Browsed by
Category: Anthropology

The white men seemed like lightning from heaven but their shit smelled just like ours

The white men seemed like lightning from heaven but their shit smelled just like ours

Comments 0 Comment

  Sean Flynn writes: Long after missionaries and Europeans settled on the coast of New Guinea in the 19th century, the mountainous interior remained unexplored. As recently as the 1920s, outsiders believed the mountains, which run the length of the island from east to west, were too steep and rugged for anyone to live there. But when gold was discovered 40 miles inland, prospectors went north across the Coral Sea to seek their fortunes. Among them were three brothers from…

Read More Read More

The first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe

The first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe

Comments 0 Comment

Jennifer Raff writes: Last month’s release of The Ice Bridge, an episode in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series The Nature of Things has once again revived public discussion of a controversial idea about how the Americas were peopled known as the “Solutrean hypothesis”. This idea suggests a European origin for the peoples who made the Clovis tools, the first recognized stone tool tradition in the Americas. As I was one of the experts appearing on the documentary, I want to…

Read More Read More

The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think

The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think

Comments 0 Comment

The universal sign for ‘Look over there!’ isn’t so common in some cultures. Helena Ohman/Shutterstock.com By Kensy Cooperrider, University of Chicago Octopuses have long arms and plenty of smarts, but they don’t point. Nor do chimps, gorillas or other apes, at least not in the wild. Humans, on the other hand, are prodigious pointers. Infants use the gesture before they can talk, often around 1 year of age. By 2, they’ll waddle around, their forefingers sweeping over the world like…

Read More Read More

Neanderthals developed art earlier than modern humans

Neanderthals developed art earlier than modern humans

Comments 0 Comment

Carl Zimmer writes: The two new studies don’t just indicate that Neanderthals could make cave art and jewelry. They also establish that Neanderthals were making these things long before modern humans — a blow to the idea that they simply copied their cousins. The earliest known cave paintings made by modern humans are only about 40,000 years old, while Neanderthal cave art is at least 24,000 years older. The oldest known shell jewelry made by modern humans is about 70,000…

Read More Read More

Britain left Stone Age 4,500 years ago as early Britons were replaced by metalworking migrants

Britain left Stone Age 4,500 years ago as early Britons were replaced by metalworking migrants

Comments 0 Comment

BBC News reports: The ancient population of Britain was almost completely replaced by newcomers about 4,500 years ago, a study shows. The findings mean modern Britons trace just a small fraction of their ancestry to the people who built Stonehenge. The astonishing result comes from analysis of DNA extracted from 400 ancient remains across Europe. The mammoth study, published in Nature, suggests the newcomers, known as Beaker people, replaced 90% of the British gene pool in a few hundred years….

Read More Read More

New paper links ancient drawings and the origins of language

New paper links ancient drawings and the origins of language

Comments 0 Comment

Peter Dizikes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor. More precisely, some specific features of cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language capabilities evolved, according to a new paper co-authored by MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa. A key to this idea is that cave art is often located in acoustic “hot spots,” where sound echoes strongly, as some scholars have observed. Those…

Read More Read More

Paleolithic parenting and animated GIFs

Paleolithic parenting and animated GIFs

Comments 0 Comment

The creation of the moving image represents a technical advance in the arts comparable with the invention of the steam engine during the industrial revolution. The transition from static to moving imagery was a watershed event in human history, through which people discovered a new way of capturing the visible world — or so it seemed. It turns out, however, that long before the advent of civilization, our Paleolithic forebears figured out that movement seen in living creatures around them…

Read More Read More

Britain First and the first Britons

Britain First and the first Britons

Comments 0 Comment

  The white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” (borrowing this phrase from the Nazis’ Blut und Boden) think white-skinned people have a special claim to the lands of Europe and North America. This is an arrogant and ignorant belief to hold on this side of the Atlantic where every white person has immigrant ancestry originating from Europe, but European whiteness in terms of origin (not superiority) is a less controversial notion. That is to say, even among those of…

Read More Read More