Browsed by
Category: Anthropology

What the anthropology of smell reveals about humanity

What the anthropology of smell reveals about humanity

By Sarah Ives, SAPIENS Vivian,* a Washington, D.C.–based art curator, realized she had COVID-19 in December 2020. “I bought a tree, and I brought it home,” she recalls. “And I thought, This tree has no smell. What did they sell me? Is this a bad tree?” For Vivian, the moment involved more than frustration about a “bad tree.” Her loss of smell left her unable to conjure memories and even affected her sense of self. “That Christmas was really hard,”…

Read More Read More

Earliest Pacific seafarers were matrilocal society, study suggests

Earliest Pacific seafarers were matrilocal society, study suggests

The Guardian reports: The world’s earliest seafarers who set out to colonise remote Pacific islands nearly 3,000 years ago were a matrilocal society with communities organised around the female lineage, analysis of ancient DNA suggests. The research, based on genetic sequencing of 164 ancient individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, suggested that some of the earliest inhabitants of islands in Oceania had population structures in which women almost always remained in their communities after marriage, while men left their…

Read More Read More

We are creatures of tropical jungles as much as the savannah

We are creatures of tropical jungles as much as the savannah

Patrick Roberts writes: In a sweltering tropical rainforest on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I started to appreciate why archaeologists and anthropologists had long ignored ‘jungles’ in their search for humanity’s origins. The mosquitoes, leeches, harsh terrain and difficult footing were bad enough, but now a summer monsoon downpour was rapidly approaching. As we slogged on under a canopy of green, the forest grew quiet. The usual chattering life had been smart enough to seek shelter,…

Read More Read More

Did Margaret Mead think that a healed femur was the earliest evidence of civilization?

Did Margaret Mead think that a healed femur was the earliest evidence of civilization?

By Gideon Lasco, SAPIENS According to a commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There are many variations of the anecdote, but the general details are similar: To the student’s surprise, Mead replied that the first sign of civilization is a healed human femur—the long bone that connects the hip to the knee. Mead proceeded to explain, as the story goes, that wounded…

Read More Read More

65,000-year-old ‘stone Swiss Army knives’ show early humans had long-distance social networks

65,000-year-old ‘stone Swiss Army knives’ show early humans had long-distance social networks

Paloma de la Peña, Author provided By Amy Mosig Way, Australian Museum Humans are the only species to live in every environmental niche in the world – from the icesheets to the deserts, rainforests to savannahs. As individuals we are rather puny, but when we are socially connected, we are the most dominant species on the planet. New evidence from stone tools in southern Africa shows these social connections were stronger and wider than we had thought among our ancestors…

Read More Read More

Why human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago

Why human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago

BBC Future reports: Your ancestors had bigger brains than you. Several thousand years ago, humans reached a milestone in their history – the first known complex civilisations began to emerge. The people walking around and meeting in the world’s earliest cities would have been familiar in many ways to modern urbanites today. But since then, human brains have actually shrunk slightly. The lost volume, on average, would be roughly equivalent to that of four ping pong balls, says Jeremy DeSilva,…

Read More Read More

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

Elizabeth Preston writes: On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than…

Read More Read More

Record-breaking simulation hints at how climate shaped human migration

Record-breaking simulation hints at how climate shaped human migration

Nature reports: A colossal simulation of the past two million years of Earth’s climate provides evidence that temperature and other planetary conditions influenced early human migration — and possibly contributed to the emergence of the modern-day human species around 300,000 years ago. The finding is one of many to come out of the largest model so far to investigate how changes in Earth’s movement have influenced climate and human evolution, published in Nature today. “This is another brick in the…

Read More Read More

New research suggests modern humans lived in Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, in Neanderthal territories

New research suggests modern humans lived in Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, in Neanderthal territories

The Grotte Mandrin rock shelter saw repeated use by Neanderthals and modern humans over millennia. Ludovic Slimak, CC BY-ND By Ludovic Slimak, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès; Clément Zanolli, Université de Bordeaux; Jason E. Lewis, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York), and Laure Metz, University of Connecticut Perched about 325 feet (100 meters) up the slopes of the Prealps in southern France, a humble rock shelter looks out over the Rhône River Valley. It’s a strategic point…

Read More Read More

Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50,000-year-old social network in Africa

Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50,000-year-old social network in Africa

The Guardian reports: Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest social network, a web of connections that flourished 50,000 years ago and stretched for thousands of miles across Africa. But unlike its modern electronic equivalent, this ancient web of social bonds used a far more prosaic medium. It relied on the sharing and trading of beads made of ostrich eggshells – one of humanity’s oldest forms of personal adornment. The research by scientists in Germany involved the study of more than…

Read More Read More

How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution

How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution

Clovis spearheads. wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Nicholas R. Longrich, University of Bath For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes, beads and bows appeared. This technological revolution wasn’t the work of one people….

Read More Read More

Mating between groups spread across vast areas drove human evolution

Mating between groups spread across vast areas drove human evolution

Science News reports: Evidence that cross-continental Stone Age networking events powered human evolution ramped up in 2021. A long-standing argument that Homo sapiens originated in East Africa before moving elsewhere and replacing Eurasian Homo species such as Neandertals has come under increasing fire over the last decade. Research this year supported an alternative scenario in which H. sapiens evolved across vast geographic expanses, first within Africa and later outside it. The process would have worked as follows: Many Homo groups…

Read More Read More

A new species of early human? Why we should be cautious about new fossil footprint findings

A new species of early human? Why we should be cautious about new fossil footprint findings

Dawid A. Iurino for THOR, Author provided By Matthew Robert Bennett, Bournemouth University and Sally Christine Reynolds, Bournemouth University A collection of fossil footprints at Laetoli in Northern Tanzania, preserved in volcanic ash and dated to 3.66 million years ago, are still yielding surprises almost 45 years after their discovery. Based on a re-analysis of fossil footprints from one of Laetoli’s sites, the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature say they’ve discovered evidence of a previously…

Read More Read More

How animal uses of fire help illuminate human pyrocognition

How animal uses of fire help illuminate human pyrocognition

Ivo Jacobs writes: In the beginning, there was no fire. People were cold, lean and hungry. Like baboons, they gathered food and ate it raw. But one day, a group of children began playing with arrows by twirling them against a log, and were surprised to find that the tips became hot and smoke appeared. Sparks jumped and landed on the dry grass nearby, making it smoulder. The kids added more grass to the flames and, as the bonfire grew,…

Read More Read More

Why did modern humans take so long to settle in Europe?

Why did modern humans take so long to settle in Europe?

Robin McKie writes: Modern humans made several failed attempts to settle in Europe before eventually taking over the continent. This is the stark conclusion of scientists who have been studying the course of Homo sapiens’s exodus from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Researchers have recently pinpointed sites in Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic where our ancestors’ remains have been dated as being between 40,000 to 50,000 years old. However, bone analyses have produced genetic profiles that have…

Read More Read More

A new species of human ancestor is named

A new species of human ancestor is named

SciTechDaily reports: An international team of researchers, led by University of Winnipeg paleoanthropologist Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, has announced the naming of a new species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis. This species lived in Africa during the Middle Pleistocene, around half a million years ago, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans. The Middle Pleistocene (now renamed Chibanian and dated to 774,000-129,000 years ago) is important because it saw the rise of our own species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, our…

Read More Read More