Anthropology
gregladen | March 5, 2009Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather non-Darwinian things to do. This idea has been explored and talked about in many ways by many people. Kurt Vonegut Jr.'s character in Galapagos repeatedly, in a state of lament, quips "Thanks, Big Brain..." as evidence accumulates that our inevitable march towards extinction is primarily a…
sheril | March 4, 2009Guest post by Brian Hare, Evolutionary Anthropologist at Duke University
Last month, a 200 pound male chimpanzee named Travis mauled a woman outside the home where he has been living with his owner Sandra Herold. Charla Nash was nearly killed by Travis and now has life changing wounds to her face while Travis was stabbed by his owner with a butcher knife and shot dead by the police.
Was this incidence preventable or just a freak accident? Should chimpanzees and other primates be kept as pets? What is the effect of the primate pet trade not only on the welfare of these "pets" but on their…
laelaps | March 4, 2009
The Burlington County skull. From Hrdlicka's Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America.
By 1859 it had become established that humans had a more ancient history than had previously been known, but just how old was Homo sapiens? This was a pivotal question, for the area of the world that could claim the oldest vestiges of humanity could provide crucial clues about the evolution and dispersal of our species. Asia, with its open plains and "vigorous climate", seemed like the best place to look for the stock from which humans arose but traces of prehistoric humans…
gregladen | March 4, 2009And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and a little patient. This is because a handful of words, including Who, You, Two, Five, Three and I exist across a range of languages as close cognates, and can be reconstructed as similar ancestral utterances in ancestral languages.
It's like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight…
gregladen | March 2, 2009Only one person on the crew spoke English, and this was the same person, a young woman named Akiko, who called herself a "production assistant," with whom I'd been in communication to arrange this whole thing, over the last many months.
The crew was from Japan and they were filming a documentary on evolution. Someone who knew someone who knew someone had attended a talk I had given a couple of years earlier at the University in Tokyo, and the producers of this documentary thought it would be interesting to include me in their documentary. The initial contact had been by phone from Akiko…
laelaps | March 2, 2009[Last night New Brunswick was buried under several inches of snow, shutting down the university and giving me the day off. I have been using my free time to get some reading done and work on a few projects but I did not want to neglect this blog. Here are the first several pages of the chapter on human evolution from Life's Splendid Riddle, the book in-progress I have so often mentioned here. I still do not have an agent and am unsure whether this book will ever make it to shelves, but I could not resist sharing this sample with you. Enjoy.]
Not long after the earth had been given form, when…
laelaps | February 27, 2009
The "Hottentot Venus", drawn from a wax cast made in Paris. From The Human Race.
On December 31, 1816 Saartje Baartman died in Paris. She had been ill for three days, perhaps stricken with smallpox, before she and her unborn child expired. Better known as the "Hottentot Venus", Baartman was a celebrity in Europe known for being the antithesis of the European concept of beauty. She was a dark-skinned member of the Khoikhoi tribe of South Africa* with buttocks so large that they mesmerized Europeans. She was treated as a sideshow attraction, marveled at by scholars and the public alike.
*[I…
ddobbs | February 27, 2009I drove up to Montreal yesterday, and amid visits with anthropologist and Somatosphere founder Eugene Raikhel, anthropologist Allan Young, and Suparna Choudhury, talked about (among other things) the emerging new area of study they're calling "critical neuroscience."
What the heck is critical neuroscience? Well, one definition calls it
the attempt to assess and inform neuroscientific practice from a rich interdisciplinary perspective, and to categorize, evaluate and (begin to) manage the various risks resulting from neuroscience and its results and applications
.
Daniel Lende, one of the…
gregladen | February 25, 2009The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability ... or lack thereof ... to bear offspring. But this is hardly ever considered in the parodies we see of these differences.
[Repost from Gregladen.com]
You have all seen the sometimes funny, sometimes not cartoon depictions of these differences, for example this one:
Obviously,…
gregladen | February 25, 2009 Why is there no Birth Control Pill for men?
The answer I'd like to propose can be summed up in two closely linked words pilfered from the question itself:
Men. Control.
