I’m kinda surprised that this paper, “A study on the correlation between IL1RAPL1 and human cognitive ability,” hasn’t made many waves in the press nor in the blogosphere. Aside from being controversial, it is a pretty fascinating study. But, I’m not completely shocked many have abstained from mentioning it… Like the genetics of race, [...]
Thank you, Kambiz, for letting me introduce my new book to the Anthropology.net community.
The story behind The Genius of Kinship is an interesting one. In 1991, then a student of history at the St. Petersburg State University, I wrote a course paper on the traditional social organization of the Shoshone Indians as could be gleaned [...]
Got to hand it to Blaine Bettinger, of the Genetic Genealogist, for catching this news on GenomeWeb Daily New. In a nutshell, it is a report of what Svante Pääbo’s talked about at the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Pääbo, if you don’t know, is one of the main researchers behind [...]
I recently got an email from German Dziebel letting me know that he’s recently published his book titled, “The Genius of Kinship,” in English. The book explains American Indian kinship systems, and synthesizes ethnographic, linguistic and population genetic lines of evidence to discuss kinship organization. I do not yet have a copy of the book [...]
Monte Verde, Chile is a very interesting archaeological site. First discovered in 1976, the site is about 500 miles south of Santiago and has yielded artifacts of a small settlement of 20 to 30 people living in a dozen huts along a small creek. Aside from artifacts, a wide variety of midden has also been [...]
There’s a new PLoS ONE paper making the rounds in the press today. The research behind it fits the kinda stuff you may see on Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog and sometimes on GNXP… it is basically an investigation on the attractiveness of a symmetrical face. The paper is published open access, under the title, “Symmetry Is [...]
The latest edition of the anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth is now up at remote central, so fell free to head on over and check it out.
The next and 41st 4SH will be at Our Cultural World, on May 21st.
So, I got my hands on that mouth watering Nature paper I mentioned a couple days ago. It is titled, “Cladistic analysis of continuous modularized traits provides phylogenetic signals in Homo evolution,” and it is probably the biggest anthropology news of this week. I’ve read it and it is dense. It really shouldn’t be so [...]
A summary of Yoel Rak’s talk at the last month meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Vancouver, Canada has surfaced in a National Geographic news article from several days ago. Yoel Rak and William Hylander analyzed the anatomy of the Neandertal face and inferred what that coulda meant as far as Neandertal dietary behavior. [...]
Scientific American has a news piece explaining the implications of one of the new studies on the human genome that I reported on last week. In a nutshell, the news piece explains how the identification of 250 new regions throughout the genome impacts the current human reference genome… raising concerns that reference genome may be [...]
