Anthropology.net

Claude Lévi-Strauss died two days ago. He was 100 years old.

I shouldn’t have to write about his impact to the field of anthropology, in summary it was profound. He authored many texts. He set forth structuralism, a mode of thought by which we can compare relationships between social systems. His contributions to studying cultures and anthropology were deep and he will be missed.

Despite an ongoing bout of intermittent Interweblessness, I’m hoping to get the next Four Stone Hearth up and running as normal; Martin R seems to be away from his desk at the moment, so if anyone would like to submit anything for this coming Wednesday, please mail me by Tuesday at tim(oneword)jonzi AT gmail DOT com and I’ll do my best to ensure that all suitable submissions are duly included. Thanks.

Following on from the most recent post by Kambiz, readers, or in this case listeners might be interested in tuning into BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 21.00 London time, when the first of a two-part documentary ‘Aping Evolution’ is due to air, in which Professor Steve Jones will apparently be challenging evolutionary psychology, described thus:

Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain human behaviour from the hunter-gatherers or our nearest relatives, the chimpanzee, and has some seductively simple theories. One argument is that we have Stone Age brains in 21st-century skulls, from which we can account for everything from the violence that men show to their stepchildren to why racism exists. Is evolutionary psychology a truly useful addition to the canon of ideas to come out of Darwinian evolution or a just-so science that can be adjusted to suit the researchers’ prejudices?

Another quick reading link which might be of interest is this from Science Daily: ‘Moonlighting’ Molecules Discovered; Researchers Uncover New Kink In Gene Control’, and from which this is a snippet:

“Everyone knows that transcription factors bind to DNA and everyone knows that they bind in a sequence-specific manner,” says Heng Zhu, Ph.D., an assistant professor in pharmacology and molecular sciences and a member of the High Throughput Biology Center. “But you only find what you look for, so we looked beyond and discovered proteins that essentially moonlight as transcription factors.”

The team suspects that many more proteins encoded by the human genome might also be moonlighting to control genes, which brings researchers to the paradox that less complex organisms, such as plants, appear to have more transcription factors than humans. “Maybe most of our genes are doing double, triple or quadruple the work,” says Zhu. “This may be a widespread phenomenon in humans and the key to how we can be so complex without significantly more genes than organisms like plants.”

Reading through the rest of the article, it seems there could be some very far-reaching implications, especially in the ongoing debate as to why despite our apparent genetic proximity to the chimpanzee for example, we are so radically different.

Ciarán Brewster, a.k.a. adhominin, just tweeted about three book reviews. The reviews, written by Robin McKie of The Observer, cover recent books on cooking and human evolution which were written by some pretty big names in anthropology:

• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
  Wrangham’s thesis is that the advent of cooking reduced our energy demands of actually chewing, we do have a smaller muscles of mastication, jaws and teeth. This shift diverted the energy we would be spending on the act of eating, along with eating more easily digestable nutrients, to developing massive brains. Something I didn’t know and learned in the reviews is that people who eat only on uncooked meat or veggies will slowly starve, sucks for those on the raw food diet.
• The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself by Hannah Holmes
  Holmes addresses the fact that human females are the only primates with enlarged breasts and discusses theories on why. She says that the large breasts allow more feeding time for infants, which kept the babies more compliant and less likely to cry, which would otherwise attract predators. Our relatively hairless skin also evolved as a direct function of predator pressure, early human ancestors needed greater surface area to cool off our skin with sweat as they ran from predators in the savannah.
• The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived by Clive Finlayson
  Finlayson discusses why and possibly how Neandertals were so easily replaced by modern humans. He argues that the harsh landscape of early Africa, about 100,000 years ago, when modern humans emerged forced them to learn new technologies and lifestyles that were, “more inventive and intelligent as they struggled for survival. European Neanderthals, untutored in the school of hard knocks, were no match for our ancestors when they met.”

These books seem to be entertaining, you should check them out if you haven’t already. Also, if you’re on Twitter and looking to follow some active anthropology minded folks, I’ve compiled what I believe to be a pretty comprehensive list of anthropology Twitterers. Check that out too, and follow it… If I’m missing anyone please let me know on Twitter or via this post’s comment thread.