Browsed by
Category: Anthropology

How religion made us a successful species

How religion made us a successful species

Victor Kumar and Richmond Cambell write: For most of history, human populations were limited to small bands of around 150 members. After exceeding that size, a band would split and drift apart, the descendants forgetting their common ancestry. At some point in human history, however, bands were knit together into tribes—groups of groups—geographically distributed but linked by ethnicity, dialect, and common purpose. Tribes had an edge over bands because they enabled cooperation at a larger scale. One vital benefit was…

Read More Read More

New research upends conventional wisdom about how we burn calories

New research upends conventional wisdom about how we burn calories

Herman Pontzer writes: We’re often told our metabolism speeds up at puberty and slows down in middle age, particularly with menopause, and that men have faster metabolisms than women. None of these claims is based on real science. My colleagues and I have begun to fill that gap in scientific understanding. In 2014 John Speakman, a researcher in metabolism with laboratories at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen, organized an international effort…

Read More Read More

Genetic legacy of Denisovans may be shaping modern immune system of southwest Pacific populations

Genetic legacy of Denisovans may be shaping modern immune system of southwest Pacific populations

Science reports: When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysterious Denisovans who gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’ offspring from local diseases. Some of these variants still persist in the genomes of people living in Papua New Guinea today, according to a new…

Read More Read More

DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea

DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea

Derek R. Audette/Shutterstock By Irene Gallego Romero, The University of Melbourne and Davide Vespasiani, The University of Melbourne An encounter with a mysterious and extinct human relative – the Denisovans – has left a mark on the immune traits of modern Papuans, in particular those living on New Guinea Island. This is a new discovery we describe in a study published in PLoS Genetics today. It further suggests that our modern human diversity didn’t just evolve – some parts of…

Read More Read More

Cooked leftovers suggest Neanderthals were foodies

Cooked leftovers suggest Neanderthals were foodies

The Guardian reports: If you thought Neanderthals survived on a diet of foraged berries and uncooked animal flesh, think again. Charred remnants of what appears to be the world’s oldest cooked meal ever found have been unearthed in a cave complex in northern Iraq, prompting speculation that Neanderthals may have been foodies. “Our findings are the first real indication of complex cooking – and thus of food culture – among Neanderthals,” said Chris Hunt, a professor of cultural paleoecology at…

Read More Read More

Early humans may have cooked fish 780,000 years ago

Early humans may have cooked fish 780,000 years ago

Smithsonian magazine reports: Cooking with fire marked an important turning point in human evolution. But based on available evidence, determining exactly when early humans learned to cook is challenging. While researchers have discovered the remains of charred animals and root vegetables, that doesn’t necessarily mean people were grilling up steaks for dinner; they may have simply tossed a dead animal into the fire for disposal. Now, researchers in Israel say they’ve come up with a clever solution to this problem—and,…

Read More Read More

Ancient DNA reveals a hidden history of human adaptation

Ancient DNA reveals a hidden history of human adaptation

Chelms Varthoumlien / Unsplash By Yassine Souilmi, University of Adelaide; Christian Huber, Penn State, and Ray Tobler, Australian National University Humans may be just as vulnerable to environmental change as other animals, according to our new research analysing genetic data from more than a thousand people who lived across Europe and Asia over the past 45,000 years. We found traces of more than 50 “hard sweeps” in which a rare genetic variant rapidly swept through a population – most likely…

Read More Read More

Ancient humans were apex predators for two million years, study finds

Ancient humans were apex predators for two million years, study finds

Science Alert reports: Paleolithic cuisine was anything but lean and green, according to a study on the diets of our Pleistocene ancestors. For a good 2 million years, Homo sapiens and their ancestors ditched the salad and dined heavily on meat, putting them at the top of the food chain. It’s not quite the balanced diet of berries, grains, and steak we might picture when we think of ‘paleo’ food. But according to a study last year by anthropologists from…

