Anthropology.net

Thanks to Carl at A Hot Cup of Joe for passing this along – if you navigate to the CV page of Milford H. Wolpoff, you’ll find a number of freely accessible (PDF) papers, many or indeed all of which should be of interest to readers here.  They span a time frame of more than three decades, 1968-2004, and I’ll attempt to address at least some of them in due course – topics cover pretty much the entire gamut of human evolution, and include some discussion on multi-regionalism as opposed to multiple origins.

Following on from a recent post which linked to the Neuroanthropology website, I want to give brief mention to a neuroscientist by the name of David Eagleman, his research into synaesthesia and an excellent book he published earlier this year, ‘Sum – Forty Tales from the Afterlives’, a pocket-sized tome bristling with a glittering array of thoughts, ideas and speculations about what gods, afterlives and ourselves might or could never be, how we know we even exist or are merely re-living a seamlessly reconstructed version of one or more past life-times.

I first came across Eagleman on this podcast from ABC Radio’s ‘All in the Mind’, hosted by Natasha Mitchell, and which is available, complete with transcript here, and from which this is the introduction:

Imagine if I gave you a glass of milk and it tasted blue to you, or if your partner’s voice just felt like a wonderful golden brown, the colour of buttery toast? What if the number two and letter J conjured up the shade of letterbox red, or the name Derek tasted like earwax? Or whenever you heard music, a kaleidoscope of colours exploded inside your head; different tones and textures for different notes. Vladimir Nabokov was one, so is artist David Hockney, in fact one in a hundred of us could be a person with synesthesia, the surprising cross-wiring of the senses in the brain.

My guest today heads up one of the top centres in synesthesia research based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. By day he’s a leading neuroscientist but by night he writes novels, and he’s just been in Australia to perform with Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House a piece based on his totally intriguing new novel called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. So meet the energetic David Eagleman.

From later in the show, we hear a few more words on the extraordinary phenomena known as synaesthesia, which we learn is surprisingly prevalent in modern human populations:

…synesthesia is a condition that about one per cent of the population has, and some researchers have estimated that there are maybe 152 reported forms of synesthesia. They have a mixture of the senses, so for example if you have synesthesia you might hear music and it causes you to physically see colours, or more common versions are things like the numbers and letters of the alphabet having colours, or textures or shapes, or genders or personalities. You might taste something and it makes you feel like you’re feeling something on your fingertips, or you might hear something and that puts a taste in your mouth.

For one synesthete, for example, whenever he hears the name Derek it tastes like earwax to him, it puts the taste of that in his mouth. And for other people, you know for different words, it puts the taste of cinnamon in their mouth, or some metallic taste in their mouth and so on. It’s not just that they’re being silly or metaphorical or artistic, it’s actually that there’s cross-wiring in their brains so that from the parts of their brain that care about hearing, and the parts or their brain that care about taste, there’s a little bit of cross-talk going on, so particular auditory experiences will trigger gustatory experiences.

There are many different forms of synesthesia but what they all have in common is that they represent a blending of the senses. And it used to be thought that this was very rare but we now know that it’s really quite common, it’s at least one per cent of the population. So to come back around to your question, because of this increased cross-talk in the brain it has been suggested that maybe synesthesia is related to creativity and metaphor, because essentially that’s what it is for somebody to be very creative or to speak in metaphor, is to find parallels across different domains in the brain.

I’m not sure to what extent this a trait that applies only to our modern selves, or whether synaesthesia is something we’ve inherited from our archaic past – did Neanderthals or H. heidelbergensis or even H. erectus experience these weird fluctuations in their neural circuitry, and if so, to what extent if any has this impacted on speech, language, numeracy or even seemingly irrational belief systems which incorporate divine and omniscient beings living in abstract realms to which our souls are said to migrate shortly after our mortal demise? Do other primates share this with us, or are our own brains unique in that only our particular neural configurations are capable of fusing disparate functions into unexpected reconstructions of what seems real to us?

On that subject, here’s a quick look at some of the content in the book ‘Sum‘, which receives a fair amount of coverage elsewhere in the show – for example, this on consciousness, and by default, the concept of creation:

Questions like how consciousness comes about, how do you ever string together tens of billions of pieces and parts and get something out of it that has private subjective experience.  So if I were to hand you billions of Tinkertoys, you know those little toys you put together, and you start hooking them up so that when you touched this, that happens and so on. At what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and say ah, now this is having conscious experience?

