Anthropology.net

As yet another, or more accurately, the 28th edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival comes winging its way over the horizon, here’s a quick reminder to submit any contributions, be they typed at speed by one’s own hand, or slowly and deliberately culled from the writings of someone else, to Hot Cup of Joe, where Carl Feagans will be waiting to hear from you – if you wish to send something directly to his site you can submit to this address – cfeagans -AT- gmail -DOT- com – or your other option is to send contributions along to submit@fourstonehearth.net, from where they will be swiftly forwarded to Carl.

By the look of the upcoming hosts page at Four Stone Hearth, there should be plenty of hosting vacancies open over the coming weeks and months, should you decide to host a carnival yourself – and to apply for that opportunity, a quick note to host@fourstonehearth.net would be the best means of communicating your wishes.

See you all Wednesday.

Recently, Nate Dominy was granted a very generous fellowship to continue his studies on human evolution and diet. David Strait, of the University at Albany, also has been granted a very generous lump of cash to study this same topic.

Dominy’s scope differs from Strait’s in that Dominy takes a molecular approach. Strait will investigate how australopithecine skull shapes evolved to deal with eating different foods. The National Science Foundation has given Strait a curiously large amount of money for a physical anthropology study… about $940,000!

Here’s an excerpt of his pitch,

The australopithecines lived in Africa about 7 million to 1.5 million years ago, Strait said. The climate changed over that time, he said, becoming drier.

The australopithecines may have been forced to fall back on eating resistant or hard foods like nuts and seeds that may have been crucial to their survival.

This was what I attempted to tackle in my undergraduate thesis, I didn’t have access to many fossils nor casts, but in my studies I did observe a waxing and weening in dentition of the australopithecines. At one point in australopithecine evolution their jaws (Australopithecus boisei) were about twice the size of ours, but their brains were a about a third of ours. Something was clearly going on as far as selection and diet. Hopefully, Strait can bring some more clear answers with all this science money!

A couple days ago, Afarensis shared with us a column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of how hunters help find remains of missing persons.

Often hunters, hikers, backpackers and the like are an integral part of forensic anthropology and law enforcement. They are the ones out there, the ones trek in areas that killers hoped would keep secret. Sometimes they find human remains.

In case you didn’t get catch the link the first time, I’m reposting it here because I don’t cover enough forensic anthropology.

I’ve read this summary of Donald Johanson’s visit to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to see Lucy, the 3 million year old australopithecine ‘he found’ about 33 years ago.

Lucy is also known as AL 288-1 or Dinkenesh, in Amharic, which means “You are beautiful.” The fossils are on a very controversial tour to US museums. While visiting Lucy, Donald Johanson summarized the rifts in paleoanthropology, he says anthropologists may disagree over some aspects of human evolution, but there is broad agreement on the basic theory of where it all began,

“The one thing that all anthropologists have agreed on now is that the fossil record for humanity is so convincing, from the very earliest, very primitive stages, long before Lucy, going back as much as six million years in Africa, that this is really the cradle of humankind, Africa.”

He also commented on creationist thought and answered some questions from high students who caught him while he was there. Here’s a sound bite,

I don’t like to read too much into some quotes, but sometimes I really must, especially when Johanson put something like this out there,

“The Afar people who live there today know what these bones look like and sometimes when we come back to the field, they will take me by my hand and they will walk me and say ‘look what I found when I was herding my goats.’ And they know that you should never pick it up, because then you do not know where it is from.”

In my experience one should never come out with a quote like this because it undermines one’s authority and ownership to the research. What happens when the locals know you want fossils and displace or destroy them? If you think that doesn’t happen, think again. It does. What happens when locals know you want a hominin and bring it to you, destroying the context? The fossil becomes useless… Why then is Johanson’s name on the publications? I can’t believe Johanson is quoted saying something like that, because it brings up the idea that he may have allowed such exceptions!

