Anthropology.net

The latest edition of Current Anthropology has just been published, and included within is a special section referred to in the headline above – I haven’t had time to read it yet, so for now here’s a table of contents and a snippet from the introduction by editor Mark Aldenderfer, commenting on the themed papers, which reads thus:

Deng Xiaopeng has been reported to have said, “To get rich is glorious.” He is also reported to have said, “Let some people get rich first.” The papers in this special issue of Current Anthropology can be said to focus on the consequences of Deng’s aphorism—how some people get rich and how they manage to transfer that wealth, variously defined, to subsequent generations.

As the papers in this issue argue, wealth comes in various forms, and there are different modalities by which these forms are transferred to offspring and kin. What I found particularly compelling, however, was the simplicity of the model Smith and his cast of characters developed: two parameters do the heavy lifting—shocks, which are windfalls or losses, and the degree to which those shocks are transferred to offspring.

As both the authors and the commentators note, these models do not explain all that we want to know about wealth transfer; nevertheless, they offer a firm empirical basis for exploring this topic in greater depth and breadth. One outstanding question I would like to see explored is how wealth disparities are eventually transformed into persistent political inequalities that are maintained over the generations. Smith and his coauthors have outlined some of the directions this research may take, and I look forward to seeing it, perhaps in the pages of CA.

This looks like a pretty interesting issue, as we can see from the listed papers:

Special Section: Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies

The Emergence and Persistence of Inequality in Premodern Societies: Introduction to the Special Section

Samuel Bowles, Eric Alden Smith, and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (225 kB)

Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter‐Gatherers

Eric Alden Smith, Kim Hill, Frank W. Marlowe, David Nolin, Polly Wiessner, Michael Gurven, Samuel Bowles, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Tom Hertz, and Adrian Bell

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (330 kB)

Pastoralism and Wealth Inequality: Revisiting an Old Question

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Ila Fazzio, William Irons, Richard L. McElreath, Samuel Bowles, Adrian Bell, Tom Hertz, and Leela Hazzah

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (317 kB)

Domestication Alone Does Not Lead to Inequality: Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Horticulturalists

Michael Gurven, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Paul L. Hooper, Hillard Kaplan, Robert Quinlan, Rebecca Sear, Eric Schniter, Christopher von Rueden, Samuel Bowles, Tom Hertz, and Adrian Bell

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (386 kB)

Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Agriculturalists: Foundations of Agrarian Inequality

Mary K. Shenk, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Jan Beise, Gregory Clark, William Irons, Donna Leonetti, Bobbi S. Low, Samuel Bowles, Tom Hertz, Adrian Bell, and Patrizio Piraino

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (379 kB)

Production Systems, Inheritance, and Inequality in Premodern Societies: Conclusions

Eric Alden Smith, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Samuel Bowles, Michael Gurven, Tom Hertz, and Mary K. Shenk

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (356 kB)

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.

Ardipithecus ramidus

I want to be the first to break news to you that Science has published White’s contentious 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus! I caught news of the release on the internet. The link is not live yet, but when it is I’ll fill you in.

Owen Lovejoy is one of the authors of the paper, and he says that the fossil changes the notion that humans and chimps, our closest genetic cousins, both trace their lineage to a creature that was more like today’s chimp and we’ll have to be rewriting our text books soon. This is big folks. What this means is that our common ancestor was a bipedal forest forager and that chimps were an evolutionary offshoot.

White, the lead author, describes the fossil with flexible hands and a brain about a quarter the size of a human’s,

“We can’t say this species was a direct ancestor of modern humans, so we have to be careful. But it suggests that the direction of early hominids was away from the chimp.”

There are a lot of other implications that I won’t get into just yet, but keep checking us out from time to time as we get more!

Here are some of the press releases/news coverage that have come out since I’ve published this post:

• Kent State University Professor C. Owen Lovejoy helps unveil oldest hominid skeleton
• Fossil finds extend human story
• Before ‘Lucy,’ there was ‘Ardi’: First major analysis of early hominid published in Science
• Oldest hominid skeleton provides new evidence for human evolution
• Humanity Has a New 4.4 Million-Year-Old Baby Mama
• Ancient Skeleton May Rewrite Earliest Chapter of Human Evolution
• Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy
• Ethiopian desert yields oldest hominid skeleton
• Ardi displaces Lucy as oldest hominid skeleton
• Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally)
• Oldest “Human” Skeleton Found–Disproves “Missing Link”
• ‘Ardi,’ Oldest Human Ancestor, Unveiled

The latest issue of the Proceedings from the National Academy of Science journal hosts a Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins special feature for free online. I recommend you check it out.