We don’t even know what the theory would look like on that. I mean here’s another way of looking at it. When I was a child I absolutely expected that by the time I was this age we would have robots, that we would have C3PO serving our dinner and cleaning my room and so on. The best we have is the Roomba vacuum cleaner, and it turns out that things like intelligence is really, really hard to figure out. and even things like computer vision is very, very difficult.

Without our specific brand of consciousness it seems improbable that any complex living creature like our selves would be able to even conceive of a grand Creator, Architect, Programmer or Technician, but there is no doubt that such ideas are by now almost indelibly imprinted on our mind-set. However when it comes to describing the type of god or afterlife that many people believe in, their depictions tend to be somewhat workaday, and to a great extent moulded by models that have been portrayed by our families, religious educators and the clergy:

So when I sit next to people on aeroplanes and I ask them what their opinion is on whether there’s a God, or what they would look like, or what an afterlife would look like, it turns out there’s such a lack of creativity, everybody just says whatever their parents have told them. So this book is all about really mentally stretching on spatial scales and ideas of gender and number and all sorts of things.

And mentally stretching such ideas is exactly what this book does – whether you’re a confirmed atheist, a devout agnostic or fully subscribed believer, all the short stories in this book should give you pause for thought and more than a moment or two of inner reflection – indeed we’re told that the book has been equally well received from many quarters of the religious divide, no mean feat for such a book, especially in these days of entrenched fundamentalism that everywhere abound. Here’s a quick look at some of the ideas Eagleman offers up for consideration:

If you stopped someone on the street and said, ‘Hey, what do you think the afterlife is about?’ Of course everybody just has in their mind whatever their parents or their community has told them, and when you really start putting those ideas under the spotlight, what you discover is they’re ridiculous. So for example the one where God is getting frustrated in having to do this binary categorisation into good and evil. it’s a perfect example of how goofy the story is because people are much more multi-dimensional than that, they are much more complex than that.

And so in that story God decides to sort of revolt against that structure that she had set up and she instead invites everybody to come into Heaven and to be a part of Heaven. And what ends up happening actually if I can just read the last line here: ‘So she brings everyone to Heaven and everyone’s achieved true equality and the communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only with the help of a God in whom they didn’t want to believe.

The meritocats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden to promote, so God sits on the edge of her bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they are all in Hell.

Eagleman is also featured in a May 2009 edition of another podcast, ‘Little Atoms’, hosted by Neil Denny, and if you want to grab a copy of the book, for yourself or deserving other(s), there are two main options – you can for example order it online from places like Amazon and numerous other digital outlets.

If however, to paraphrase Matt Haynes, editor of, and writing in the latest print edition of ‘Smoke – A London Peculiar’ you believe “electricity is nothing but a demented cavalcade of charged particles over which no human could ever hold dominion”, just visit your local book-store instead, and they’ll take things from there.

As the previous posts of today have looked variously at the recent and distant past, here’s a link to an article at Centauri Dreams, from which this is an excerpt:

What we now know is that we cannot, in economic times like these, count on government agencies to proceed with the next step. The Planetary Society has raised the needed money (boosted considerably by a $1 million donation) to build Lightsail-1, creating the vehicle out of three Cubesat spacecraft. Based on early reports, the spacecraft sounds much like the NanoSail-D sailcraft created at Marshall Space Flight Center. Planetary Society vice-president Bill Nye notes, “To get sunlight to push us through space, we need a large sail attached to a small spacecraft. Lightsail-1 fits into a volume of just three liters before the sails unfurl to fly on light. It’s elegant.” NanoSail-D, likewise, is small enough to fit into a suitcase.

As and when I get more time in the future, I’d like to add more content here regarding the human exploration of space, the search for exoplanets and the strange array of other solar systems we encounter as a result, plus a great deal more besides. Until that happens though, I’d recommend readers to check Centauri Dreams on a regular basis, being as it is a source of good clear writing explaining in detail just what we humans will be considering in the near and distant future with regard to our attempts to explore our solar system, galaxy and the Universe at large, through the combined efforts of telescopic arrays, robotic craft, and maybe one day even humans once again, although for the time being, manned projects appear to be lodged firmly on the back-burner.