I’m really behind on the anthropology news. There is just too much news floating around, and I feel like I don’t have enough time to catch up with it all. From studies on tool wielding chimps, chocolate brewing, a 4,000 year old temple in Peru, to how prehistoric Vinca women dressed in Europe, and yes… more discussion on race, genetics, and human populations…. I’m overwhelmed! I’m gonna do my best to share that all with you but I really want to point out the new African Miocene ape finding.

As you know, earlier this year we heard of Chororapithecus abyssinicus, a new Miocene ape found in Ethiopia. Kenyan and Japanese anthropologists have just published their report on a similarly aged Miocene ape which is dubbed, Nakalipithecus nakayamai. It resembles Ouranopithecus macedoniensis a lot, which reminds me you may wanna read about a new species of Ouranopithecus from the late Miocene of Turkey, a publication that my friend Ferhat co-wrote. The paper is freely accessible.

Fossils like Nakalipithecus nakayamai and Chororapithecus abyssinicus are crucial, because not only is the Miocene ape record very spotty but also because they help us in figuring out the what was happening to African apes before the human lineage diverged. I’m gonna blog over at Primatology.net about Nakalipithecus nakayamai in the near future so keep an eye out.

Currently, there are 22 comments on the AAA blog in response to their decision on the HTS issue. The majority of people are in favor of the decision. Others are not in favor, like I. Most of us see the decision as incomplete and unsupported.

A commentor, Catherine, makes a very critical observation,

“the statement itself strikes me a knee-jerk reaction to what is admittedly a complex issue and one that deserves to be grounded in a careful and thorough investigation of particulars.”

Catherine has pinpointed the problem. The AAA decision is premature. Even the AAA has outlines in that,

“The Commission’s work did not include systematic study of the HTS project.”

How can a academic organization like the AAA make a statement like this without conducting a systematic study? This is a clear case of the AAA saying, “Hey we don’t give a crap about conducting an thorough analysis of the HTS. We’ll just go with our gut feeling that the HTS anthropology program jeopardizes anthropology.” This is not very academic at all. It documents ignorance and superficiality in completely analyzing the issue.

W Penn Handwerker said,

“I find the AAA Executive Board’s ‘assessment’ of the HTS project embarrassingly uncritical and naive and exceedingly simple minded.”

Exactly. That’s exactly what it is.

Jamie Cleland, a consulting anthropologist with a focus in archaeology, writes,

“…I find the Executive Board’s statement to fall far short of a considered examination of significant issues raised for our profession by the HTS program. The Board wants to affirm in its final paragraph that anthropology is obliged to attempt to improve US government policies, yet through its narrow conceptualization of anthropology as a profession that primarily “studies others,” it totally misses its chance to affect US policies in any meaningful way. It ducks the question, “Under what circumstances can anthropologists work to improve our policies and actions in war zones?” The Executive Board evokes the ethical standard of “doing no harm,” but given a situation where harm is occurring, anthropologists at the front may be in a position to reduce that harm. If we oppose HTS and similar types of programs unconditionally, we will not be doing our best at using the knowledge we have gained through our “studies of others” to improve US policies… Cultural anthropological fieldwork unarguably has in the past damaged the people studied. If through well intentioned application of ethics, we prevent the use of knowledge so gained from practical application in the most horrific of circumstances, we are not living up to the higher ethical standards that should be at the core of our profession. I would like to see the Executive Board take up the issue of how anthropology might actually be useful and ethical in war zones.”

I’m gonna end this post with a modified Marx quote I’ve plucked from Adam of Agraphia,

“[Anthropologists] have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

In my opinion your not going to change military policy and actions by writing in subscription journals and if you truly want to stop the egregious acts and culturally detrimental actions of the military you have to actually get engaged with it, learn the lingo, embed yourself within it, so you can not only understand it, but hopefully teach it the vaulable lessons that anthropology has uncovered over the years.