September 22nd, 2009 Cover of the PNAS Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins Special

• Editorial by Richard G. Klein, “Darwin and the recent African origin of modern humans.”
• Perspective by Ian Tattersall, “Human origins: Out of Africa.”
• Perspective by Timothy D. Weaver, “The meaning of Neandertal skeletal morphology.”
• Research Article by J. J. Hublin, “The origin of Neandertals.”
• Research Article by Michael P. Richards and Erik Trinkaus, “Isotopic evidence for the diets of European Neanderthals and early modern humans.”
• Research Article by John F. Hoffecker, “The spread of modern humans in Europe.”
• Research Article by G. Philip Rightmire, “Middle and later Pleistocene hominins in Africa and Southwest Asia.”
• Research Article by Francesco d’Errico, et al., “Additional evidence on the use of personal ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa.”
• Research Article by Michael DeGiorgio, et al.,”Explaining worldwide patterns of human genetic variation using a coalescent-based serial founder model of migration outward from Africa.”

Unfortunately, I have not yet had the time to read any of these papers but they I reckon they should be somewhat enlightening.

Over the past three years, a book comprising what are considered the best science posts of the year is published, and the selection process for this year’s edition is already in progress, with 210 entries already submitted, as we see from Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock:

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 210 entries, all of them, as well as the “submit” buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people’s posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays).

As is clear from the assembled list of posts, there’s a wide ranging mix of content from science bloggers hailing from a multitude of disciplines, all of whose posts were published between 12-01-08 and 12-01-09. The purpose of this most recent post is to remind bloggers to check their own archives for material they consider appropriate for this year’s edition, and having done that to read other bloggers’ work from the same year, and submit suggestions accordingly…

Then, spread the word around the Web about this – point people to the submission form from wherever you think is appropriate: your blog, twitter, Facebook, various forums, etc. Let other science bloggers know about this -the more the merrier.

And to make submitting even easier, there’s a even a handy bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar, allowing you to simply click open the submission form which opens in a separate window; moreover, it’s permissible to submit multiple entries from different sites and blogs, which makes the bookmarklet a very useful tool if you happen to come across something, rather than having to navigate directly to the submissions web-page.

Thus far I haven’t been able to establish the deadline date, but suffice it to say, the sooner submissions are sent the better. It’s also worth bearing in mind that because these entries will be published in print, posts which contain loads of links, images multimedia like videos etc, might not be as suitable as a more conventional essay, for example.

Potential contributors are reminded that it’s only possible to have entries considered by using the dedicated submission form.

As you may have noticed, it has been rather silent here for the last 5 months. I’m happy to break the silence with most excellent news of a new guest blogger to Anthropology.net & Primatology.net, Raymond Ho, of The Prancing Papio. I’ve been an avid reader of Raymond’s blog ever since he started it earlier this year. His balance in being thorough, inquisitive, and consistent has kept me subscribed.

For a little background on Raymond, he’s currently an undergraduate Biological Anthropology student at CUNY, Queens College and is expected to graduate next month. As you can tell from the title of his personal blog, he’s passionate about primatology, especially grooming. His senior honors thesis compares grooming between hamadryas baboons and gelada baboons. But he does write on many anthropological topics as well, such as paleoanthropology — one of my favorite topics!

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Raymond for accepting to blog here. I’m very grateful, actually, especially since I’m still an inactive member of this site and hope that he and others will keep this site ticking in my absence. If you haven’t followed his blog, I suggest you do. He’ll continue posting there and here.

Anthropology.net has gone platinum. With the help of guest bloggers and regular contributors, I have hosted 1,000,000 unique visitors since March of 2007. For a highly specialized niche site with no advertisement campaign I consider this milestone a success.

But, I’m going to bid blogging adieu because I have been accepted to medical school. Once I start, I imagine my studies will be like drinking from a fire hydrant and I won’t have much time to keep up with anthropology news and blogging. This is extremely hard to do, as Anthropology.net has been my baby for the last 4 years. Since the average posts takes several hours to compose, and my primary role as a medical student is to be a study bot, I am going to have to shift focus.

So what does that mean to you guys? Obviously, I won’t be posting, commenting, and moderating. I’m going to miss the discussions I’ve had with the readers and keeping up to date. I still will keep the domain and the site live just in case I ever do decide to return. I do want to extend an invitation to new guest bloggers and contributors, if you wanna pick up anthropology blogging, I’ll be more than happy to host you. Just contact me. Anyways, thank you all for such an awesome ride. I hope to be back once my clerkships start… but that won’t be for at least two more years.

