Anthropology.net

Here’s an article written by Freeman Dyson for The New York Review Of Books, in which he embarks on a fascinating discussion on a range of topics including how biology is now bigger business than physics, and how he believes that over the next 50 years, biotechnology will revolutionise our lives in much the same way as computers have done over the previous 50 years. Here’s his take on the current state of play…

I see a close analogy between John von Neumann‘s blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.

He makes mention of how genetically modified tropical fish have been given a makeover which has enabled vendors to sell in a new range of colours, and even an establishment that specialises in the production of different snakes and lizards. He contends that although creating new breeds of animals, plants etc has largely been confined to specialist breeders, biotechnology will, in a similar way to the personal computer, become available to the domestic consumer, with the possibility that all sorts of weird and wonderful animals and plants will begin to appear in our very homes, their actual places of invention, conception and birth. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post to announce that the latest edition of Current Anthropology is now online, and here’s a list of the articles included…

Cori Hayden
A Generic Solution? Pharmaceuticals and the Politics of the Similar in Mexico

Carlos Fausto
Feasting on People: Eating Animals and Humans In Amazonia

Maria Gropas
The Repatriotization of Revolutionary Ideology
and Mnemonic Landscape in Present-Day Havana

Charles L. Briggs
Anthropology, Interviewing, and Communicability
in Contemporary Society

John Parkington/Judith Sealy
On Diet and Settlement in Holocene South Africa

Bruce Albert and François-Michel Le Tourneau
Ethnogeography and Resource Use among the Yanomami: Toward a Model of “Reticular Space”

Flora Lu
Integration into the Market among Indigenous Peoples: A Cross-Cultural Perspective from the Ecuadorian Amazon

Gregory S. Gullette
Migration and Tourism Development in Huatulco, Oaxaca

Andrei Soficaru, Catalin Petrea, Adrian Dobos, and Erik Trinkaus
The Human Cranium from the Pestera Cioclovina Uscata, Romania: Context, Age, Taphonomy, Morphology, and Paleopathology

All of which looks like a fairly impressive set of papers over an extensive range of topics, and although a subscription is required for full access, it’s not vastly expensive and gives very good value for money, especially as you also get access to at least 60 of the most recent issues dating back to Spring 1996.

One excellent feature is that in many of the presented papers, peers of the authors are invited to submit their own comments, and in some cases these can be just as illuminating as the papers themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a story looking into the possibility that people were regularly putting to sea back in the Upper Palaeolithic, detailing research of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia; their discovery of lithic artefacts is described here…

The discovery at a coastal site on the island’s northwest has revealed chipped tools submerged in the sea and made with local stone which could be the earliest trace yet of human activity in Cyprus.

U.S. and Cypriot archaeologists conducting the research have known since 2004 that Cyprus was used by small groups of voyagers on hunting expeditions for pygmy elephants.

But the newly discovered expanse of the Aspros dig in the Akamas peninsula, which stretches into the sea, suggests the site held larger numbers of people, possibly for months.

The find, archaeologists told Reuters on Wednesday, could also suggest the island of Cyprus, tucked in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean and about 30 miles away from the closest land mass, may have been gradually populated about that time, and up to 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.

I assume that the researchers are currently basing their 14,000 bp dates by the fact that the submerged tools have been found at a location that was known to have been above water at the time, and was subsequently inundated as post-glacial sea-levels rose – it’s possible that if the search was conducted even further offshore at deeper levels, stone tools or other traces of human activity might also be found there, pushing back the date of the first people on Cyprus still further. Read the rest of this entry »