Airing this Sunday, November 15th at 9pm ET/PT in the US, on the National Geographic Channel is a documentary called ‘Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers’, for which this is the description:

Terrifying legends from the Amazon tell of Indian headshrinkers who would shrink an enemy’s head to render the vengeful soul powerless.  Now, NGC has exclusive U.S. access to 45-year-old archive footage captured by explorer Edmundo Bielawski, purportedly the only known footage that shows the process of an actual ― recently deceased ― human head being shrunk. Author and explorer Piers Gibbon heads deep into the Amazon jungle in an attempt to trace Bielawski’s 1960s journey, rediscover the exact location where this scene was filmed and reconnect with the tribe today.  After a string of setbacks, Gibbon finally gets a striking clue that leads him on an arduous trek to the village of Tukupi, where he finds one aging warrior, the last of his generation, who could provide answers to the mystery once and for all.

This programme kicks off a week-long series of documentaries that will be shown on the National Geographic Channel, as part of their aforementioned Expedition Week, and later that same night, viewers are offered ‘Secrets of the Druids’.

Limited online time means I’m unable to offer readers a full preview here, but suffice it to say there is a plethora of information, resources and archive footage to be found by navigating to the series’ main page and taking it from there – as far as viewers outside the US are concerned, I imagine we’ll get to see this series at some point in what we hope is the near future.

Although the linked paper doesn’t specifically address issues of anthropology, it’s nevertheless worth checking this to see how the researchers reached the conclusion that the amount of energy required for running meant that the two-legged dinosaurs studied would have required far more than a cold-blooded organism would have been able to cope with. Here’s the abstract:

Background:

One of the great unresolved controversies in paleobiology is whether extinct dinosaurs were endothermic, ectothermic, or some combination thereof, and when endothermy first evolved in the lineage leading to birds. Although it is well established that high, sustained growth rates and, presumably, high activity levels are ancestral for dinosaurs and pterosaurs (clade Ornithodira), other independent lines of evidence for high metabolic rates, locomotor costs, or endothermy are needed. For example, some studies have suggested that, because large dinosaurs may have been homeothermic due to their size alone and could have had heat loss problems, ectothermy would be a more plausible metabolic strategy for such animals.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Here we describe two new biomechanical approaches for reconstructing the metabolic rate of 14 extinct bipedal dinosauriforms during walking and running. These methods, well validated for extant animals, indicate that during walking and slow running the metabolic rate of at least the larger extinct dinosaurs exceeded the maximum aerobic capabilities of modern ectotherms, falling instead within the range of modern birds and mammals. Estimated metabolic rates for smaller dinosaurs are more ambiguous, but generally approach or exceed the ectotherm boundary.

Conclusions/Significance

Our results support the hypothesis that endothermy was widespread in at least larger non-avian dinosaurs. It was plausibly ancestral for all dinosauriforms (perhaps Ornithodira), but this is perhaps more strongly indicated by high growth rates than by locomotor costs. The polarity of the evolution of endothermy indicates that rapid growth, insulation, erect postures, and perhaps aerobic power predated advanced “avian” lung structure and high locomotor costs.

The entire paper is free to access, presumably for eternity or its nearest equivalent, whilst there’s some additional coverage from Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Reference:

Citation: Pontzer H, Allen V, Hutchinson JR (2009) Biomechanics of Running Indicates Endothermy in Bipedal Dinosaurs. PLoS ONE 4(11): e7783. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007783

Editor: Andrew Allen Farke, Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, United States of America

Received: August 12, 2009; Accepted: October 14, 2009; Published: November 11, 2009

Here’s a link to a post at Neuroanthropology which should really have been included in the recent and 79th edition of Four Stone Hearth, which was somehow overlooked by me at the time. The linked essay was constructed by Greg Downey, in which he considers amongst much else, traditional structuralism, its origins and cycle of acknowledgement in academia, and how modern research into the brain and and its complex behind-the-scenes activities would seem to fly in the face of much structuralist thought.

