germany were resounding to a very different sort of musical sound - tunes emanating from flutes made of bird bones and ivory. These thin tubes have recently been uncovered by Nicholas Conard from the University of Tubingen and they're some of the oldest musical instruments ever discovered.
The ancient flutes hail from the Hohle Fels Cave in Germany's Ach Valley, a veritable treasure trove of prehistoric finds that have also yielded the oldest known figurative art. The flutes were found less than a…
laelaps | June 23, 2009If you can handle some more hype about human evolution, here's a snippet from the (more or less) recent BBC documentary "The Ape That Took Over the World." It is about the controversial placement of Kenyanthropus in hominid evolution;
I do not have time to do a full write-up here (especially since I have not as yet seen the show in full), but the evolutionary placement of Kenyanthropus is more controversial than this clip admits. Kenyanthropus appears to be a hominin, but whether it represents a new genus, an already-known form of Australopithecus, or something else is still being debated.…
gregladen | June 23, 2009Near the end of the earth there are lines one might not cross for fear of falling off.
OK, you won't really fall off, but you will become scared and lost.
The area of my research in the Ituri was, by many standards, one of those places near the end of the earth, with the lines that have consequences if you cross them. This region of Africa, with complex and important topography, was the last to be figured out by Western explorers and geographers. As recently as 1889, Europeans thought that the Semliki River flowed from the Rwenzori Mountains into Lake Albert, and most people did not know…
laelaps | June 22, 2009Fossil teeth can be tricky things. In 1922 paleontologist H.F. Osborn believed that he had found the first evidence of an extinct fossil ape from North America on the basis of a worn molar from Nebraska, but it later turned out to be the tooth of a prehistoric peccary. Four years later, by contrast, Davidson Black named a new species of ancient human on the basis of a handful of teeth recovered from Dragon Bone Hill in China. These turned out to belong to Homo erectus. Both paleontologists made bold steps on the basis of sparingly little evidence, but with entirely different outcomes.
Last…
gregladen | June 20, 2009Through the filter of time ... a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago.
Admit it. Once you discovered Alta Vista's Babel software you did this: You entered a phrase to translate from your native language to some other language, then translated it back again to see what would happen. Or, you translated it through several different languages.
Whether you've done that or not, via Rosetta Rants, we have this site, which will translate your phrase through one of two pathways. One is via French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The other includes Japanese…
gregladen | June 20, 2009The first time I ever caught a bowfin (Amia calva)I was shocked and amazed at this fish. It was green .... really green like beyond fresh water fish green .... with a fancy spot on the upper part of the back of its dorsal fin. And it had one impressive dorsal fin. It was whopping big and took a while to land.
When I caught that fish, I had a plastic worm lure with which I was trying to catch the mocking bass. The mocking bass is a specific individual large mouth bass or, as Julia called them back in those days, "big mouth bass." The mocking bass hangs on a sandy spot that looked like a…
edyong | June 19, 2009Talking with someone comes so naturally that we forget sometimes how skilful it is. Rhythms of conversation and cues of grammar need to be judged so that people can take their turns at talking without cutting off their partner or without leaving pregnant pauses. The former is rude, the latter awkward.
That's certainly how things are usually conducted in English, but a new study suggests that this pattern of turn-taking applies across human cultures. By studying 10 languages from all over the world, Tanya Stivers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics discovered a universally…
laelaps | June 15, 2009The skull of a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), photographed at the AMNH's "Extreme Mammals" exhibit.[Author's note: This post gets a little bit graphic, so those who are made squeamish by taphonomy might want to skip this one.]
There was something funny about the assemblage of Homo erectus fossils found at Dragon Bone Hill in Zhoukoudian, China. There were plenty of teeth and skulls but scarcely any post-cranial remains. Where were the bodies?
The majority of Homo erectus fossils from Zhoukoudian were discovered and studied by an international team of scientists during the 1920's and 1930's…
laelaps | June 14, 2009
The skull of the Taung child (Australopithecus africanus); the fragmentary remains of Orrorin; the scattered bones of Homo erectus from Dragon Bone Hill; a skullcap of a young Paranthropus from Swartkrans, South Africa. What do all these hominin fossils have in common? They all bear the tell-tale marks of predators, from birds of prey to gigantic hyenas, and run distinctly against the notion that humans have always dominated the landscape. There have always been toothy shadows that stalked the night during our history, and the significance of this fact is the focus of Donna Hart and Robert…
edyong | June 14, 2009
Discriminating against people who do not speak your language is a big problem. A new study suggests that the preferences that lead to these problems are hard-wired at a very young age. Even five-month-old infants, who can't speak themselves, have preferences for native speakers and native accents.
The human talent for language is one of our crowning evolutionary achievements, allowing us to easily and accurately communicate with our fellows. But as the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel relates, linguistic differences can serve to drive us apart and act as massive barriers between…
gregladen | June 8, 2009Last week, a very bad thing happened to me, a life changing experience, the kind of thing many people with blogs would tell everyone about, trolling for sympathy and making everyone feel bad. Well, I am certainly not above doing that, but strategically I've decided to tell only a few people what is going on, and everyone else ... well, I'm going to leave you in a state of wondering. Which, of course, is my own narcissistic way of getting attention.
Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence. ... "There was no dinner," she said. "It was me…
laelaps | June 4, 2009Not so long ago it seemed that the "Lucy's Legacy" exhibit, which features the world's most famous fossil hominin, was coming to an end. The exhibition failed to bring in the crowds that were expected and there were doubts as to whether it would continue. According to a story about the exceptionally-talented paleo-artist Viktor Deak that appeared in this week's New York Times, however, it looks like Lucy is coming to Manhattan;
[Deak's] 78-foot-long mural showing six million years' worth of the proto-humans whose bony bits have been found in northeast Africa is coming to Manhattan in June as…
gregladen | June 3, 2009One fall afternoon ... I was summoned to... a windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. ... four-inch metal pins were affixed... to my vertebrae at regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it. ... I'd been told that this "posture photo" was ... routine... Those whose pins described ... erratic postural curve were required to attend remedial posture classes.
1995 New York Times by Ron Rosenbaum.
laelaps | June 3, 2009The face of Anoiapithecus. From Moya-Sola et al. (2009). One of the most controversial aspects of the whole Darwinius kerfuffle has been the primate's proposed status as "the ancestor of us all." The fossil, named "Ida", has been popularly touted as the "missing link" connecting us to all other mammals, but how can we really know if Darwinius fits this role? The truth is that we can't, and it is nearly impossible to parse direct ancestor-descendant relationships among fossil vertebrates, especially when we're talking about a fossil that lived over 40 million years before the first hominins…
gregladen | June 2, 2009This question is shorthand for a larger and more nuanced set of questions that has emerged over the last 24 hours here and here as people engage in this very interesting and important discussion about rape, especially wartime rape and related post-apocalyptic rape cultures.
"The switch" is a term I first heard from a student, who wrote a term paper for me on this in 1993. The basic idea of a switch would be supported if more or less randomly (though age biased, likely) selected men, put into a certain situation, tended to commit rape on a much larger scale ... or more exactly, a much…
laelaps | June 2, 2009The exceptionally preserved skeleton of Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One.Last month an international team of paleontologists lifted the veil on one of the most spectacular fossils ever discovered; a 47-million-year-old primate they named Darwinius masillae. It was a major event, but not everything went as planned. This fossil, popularly known as "Ida", immediately sparked a controversy about the relationship between science and the media, the ethics of buying fossils from private collectors, and what our distant primate ancestors were like.
Indeed, the media blitz promoting…