French Neolithic discontinuities
Marie-France Deguilloux and colleagues [1] present a short analysis of ancient mtDNA recovered from a Neolithic burial at Prissé-la-Charrière, between the Loire and Garonne valleys of western France....
View ArticleNowhere the rational man
David Sloan Wilson has been posting a series on behavioral economics ("Economics and evolution as different paradigms"). This, broadly speaking, is based on the idea that humans are not rational...
View ArticleProfessors who reject technology
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article by Jeffrey Young: "College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back." I think that the article confuses matters by lumping together people with...
View ArticleCareers in anthropology
The Guardian has a helpful entry in its series on careers: "What to do with a degree in anthropology." Most don't pursue graduate work: Of the anthropology graduates who left university in 2008, 51%...
View ArticleLast of a tribe
I want to pass along a story from Slate's Monte Reel, about a modern-day Ishi in remote Brazil: "The most isolated man on the planet." Eventually, the agents found the man. He was unclothed, appeared...
View ArticleHangman strategy
You may have seen that story about "jazz" being the hardest Hangman word. Personally, I always figure that such a short word is hardly fair, but I'm not that good at Hangman. The inside story of how...
View ArticleThe price of erudition
Did you know that the three-volume Handbook of Paleoanthropology is a thousand dollars from Amazon? A thousand dollars! I thought that the prices of edited volumes had gotten out of control, but wow! I...
View ArticleBrain slice art
Artist Noah Scalin gets a play date at the Mutter Museum, and here's what he does: (via Dudecraft).
View ArticleNew data on Ashkenazi population history
Bray and colleagues [1] report on genotyping of 471 people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. This is one of the largest samples of a single human population, and is therefore very interesting for studies of...
View ArticleRobot geriatrics
Coming soon: elderly cyborg farmers? MANUAL labour is becoming more and more difficult for Japan's aging farmers, prompting a Tokyo professor to devise a high-tech solution: mechanise the bodies of the...
View ArticleSocial media in education
Krystal D'Costa (Anthropology in Practice) links to a mini-documentary about the role of social media in the education of "Gen-Y": "Decade 2: Encouraging Educators to Rethink Social Media Strategies in...
View ArticleFrozen zoo
The Observer has a nice article describing the "Frozen Zoo" of samples kept by the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research. Dr Oliver Ryder, the geneticist who heads the Frozen Zoo programme,...
View ArticleAn ape by any other name
As usual, I was looking for something else -- this time in the writing of Henry Fairfield Osborn -- and came across an interesting paper that he delivered as a lecture in 1927 [1]. He was addressing...
View ArticleGuardian science blogs
The Guardian now has a small network of science blogs. Their launch announcement includes this surprising factoid: You would not know it from general media coverage but, on the web, science is alive...
View ArticleInclusive fitness works
I can't believe the amount of attention the paper by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson [1] has gotten. It was in last week's Nature. The basic idea was that the evolution of eusociality...
View ArticleCrete again, again, again
Julien Riel-Salvatore has written more about the supposed Middle Paleolithic-age stone tools from Crete: "The final (?) word on those handaxes from Crete". First, on the basis of the drawing of the...
View ArticlePLoS Blogs
PLoS now has blogs. The announcement accentuates that they have an equal representation of scientists and science journalists. Neuroanthropology, authored by Daniel Lende and Greg Downey, will be of...
View ArticleEating their young
Ally Fogg: "Why the young get a bad press" reports on research into age and media bias: Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State University gave 276 volunteers an online magazine to browse. She found...
View ArticleWhy don't universities cut out the middleman?
I've been reading several different conversations about the future of science (and social science) academic publishing. Matt Nisbet: "If the Cost of Publishing a Scientific Journal Article is $10,000,...
View ArticleYellowstone
I was talking about the Yellowstone series of eruptions with students the other day. Along those lines, this news item from Michael Reilly is interesting: If you thought the geysers and overblown...
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