As we see from this extract:

This is perhaps one of the first and simplest distinctions between structuralism, together with some forms of cognitive anthropology, and neuroanthropology. The belief that, underlying human expression is a simpler structure of thought, one that can be described as an oppositional framework of categories, is, in my opinion, not consistent with current neurosciences. Structuralist analysis assumes that, underlying surface complexity in myth, ritual, and even conscious thought, there must be a simpler generative matrix (this is also one of my issues with Pierre Bourdieu, and the reason that I think his thought is overly structuralist). Increasingly, neurosciences are leading us to the opposite conclusion, that conscious thought and overt expression are the thin surface of much more complex processes, a staggeringly Byzantine thinking organ embedded within a baroque organism upon which it depends for sensation, experience, subsistence, and even motivation to exist. Even the theorists of mental modularity, with which I disagree on many things, come into direct conflict with the stupendous simplification of mental processes required by structuralist analysis (for more, see Andy Clark & Michael Wheeler: Embodied cognition and cultural evolution).

If like me, you only have a vague acquaintance with the workings of the mind of Lévi-Strauss himself, be sure to check the rest of this most informative essay, as it provides a succinct introduction to what the man was about, his thoughts on the function of myth, plus a whole lot more, including plenty of outgoing links to further reading.

Although I haven’t been able to catch this latest offering from TAC, this video and the previous two, first aired a few weeks back should definitely be worth setting aside some time for over this (or any other) weekend – here’s a description of the first,  Archaeology in Taguatinga Valley, from TAC’s website:

This video describes the Archaeological Scientific Salvage and Cultural Heritage Management Program of Taguatinga Valley in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. The Goiano Institute of Pre-History and Anthropology (IGPA) from the Catholic University of Goias (UCG) conducted research on a massive water treatment project and carried out extensive public education. The work was supervised by Brazilian National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) and funded under contract by the Company of Basic Sanitation of Brasilia (CAESB).

The next is Welcome to Chucalissa, is described as follows:

Located in Memphis, Tennessee, the Chucalissa prehistoric site represents the widespread Mississippian Culture.  Founded initially around A.D. 1000, Chucalissa village reached its peak around 1500 with the construction of large platform mounds around a central plaza.  Part of a complex society and supported by farming and natural foods, the Native American people of this site traded throughout much of the Midwest and South.  Since its rediscovery in 1940, the site has become an education center for the University of Memphis through the C. H. Nash Museum.

And finally we have Uncovering Ancient St. Louis, as explained here:

“Ancient history” didn’t happen just in famous places like Rome, Tikal and Angkor Wat.  It happened also in the heart of North America.  Modern St. Louis residents may not realize that their city once hosted a complex Native American culture, represented by a cluster of mounds, possibly an actual city rivaling Cahokia across the Mississippi River.  A small army of scientists, while uncovering thousands of prehistoric Native American archaeological sites around this fertile convergence of rivers, has some fascinating questions about what took place here.

I’ll try and add comment at a later date when I’ve had time to watch these items in full.

Current Anthropology, December 2009, Volume 50 number 6 is now out, which as will be apparent from the headline, marks no less than 50 years in the field, and there are a number of essays contained therein which reflect on the past, present and future of this publication. Here’s part of editor Mark Aldenderfer’s introduction to the proceedings:

In this issue we celebrate 50 years of Current Anthropology. By no means the most long‐lived anthropology journal (that honor must go to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which technically began its run in 1872 but whose origins can be traced to 1863), it is certainly unique. The six celebratory essays explore the history of this remarkable journal from the perspectives of past editors, beginning with Cyril Belshaw, who took over from Sol Tax, the journal’s founder, and then Adam Kuper, Richard Fox, and Ben Orlove, as well as two past presidents of the Wenner‐Gren Foundation, Sydel Silverman and Richard Fox. Barbara Metzger, who joined the journal as a copy editor in 1964 at Tax’s behest and became arguably the central figure of the journal through the terms of five editors, provides another perspective on CA’s evolution. These very personal reflections offer us insights into not only the history of the journal but also the changing nature of scholarly publishing and the ways in which CA shaped, and was shaped by, the contours of these changes.

