Archive for the 'Anthropology' Category

Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby’s cry

Published
by
billycuts
on November 12, 2009
in Anthropology, Biology and Language
. 0 Comments

Telling the difference between a German and French speaker isn’t difficult. But you may be more surprised to know that you could have a good stab at distinguishing between German and French babies based on their cries. The bawls of French newborns tend to have a rising melody, with higher frequencies becoming more prominent as the cry progresses. German newborns tend to cry with a falling melody.

Newborn-baby.jpgThese differences are apparent just three days out of the womb. This suggests that they pick up elements of their parents’ language before they’re even born, and certainly before they start to babble themselves.

Birgit Mampe from the University of Wurzburg analysed the cries of 30 French newborns and 30 German ones, all born to monolingual families. She found that the average German cry reaches its maximum pitch and intensity at around 0.45 seconds, while French cries do so later, at around 0.6 seconds.

These differences match the melodic qualities of each respective language. Many French words and phrases have a rising pitch towards the end, capped only by a falling pitch at the very end. German more often shows the opposite trend – a falling pitch towards the end of a word or phrase.

These differences in “melody contours” become apparent as soon as infants start making sounds of their own. While Mampe can’t rule out the possibility that the infants learned about the sounds of their native tongue the few days following their birth, she thinks it’s more likely that they start tuning into the own language in the womb.

Science Blogs

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Bone find suggests humans on Treasure Coast 13,000 years ago

Published
by
billycuts
on June 8, 2009
in Anthropology, Biology and History/Archaeology
. 0 Comments

47377228VERO BEACH – Treasure Coast amateur fossil collector James Kennedy appears to have made an unprecedented archaeological discovery that might help confirm a human presence here up to 13,000 years ago.

A 15-inch-long prehistoric bone fragment found near Vero Beach contains a crude engraving of a mammoth or mastodon on it, said Dr. Barbara Purdy, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Florida.

"It is humbling to realize that we are seeing what the hunter saw more than 13,000 years ago," Purdy said.

Tests so far have shown it to be genuine.

SouthFlorida.Com

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Human culture subject to natural selection, Stanford study shows

Published
by
billycuts
on February 19, 2008
in Anthropology, Genetics, Memetics and Society/Social Systems
. 1 Comment

The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds.

Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome.

This study of cultural evolution, which compares the rates of change for structural and decorative Polynesian canoe-design traits, is scheduled to appear Tuesday, Feb. 19, in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Biological evolution of inherited traits is the essential organizing principle of biology, but does evolution play a corresponding role in human culture”” said Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California-Los Angeles and author of Guns, Germs and Steel. “This paper makes a decisive advance in this controversial field.”

EurekAlert

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Cruising the Amazon

Published
by
billycuts
on February 8, 2008
in Anthropology, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Entheogens/Psychedelics, Environmental/Nature, Ethnobotany/Botany, Health/Bio-Tech, Latin America and Mind/Body/Spirit
. 0 Comments

Life is everywhere in the upper Amazon wilderness. Life that creeps, life that crawls, life that slithers, sprouts, burrows, scurries and slinks—and dies. The dank odors of alternating rot and genesis rise from the mulching forest floor. My Deet-fortified insect spray battles swarms of blood-mad mosquitoes to a draw. The air is fat with syrupy humidity, and I am sweating like an icicle in the sun.

Nature is on fast-forward here. Trees—palms, laurels, kapoks, mahoganies, bamboos, acacias, figs, balsas, cedars—jostle each other in the search for a share of the sunlight; they grow to enormous heights and spread their foliage like a green umbrella at the top. Lianas, tropical climbing plants, wind themselves like boa constrictors around the tree trunks and arch themselves in great loops as they, too, struggle upward for a glimpse of light. The trees become parasites, and giant orchids seed themselves in branches 60 feet from the ground. The general effect is of a an impenetrable fecund, living wall.

Amid this vast assortment of life, creatures use stunts and flim-flam to befuddle or repel predators, lure prey, seduce mates and gobble food. Caterpillars masquerade as snakes, plants imitate the smell of rotting meat to attract flies as pollinators, and trees rely on fish to distribute their seeds when the rivers flood.

