Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
Link to review: Who’s the barbarian now? Empires of the Silk Road
Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus
Link to review: Dragon’s Battles
Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus
Link to review: Dragon’s Battles
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Link to review: Mother Nature: a complicated and morally ambivalent tale
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Link to review: Mother Nature: a complicated and morally ambivalent tale
To classify humanity is not that hard
In my post below I quoted my interview L. L. Cavalli-Sforza because I think it gets to the heart of some confusions which have emerged since the finding that most variation on any given locus is found within populations, rather than between them. The standard figure is that 85% of genetic variance is within continental […]
To study humankind, AAA responds
This morning I received an email from the communication director of the American Anthropology Association. The contents are on the web:
AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology
Some recent media coverage, including an article in the New York Times, has portrayed anthropology as divided between those who practice it as a science and those […]
Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map
In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on this […]
The study of humankind: questions, answers, and good faith
John Hawks, Anthropology in transition:
Of course, by the 1980’s, anthropology was already disowning many of the central figures of its early development. If they had not themselves been tools of the colonialist oppressors, they were dupes of their knowing research subjects. Lewis is quite correct — many students of anthropological theory were no longer required […]
What is this “Western culture” you speak of?
This is my comment of the month:
Pontifications about “Western culture” bother me. The people who use the term seem to assume that “we” are part of “Western culture” and know what it is. No explanation is necessary. But if you stop and think about it, in what sense are a Hungarian peasant farmer and a […]
Verbal vs. mathematical aptitude in academics
It isn’t too difficult to find GRE scores by intended major online. In reviewing articles/posts for my post below on anthropology I noted the distinction made between quant & qual methods, and aversions to regressions and scatter plots (or the supposed love of biological anthropologists for these tools). That got me wondering about the average mathematical […]
“The” unbearable “whiteness” of “science”
Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift:
Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.
The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based […]
The great northern culture war
A new paper in The New Journal of Physics shows that a relatively simple mathematical model can explain the rate of expansion of agriculture across Europe, Anisotropic dispersion, space competition and the slowdown of the Neolithic transition:
The front speed of the Neolithic (farmer) spread in Europe decreased as it reached Northern latitudes, where the Mesolithic […]
Men at work: hoes, ploughs, and steel
Ancient Egyptian farmer ploughing a field
Recently several weblogs have pointed to a new working paper on the role of plough-based agriculture vs. hoe-based agriculture in shaping cultural expectations about male and female labor force participation specifically, and the differentiation of gender roles more generally. My first reaction was: “doesn’t everyone know this already?” I am […]
The inevitable social brain
One of the most persistent debates about the process of evolution is whether it exhibits directionality or inevitability. This is not limited to a biological context; Marxist thinkers long promoted a model of long-term social determinism whereby human groups progressed through a sequence of modes of production. Such an assumption is not limited to […]
Did cavemen eat bread?
Food is a fraught topic. In How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom alludes to the thesis that while conservatives fixate on sexual purity, liberals fixate on culinary purity. For example, is it organic? What is the sourcing? Is it “authentic”? Obviously one can take issue with this characterization, especially its general class inflection (large swaths of […]
Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance
The German magazine Der Spiegel has a rather thick new article out reviewing the latest research which is starting to reintroduce the concept of mass folk wanderings into archaeology. The title is How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe. In the story you get a good sense of the recent revision of the null model […]
Polygamy and human evolution: maybe it’s agriculture
Eric Michael Johnson has a fascinating piece in Psychology Today, Sex, Evolution, and the Case of the Missing Polygamists. I want to spotlight a few paragraphs:
Keep in mind that in terms of interpreting such genetic evidence we are of necessity confined to a fairly recent time depth (and remember, by “recent” someone like me means […]
The naked years
When I talk about sexual selection I usually make sure to have an accompanying visual of a peacock to go with the post. But really I could have used a dandy as an illustration, or perhaps in our day & age “The Situation”. Unlike the peacock much of what passes for human “plumage” is not […]
Linguistic diversity, other views
Readers might find these responses of interest. Mostly I just laughed, though some of you may be a bit more serious than I, so if anthro-gibberish drives you crazy, don’t follow the links. As I told “ana” below a lot of the discussion we had was basically just talking past each other. I kept telling […]