It has taken the American Anthropological Association (AAA) over a month to respond to the issue of the US Military embedding anthropologists to aide in the war effort. I’ve commented on this in early October. I support the idea of embedding anthropologists, even though I do not support the wars. I see it as progress and a potentially effective application of anthropology.

The AAA has finally convened and decided to disapprove of the program, which goes by Human Terrain System or HTS. They say that the HTS program,

“creates conditions which are likely to place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the AAA Code of Ethics and that its use of anthropologists poses a danger to both other anthropologists and persons other anthropologists study.”

I’ve read a lot of debate on this site and all over the anthropology blogosphere on this matter. I respect the amount of thought and concern the community has put into this issue. I really respect this piece of first hand anthropology in the military that was shared on our site. But the AAA has taken a really pitiful stance. I’ll do my best to explain why but I apologize if the following doesn’t come out very articulate because I’m writing this in haste.

First of all, the decision not to support the HTS is based upon a unacademic and uneducated possibility that future anthropologists may face conducting research. Does the AAA have any empirical evidence that future anthropologists will face hardships because of the HTS? No, they don’t. They are running on the notion that because people will not easily differentiate HTS anthropologists from the military, that they’ll forever have a irreversible impression on anthropology.

How do we know that HTS anthropologists will be so horrible that no other anthropologist can follow suite and reverse the damages? We don’t. Just as likely as it is that HTS anthropologists will completely botch up anthropology is the notion that HTS anthropologists may be evangelical figures for anthropology and make it easier to conduct anthropological research in the areas HTS anthropologists work at. What I’m getting at is that at this point we do not have any idea to see how HTS anthropologists impact anthropology as a whole. I really think the HTS anthropology programs should move forward, be supported with constructive criticism… not outright opposition!

Also, I was really disappointed to read in the conclusion of the AAA statement on how they affirm,

“that anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve… through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere…”

…When they were the very group that ignorantly opposed open access last year. Judging by their actions, the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding is through closed access publications and through opposing real life applications of anthropology. Give me a break.

I’m really considering posting to their newly created blog on this issue. They basically have opened the flood gates to

“facilitate discussion on this subject, [to use the blog] to post comments regarding the Executive Board Statement and related issues.”

What do you think? How do you feel about the AAA’s stance? Please share your thoughts and comments!

The latest and 27th edition of the anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth has gone live over at Sorting Out Science, hosted by Sam Wise, and as ever there is a very good and eclectic mix of posts for the delectation of all – and more to the point, there’s a vast collection of contributions assembled this time round, probably one of the most ever for a single edition.

The next and 28th edition of 4SH will be hosted by Carl Feagans at Hot Cup of Joe, on Wednesday November 21st, so in the meantime, many thanks to Sam Wise for hosting this current bumper issue, and see you all in a couple of weeks.

The next edition of the anthropology blog carnival 4SH, is due to appear this coming Wednesday at Sorting Out Science, hosted by Sam Wise – so please submit something from your own musings and missives, or even something you like from elsewhere in the blogosphere, direct to Sam – or indeed to Four Stone Hearth direct – although bearing in mind that Martin at Aardvarchaeology is away at the minute, it’s possible he may not be able to gain constant access to the Internet, and forward submissions to the relevant site as he normally does in his role as administrator of 4SH.

If however he indicates that all is as usual, I’ll update this accordingly – see you all on Wednesday.

Update : Monday  Nov. 5th – Martin is back with us again, so if you’d like to submit something for Wednesday’s Four Stone Hearth, you can do so through the normal channels, i.e. by clicking on Four Stone Hearth.

Kerim over at Savage Minds as well as Lorenz of Anthropologi.info and Jason Baird Jackson of Museum Anthropology have all broke the news that the American Museum of Natural History has digitalized 100 years of anthropology papers and put them online. The best part of this news is that all the papers are open access! This is great news for anthropology and will be an excellent, easily accessible resource of top notch anthropology publications.

Hope on over to this link if you’re interested in seeing what they have in their repository.