Although Sol Tax first saw CA as a venue for reviews and news, the realities of scholarly publishing even then moved him toward a broader conception of the idea of “current” research. Over the decades, as our editors have stressed, current meant just that—publishing not just the new for the sake of newness and currency but also the best of that research. Here the journal over the decades has been tremendously successful. Although I am aware of dissatisfaction with and rejection of quantitative measures of journal impact, such measures are nevertheless one way to document the quality of a journal and its influence on a field. Using the Institute for Scientific Information’s impact factor formula as reported in their annual Journal Citation Reports (see http://tinyurl.com/ygvxffq for definitions and caveats), since 1997, CA has ranged from the first to the seventh position of all indexed anthropology journals (lower numbers are better). This is a remarkable achievement for a four‐field journal in an era of increasing specialization, and the past editors must be heartily congratulated for keeping CA timely, relevant, and important to the field across these five decades. For the sake of modesty, I will forgo comparisons with the other two major four‐field journals!

As ever, the contents are behind a paywall, albeit one which in my opinion is very good value for money – as I’ve mentioned before, the cost of a digital annual subscription isn’t much different from what some journals charge for access to a single paper, and moreover the papers published in CA this year have been especially wide-ranging, informative and thought-provoking, a trend which I imagine will continue long into the future.

To access the Table of Contents, just click this link.

The Journal of Experimental Biology has published an interesting paper about some unique features in sprinters: longer toes and shorter ankle joints. The only one flaw is that their sample size is limited, they only compared 12 collegiate sprinters with 12 non-athletes of the same height. Regardless, from a physical anthropological point of view, this comparative & biophysical analysis informs us what traits help humans sprint faster.

The significance of long toes and short ankle joints can be explained from a purely physics perspective. From the start of a sprint, the only way a human can accelerate is through the transfer of energy from the force of the leg muscle to pushing on the ground. The advantage of longer toes provide maximum contact with the ground just a little bit longer than shorter toes.

The ankle joint is shorter because there is an inverse relationship between tension force and distance — think torque and angular momentum. Sprinters have a 25% shorter distance between the Achilles tendon and center of rotation of the ankle. The Achilles tendon is the common attachment of the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles into the calcaneus. When contracted, these two muscles flex the knee and plantar flex the foot. With a shorter ankle joint, these muscles shorten less for the same joint rotation. If muscles shorten less, then they shorten more slowly. This facilitates them to produce greater force that more than compensates for the reduced leverage.

When these two adaptations are combined, the authors figured that the greatest acceleration is achieved when the Achilles tendon lever arm is the shortest and the toes are longest. Comparing these anatomical features to other sprinting animals, like ostriches, greyhounds and cheetahs, they authors observed that they also have feet built for sprinting with similar features.

The authors, who are not physical anthropologists, state in press releases that they think these adaptations could have had some evolutionary backing. They raised the tired hypothetical scenario where early human ancestors, now those with longer toes and shorter ankle joints, were better able to run away from the saber tooth tiger or marauding tribe and reproduce that trait. But I disagree, while there certainly is an inherited component to the size and shape of our bones, muscles, and joints, our bodies are malleable and depending on training, our bones and muscles can change!

Furthermore, the majority of humans are not sprinters, as I understand it. In fact, most of us are good at long distance motility. Our bodies are extremely inefficient at sprinting but we’re really good at staying the course! Most of us have lots of Type I muscle fibers, slow but fatigue resistant fibers. Anyways, I don’t mean to rag them on this concept, as I mentioned they aren’t physical anthropologists and they seem to only be speculating on this last point. Either way, I believe the observation they made is interesting!

Knight, K. (2009). SHORT HEELS GIVE ELITE SPRINTERS THE EDGE Journal of Experimental Biology, 212 (22) DOI: 10.1242/jeb.039735

Lee, S., & Piazza, S. (2009). Built for speed: musculoskeletal structure and sprinting ability Journal of Experimental Biology, 212 (22), 3700-3707 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.031096

As by necessity this edition is being put together quite hurriedly, let’s get straight to the posts – I received a grand total of 3 submissions, and two of those were from one contributor, namely Eric at The Primate Diaries, which is where we’ll begin.

In Reexamining Ardipithecus ramidus in Light of Human Origins, Eric examines the way in which the recent Ardipithecus ramidus discoveries have been interpreted, in this case by Owen Lovejoy, the anthropologist who headed up much of the recent investigations.