It’s a jungle out here.

Chicago Tribune

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Our diets made us different from apes

Published
by
billycuts
on February 3, 2008
in Anthropology and Biology
. 0 Comments

Humans and Apes may share common ancestors and have 99 per cent of identical genes, but our diet has made us what we are today.

Dietary patterns of human beings have played a key role in their evolution, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said.

Humans consume a distinct diet compared to other apes. Not only do we consume much more meat and fat, but we also cook our food, they said.

Daily News and Analysis

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Scientists find cultural differences among chimpanzee colonies

Published
by
billycuts
on January 7, 2008
in Anthropology, Biology, Environmental/Nature, Genetics and Society/Social Systems
. 0 Comments

Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.

Historically, scientists believed that behavioural differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behaviour are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their ‘cultures’ in a similar way to humans.

Physorg

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David Mayberry-Lewis (1929-2007)

Published
by
billycuts
on December 3, 2007
in Anthropology
. 1 Comment

Just got this in my mailbox…


Dear Colleagues,

It is with great sadness that I must report the death of David Maybury-Lewis on December 2, 2008. David Maybury-Lewis was the Edward C. Henderson Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.

David was an eminent scholar of Amazonia, an enthusiastic teacher and mentor to generations of students, and an untiring advocate for indigenous peoples around the world. In 1972 he founded Cultural Survival, an international organization to support and promote the voices and rights of indigenous groups. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 1956, joined the Harvard faculty in 1960, and served several terms as Chair of the Department of Anthropology between 1971 and 1981.

The family has not yet announced plans for a funeral and memorial service. As soon as further details are available, I will distribute them.

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Mursi Tribeswoman With AK47 and iPod

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 23, 2007
in Anthropology and Neoliberal Globalization
. 0 Comments

mursi ipod
Great photo by Cory Doctorow entitled “Female member of Mursi tribe in Southern Ethiopia”

via boingboing

Egalitarian Experiment Shows We’re a Bunch of Robin Hoods

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 16, 2007
in Anthropology, Consciousness/Psych/Brain and Economics
. 0 Comments

People taking part in a game designed to explore egalitarian impulses in human nature consistently robbed the rich players and gave money to the poor, scientists say.

Associate Professor James Fowler, from the University of California at San Diego, and his fellow researchers detected what they saw as a ‘Robin Hood impulse’ in people who took part in the experiment

“That’s the classic story we all know, where someone’s taking from the rich and giving to the poor, which is exactly what we’re seeing in this experiment,” Fowler says in a reference to the medieval English folk legend.

“In essence, what we found is that our taste for equality is one of the important reasons why we cooperate with each other, much more so than, say, other species of primates,” Fowler says.

The experiment, described today in the journal Nature, was carried out last year using 120 paid student volunteers at a computer lab on the campus of the University of California at Davis.

abc

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The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 16, 2007
in Anthropology, Books / E-Books, Entheogens/Psychedelics, Occulture and Personal
. 0 Comments

For fans of the literary con, it’s been a great few years. Currently, we have Richard Gere starring as Clifford Irving in “The Hoax,” a film about the ‘70s novelist who penned a faux autobiography of Howard Hughes. We’ve had the unmasking of James Frey, JT LeRoy/Laura Albert and Harvard’s Kaavya Viswanathan, who plagiarized large chunks of her debut novel, forcing her publisher, Little, Brown and Co., to recall the book. Much has been written about the slippery boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the publishing industry’s responsibility for distinguishing between the two, and the potential damage to readers. There’s been, however, hardly a mention of the 20th century’s most successful literary trickster: Carlos Castaneda.

If this name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the “Godfather of the New Age,” Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, don Juan, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.

Under don Juan’s tutelage, Castaneda took peyote, talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. All this took place in what don Juan called “a separate reality.” Castaneda, who died in 1998, was, from 1971 to 1982, one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the country. During his lifetime, his books sold at least 10 million copies.

Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them “beautifully lucid” and remarked on a “narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies.” They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success. Richard Jennings, an attorney who became closely involved with Castaneda in the ‘90s, was studying at Stanford in the early ‘70s when he read the first two don Juan books. “I was a searcher,” he recently told Salon. “I was looking for a real path to other worlds. I wasn’t looking for metaphors.”

salon

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The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 12, 2007
in Activism, Anthropology, Art, Books / E-Books, Civil Rights, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Freedom of Information, Futurism/Transhumanism, Hacks, Help Yourself, Human Rights Violations, Inc. Shenanigans, Language, Literature/Poetry, Media, Memetics, Mind/Body/Spirit, Mindhacks, Nature of Reality, Occulture, Philosophy, Poetry, Political, Religion, Resistance, Sexuality and Society/Social Systems
. 1 Comment

taz

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Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on March 20, 2007
in Anthropology, Biology, Philosophy and Society/Social Systems
. 0 Comments

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book “Sociobiology” that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress.

NewYork Times

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Landmark Ruling Celebrated as a Victory for Religious Freedom, Environmental Justice & Cultural Survival

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on March 15, 2007
in Activism, Anthropology, Economics, Environmental/Nature, Human Rights Violations, Inc. Shenanigans, Law and Religion
. 0 Comments

Flagstaff, AZ—On Monday, March 12th the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling to protect a mountain held holy by more than 13 Native American Nations. The slopes of the San Francisco Peaks, located in Northern Arizona, have been at the center of a historical and lengthy battle that has pitted economic interests on public lands against environmental integrity, public health and cultural survival..A local ski resort planned to expand and use treated waste effluent to make snow.

Yesterday, a federal court appeals panel issued the unanimous decision written by Judge William A. Fletcher. “We reverse the decision of the district court in part. We hold that the Forest Service’s approval of the Snowbowl’s use of recycled sewage effluent to make artificial snow on the San Francisco Peaks violates [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] RFRA, and that in one respect the Final Environmental Impact Statement prepared in this case does not comply with NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act].”

More than 100 supporters gathered at an afternoon press conference near the base of the Sacred Peaks to celebrate. Tribal Leaders, Environmental Groups and representatives of the community based group the Save the Peaks Coalition spoke of the victory.

“This is a very important decision that sets great precedent for people who are concerned with Native American rights and religious freedom” said Howard Shanker, of the Shanker Law Firm, PLC, representing the Navajo Nation, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Yavapai-Apache Tribe, the Havasupai Tribe, Rex Tilousi, Dianna Uqualla, the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Flagstaff Activist Network.

“Because of this decision in the 9th circuit, other tribes throughout the nation could have the ability to rely on this case to help protect sites that are sacred to them and culturally and religiously important” Mr. Shanker said.

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Endangered Languages Encode Plant and Animal Knowledge

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on February 23, 2007
in Anthropology, Environmental/Nature, Green Meme / Sustainability and Memetics
. 0 Comments

Saving indigenous languages from extinction is the only way to preserve traditional knowledge about plants and animals that have yet to be discovered by Western scientists, says a linguist and cultural expert.

More than half of the word’s 7000 languages are endangered, because they consist of an unsustainably small – and declining – speaker base. Each language death represents a significant erosion of human knowledge about local plant and animal life that was acquired over many centuries, says David Harrison at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, US.

Information about local ecosystems is so intricately woven into these languages that it cannot be replaced simply through translation, he explains. The indigenous taxonomy alone can provide a huge range of information about species, which young speakers in these tribes acquire instantly through learning the name.

new scientist

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Chimpanzees ‘Hunt Using Spears’

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on February 23, 2007
in Anthropology, Biology, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Environmental/Nature and Technology
. 0 Comments

Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks.

The report’s authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, said the finding could have implications for human evolution.

Chimps had not been previously observed hunting other animals with tools.

Pruetz and Bertolani made the discovery at their research site in Fongoli, Senegal, between March 2005 and July 2006.

“There were hints that this behaviour might occur, but it was one time at a different site,” said Jill Pruetz, assistant professor of anthropology at Iowa State University, US.

“While in Senegal for the spring semester, I saw about 13 different hunting bouts. So it really is habitual.”

bbc
Check out this movie at National Geographic.

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