Read More Read More

Neanderthals and modern humans may have copied each other’s tools

Neanderthals and modern humans may have copied each other’s tools

The Guardian reports: Modern humans lived alongside Neanderthals for more than 1,000 years in Europe, according to research that suggests the two species may have imitated each other’s jewellery and stone tools. Previously, it was known that humans and their ancient relatives existed at the same time on the European continent for more than 6,000 years and that the two species interbred on several occasions. But the extent of their interactions remains the focus of scientific investigation. The latest paper…

Read More Read More

The story of America’s ‘lost crops’ shows that the reign of corn was not inevitable

The story of America’s ‘lost crops’ shows that the reign of corn was not inevitable

Sarah Laskow writes: The development of agriculture, the Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe declared in 1935, was an event akin to the Industrial Revolution—a discovery so disruptive that it spread like the shocks of an earthquake, transforming everything in its path. Childe’s work on what he termed “the Neolithic Revolution” focused on just one site of innovation in the Near East, the famous Fertile Crescent, but over time archaeologists posited similar epicenters in the Yangtze River valley of East Asia…

Read More Read More

How did the patriarchy start – and will evolution get rid of it?

How did the patriarchy start – and will evolution get rid of it?

Many hunter gatherers have a long history of egalitarianism. DevonJenkin Photography/Shutterstock By Ruth Mace, UCL READER QUESTION: Many people assume the patriarchy has always been there, but surely this isn’t the case? How did it really originate? Matt, 48, London. The patriarchy, having been somewhat in retreat in parts of the world, is back in our faces . In Afghanistan, the Taliban once again prowl the streets more concerned with keeping women at home and in strict dress code than…

Read More Read More

Humans may have started tending animals almost 13,000 years ago

Humans may have started tending animals almost 13,000 years ago

Science News reports: Hunter-gatherer groups living in southwest Asia may have started keeping and caring for animals nearly 13,000 years ago — roughly 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. Ancient plant samples extracted from present-day Syria show hints of charred dung, indicating that people were burning animal droppings by the end of the Old Stone Age, researchers report September 14 in PLOS One. The findings suggest humans were using the dung as fuel and may have started animal tending during…

Read More Read More

Oldest human or just another ape? Row erupts over 7 million-year-old fossil

Oldest human or just another ape? Row erupts over 7 million-year-old fossil

The Observer reports: It is a dispute that has taken a long time to reach boiling point. Seven million years after an apelike creature – since nicknamed Toumaï – traversed the landscape of modern Chad, its means of mobility has triggered a dispute among fossil experts. Some claim this was the oldest member of the human lineage. Others that it was just an old ape. The row, kindled by a paper in Nature, last week led scientists to denounce opponents…

Read More Read More

An anthropologist schooled in spiritual healing offers wisdom for troubled times

An anthropologist schooled in spiritual healing offers wisdom for troubled times

Anna Badkhen writes: Once upon a time, in a thatched spirit hut in the Nigerien village of Tillaberi, the Songhay master sorcerer Adamu Jenitongo told the American anthropologist Paul Stoller that the bush was angry. “People who speak with two mouths and feel with two hearts anger the spirits of the bush,” Adamu Jenitongo said. “When the bush is angry there is not enough rain. When the bush is angry there is too much rain. When the bush is angry…

Read More Read More

What animal intelligence reveals about human stupidity

What animal intelligence reveals about human stupidity

By Rachel Nuwer, August 26, 2022 The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was, by all accounts, a miserable human being. He famously sought meaning through suffering, which he experienced in ample amounts throughout his life. Nietzsche struggled with depression, suicidal ideation, and hallucinations, and when he was 44 — around the height of his philosophical output — he suffered a nervous breakdown. He was committed to a mental hospital and never recovered. Although Nietzsche himself hated fascism and anti-Semitism, his…

Read More Read More

Seven-million-year-old femur suggests ancient human relative walked upright

Seven-million-year-old femur suggests ancient human relative walked upright

Nature reports: A battered fossil leg bone discovered more than 20 years ago in Chad is finally making its scientific debut. Researchers say that the remains, described today in Nature, show that a species called Sahelanthropus tchadensis was an ancient human relative that walked on two feet. At seven million years old, S. tchadensis is a candidate for the earliest known member of the hominin lineage — the evolutionary branch that leads from the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees…

Read More Read More