Next from the same author is Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion? in which he comments at length on the stereotypical way in which food provisioning by male chimps (and by implication humans) has been interpreted, with claims that such behaviour supposedly increases their chances of copulating with females shortly after food has been shared – as he points out in the post, when the actual data are examined and analysed over the long term, in this case 22 months, we see a different story, as neatly summed up here:

The larger story lay not in the fact that females preferred to mate with males who provisioned them, but that they were opportunistically shifting their mating strategies for their own reproductive interests. In earlier studies by Boesch at the same site it was demonstrated that 84% of undesirable advances were rejected by females (Stumpf & Boesch 2006; pdf here), promiscuous mating was reserved for the early part of estrous and that 93% of all copulations were terminated by females (Boesch et al. 2006; pdf here). Females chose who they would mate with, when they would mate with them and how long it would last.

The point made thereafter is that instead of the view that male chimps shared food with females as a short term tactic, in reality the females appear to be calling the shots by adopting long term strategies in order to discern who  would make the best father for their offspring, recalling past food sharing, in addition to overall male ranking when making their choice.

And although this wasn’t actually submitted, I’ve included it anyway – Science Got Ardi Wrong or: The Enigma of Ardipithecus [UPDATED], which again points out some of the many holes in recently publicised news articles and the like – another very pertinent article which is not to be missed.

From Ad Hominin, Ciarán submits a post to which I referred to in a previous post here, namely Did Neandertals and modern humans interbreed?, and although I commented on just one paragraph, the account of the proceedings at the recent Human Evolution 150 Years After Darwin conference in Gibraltar reveals the ongoing debate regarding how archaic H. heidelbergensis and Neanderthals should be viewed, with particular reference to Atapuerca, and whether they should even be viewed as two entirely separate species in the first place.

In a similar vein we have this from Zinjanthropus: Skepticism is good, but… from which this is the introduction:

Earlier this week, Eric Michael Johnson drew my attention to a post by psychologist Christopher Ryan at his blog Sex At Dawn.  Ryan attacks Lovejoy’s monogamous humans model by citing many different lines of evidence.

I became so distracted by the reported testes:body mass ratio of 1/160 in humans that I couldn’t stop until I had some answers.  I am a female human, but even I thought that 1 kg of testicles would be an awful lot to lug around.  So I got out my books and my calculator and did some math, wrote in, and it was fixed.  Peer review in action!

Time now to serve off in other directions, where we find a bag of posts, mixed in topicality but all similarly interesting and well worth the read.

Over at Aardvarchaeology, Martin regales us with Danes Run Entire Urn Burials Through CT Scanner, whilst Alun Salt runs censorship through the mill with Libel, Censorship and Blog Comments, and further informs us that ‘It’s Not Just Jack Who Names the Planets’, in another riveting piece.

Sticking with archaeology, here’s a post called ‘Tramp Down Babylon’ from anthropologyworks which revisits the damage done to the site in the years since the US military has occupied the site, whilst back in the UK comes some slightly better news which concerns the recent discovery of the remains of a bluestone henge that is believed to have preceded the more monumental phase which eventually led to the construction of the megalithic complex with which we are familiar today. Eternal Idol has “It’s not quite Tutankhamun’s tomb, but…” – an account of Professor Mike Parker Pearson’s recent presentation on “Bluestonehenge”, which offers a nice report on the excavations ahead of a more formal publication some time in February 2010.

Brian at Old Dirt -New Thoughts asks ‘How Much Should We Dig?, with reference to his ongoing Hamline Project all the way up there in Alaska.

Neuroanthropology chip in with The Uncultured Project, and include a link to the actual project website here.

The final entry comes from the New York Times, who in common with Kambiz in a previous post here, announce Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100, from which this is taken:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

So that’s it for this time round – the next Four Stone Hearth, the 80th no less, is due out on Wednesday November 18th – no host is as yet slated, so if you fancy having a go at hosting on your own blog or site, just follow this link where instructions on how to do so can easily be found. Thanks for reading this somewhat brief edition, which I hope wasn’t too perfunctory, but limited battery life in a cafetería was a strong natural selector on this occasion.