Category: anthropology
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10,000 years ago there were no “Southeast Asians”
Mexico: Ancient woman suggests diverse migration: A scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought, researchers say. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History on Thursday released…
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Knowledge is not value-free
This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something. I think knowledge of many…
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Differences in swine flu response by population
Remember when there was talk about how SARS might disproportionately hit Chinese in comparison to other populations? Here’s a new paper on how Swine Flu may progress in different populations, Clinical Findings and Demographic Factors Associated With ICU Admission in Utah Due to Novel 2009 Influenza A(H1N1) Infection: The ICU cohort of 47 influenza patients…
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Monkeys are more complicated than you’d think
Generous Leaders and Selfish Underdogs: Pro-Sociality in Despotic Macaques: Actively granting food to a companion is called pro-social behavior and is considered to be part of altruism. Recent findings show that some non-human primates behave pro-socially. However, pro-social behavior is not expected in despotic species, since the steep dominance hierarchy will hamper pro-sociality. We show…
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Culture & genomics
Interesting post, Culture and the human genome: a synthesis of genetics and the human sciences, at Replicated Typo. Looks like an interesting blog, not updated that often, but the posts have value-add. Definitely adding to my RSS reader. My main complaint about the weblog are the annoying little Snap div pops. Is there anyone […]
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Agriculture & health in the pre-Columbian period
I’ve been interested in the transition toward agriculture, and its relationship to human health, for a while. There seem to have been two dominant paradigms in anthropology over the past century. The first is that agriculture spread because it was supe…
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Height doesn’t always matter….
How universal are human mate choices? Size doesn’t matter when Hadza foragers are choosing a mate:It has been argued that size matters on the human mate market: both stated preferences and mate choices have been found to be non-random with respect to h…