Myriad aspects of life can be understood by recognizing a single critical fact, and the layered, sometimes complex, deeply biological effects of that fact. Males, by definition, can't have babies.
All mammalian males contribute to the reproductive endeavor, but often this contribution consists of a single cell, one per offspring. True, that cell contains a haploid copy of the male's DNA, the quality of which is…
gregladen | February 24, 2009Is 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 Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…
laelaps | February 17, 2009Everyone knows that 1859 was the year in which Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published, but there was a significant event in September of that same year that is often overlooked. It involved the new understanding that humans and extinct mammals (like sabercats and mammoths) had lived alongside one another in ancient Europe. This may not seem like a particularly controversial point now (who today could imagine "cave men" without mammoths and woolly rhinoceros plodding about the landscape?) but during the first half of the 19th century it was…
gregladen | February 16, 2009So Amanda and I arrive at some public building in a largish Midwestern city. I'm a scientist, here to sit on a panel for a public discussion related to science and education. The building, a library, is not open yet but is scheduled to open in a few minutes. There are two groups of people standing in the flurries and chilly wind waiting for opening. The larger group is pressed against the door, seemingly anxious, and I (incorrectly, it turns out) attribute this anxiety to the cold. I'm thinking they want to go inside because it is cold. All but two people in this group are brown to dark…
laelaps | February 16, 2009
An illustration of the Yale mastodon mount.
While planting corn on his Iowa farm around 1872 a farmer named Peter Mare found a curious carving. It was a smoking pipe in the shape of an elephant, a very odd item indeed, and he used it for its intended purpose until he moved to Kansas in 1878. At that time he gave it to his brother-in-law, but soon after a Reverend Gass came calling. Gass, an amateur archaeologist, wanted to purchase it, but the pipe was not for sale. Even so, the owner of the pipe allowed Gass to photograph it and make some casts, which he shared with the members of the…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
gregladen | February 9, 2009We're half way through Darwin Month, and only a tiny ways through the voyage. Need to hurry up! So, let's skip ahead a bit and hit the Gauchos....
reposted with minor modifications
Well, you don't really want to hit at Gaucho ... they hit back rather hard....
The Gauchos are the cowboys of the so-called Southern Cone and Pampas. The Gauchos are a Latin American version the horse mounted pastoralists that emerge wherever four things are found together: Grasslands, horses, people and cattle. Like all horse-mounted pastoralists, they have been known to have certain cultural tendencies or…
gregladen | February 3, 2009Well, the above statement, while true, is just a tiny bit beyond the peer reviewed paper I'm reporting to you today, but this paper supports the assertion and the results presented in the paper should not be a surprise to anyone.
Here's the basic idea:
If you focus on categorizing people into races at the expense of recognizing variation within these alleged racial groups, you will a) get 'good' at categorizing races, b) get bad at recognizing individual differences within the "other" races (other = not you), and c) become more racist.
If, on the other hand, you focus on ... learn, train…
edyong | January 22, 2009The area collectively known as Austronesia covers half the globe. It stretches from South-East Asia and Taiwan, across New Guinea and New Zealand, to the hundreds of small islands dotted around the Pacific. Today, it is home to about 400 million people.
They are the descendants of early humans who spread throughout the Pacific in prehistoric times. These forebears are long dead but they left several unexpectedly important legacies that are evident in their modern descendants. The languages they used evolved and splintered into over 1,200 tongues spoken by modern Austronesians. The bacteria…
laelaps | January 20, 2009A little more than halfway through the horror novel The Relic, a blood-spattered tale of a monster lurking in the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History, the scientist Greg Kawakita shows off his evolutionary extrapolation program to his colleague, Margo. It is a complex analysis system designed to take two DNA samples and spit out a hypothetical intermediate creature, essentially extrapolating what their common ancestor must have been like. In a test run, Greg has the computer scrutinize the DNA of a chimpanzee and a human;
Intermediate form morphological characteristics:
Gracile…
gregladen | January 11, 2009One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason why it is interesting. In addition, the Younger Dryas was a pretty big deal ... a climate change or something like a climate change that caused massive changes all around the earth, and fairly recently. But the cause of the Younger Dryas is at present unknown, although…