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken a bit of a blogging hiatus. I have actually taken the time off to write some software in Python that I hope to release soon… a project that you may have seen in previous iterations.

Speaking of some software, I have do have some less cryptic news to share with you. I have been a part of the development team behind FOROST, a forensic osteology metabase, that physical anthropologists and forensic specialists may find useful since it provides images and descriptions of special pathological and taphonomic cases. We’re ready to showcase the site and encourage you to use it and pass it onto others!

This metabase primarily functions to expand one’s access to comparative samples. By providing a portal to well documented images and attribution, we foresee that FORST will help connect investigators to collections that they may have never knew about. We’ve decided to call it a metabase because we’ve decided not to house the images and metadata linked to each specimen. Rather, we curate a subset of the information, which is determined by contributors, and is in turn searchable from the FOROST query builder. Each item in the database is ultimately stored on the participant members’ servers and is branded to their liking. I am hopeful that this unification of forensic data will pool together distributed specimen information while retaining individual attribution. I’m even more hopeful that it will facilitate collaboration and standardization of forensic criteria. It is like one big digital potluck party…

The metabase is queriable now. You can poke around and see how we’ve gone about showing the results from the preliminary institutions that have participated. You’ll find some pretty cool images of blunt force trauma and gunshot wounds. I’ve worked with a close colleague of mine, Dr. Henry Gilbert, who approached me with the idea a while back ago. My role has been primarily a consultant, where I’ve helped with brainstorming the database design, setting up the development environment and PHP coding practices. The senior developer is Raul Castillo. I recently started making a translation of the site into Farsi, as well. I have also had the pleasure to work with researchers and developers from UNAM.

I really am excited about this project and I’d really like to hear your feedback. We’re far from calling it a completed project and understand it may have some quirks here and there. I want to know about your experiences using the metabase. You can shout out your ideas and suggestions for improvements here in the comments thread, or you can send the project manager, Socorro Baez, an email, if you prefer the private route. You should also contact her if you want to participate too.

Oh yeah! FOROST will also be announced at a conference at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, at UNAM on the 16th to the 20th of March, 2009. I plan on attending the conference, which will host talks by Carlos Serrano Sánchez and Douglas Ubelaker, as well as others. If you’re interested in how forensic science intersects with anthropology, I recommend you attend. Let me know if you do decide to go, maybe we can have a meetup of Anthropology.netters.

I’m fairly busy as of late and so I regularly set aside some weekend reading, such as Sergey Gavrilets‘ new paper on investigating the impact of egalitarianism on human evolution during the Pleistocene. The paper was published the other day in the open access journal PLoS One. Yesterday, I bookmarked the paper’s DOI (10.1371/journal.pone.0003293), in hopes that I can read it today.

Fast forward to this afternoon… I sit down to download the PDF, print it out, and read it. I know that DOI’s have several layers of resolution and PLoS’ DOIs resolve to plos.org. I click my bookmark and much to my surprise am presented with this on my screen:

Ahh, the ever familiar landing page of shame, a billboard to the public pointing out those who forgot to renew their domain name with their registrar. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll simplify it. In the land of the internet, there are special servers, called nameservers which handle the association of a domain name to a computer’s [IP] address. Without them, we’d have to memorize numbers like 72.14.207.99 to access Google. To use these servers, those of us that own domains have to pay a regular annual fee. If we don’t, the service will put up this landing page. After some time, the name will released into the market and other’s can grab it.

I don’t know how long this problem will last for plos.org, but even if it lasts just for today or this weekend, it is an embarrassing problem for the Public Library of Science. It also raises my eyebrows and makes me question the responsibility of the individuals who run the joint. The Public Library of Science is completely web-run operation. If they can’t stay on top of renewing their domain names, how long can they be the premiere open access publication? We can’t visit their homepage, thousands of DOIs aren’t resolving today and I wonder if emails addressed to *@plos.org have been bouncing back?

There could be obvious explanations, though. Maybe the guy who’s in charge of managing the domains is vacationing? Or maybe they actually switched some settings, such as the IP address the domains point to. That could definately be the case. Come to think of it, since their other services that live on subdomains, such as PLoS Biology is working fine, I hope that’s why. But, I honestly couldn’t access the journal via DOI all day long. When IP addresses change, it doesn’t take that long to propagate across the whole world. So I decided to do a quick WHOIS search on plos.org, and in fact, the domain name did expire on October 2nd, 2008 and was not renewed.

Anyways, no hard feelings for the PLoS guys… It is hard running a nonprofit organization. I know, I used to work for one. In my experience, there never seemed to be enough people and everyone wore different hats. I really love their journals too. They’ve done some amazing things, such as the comments and trackbacks in PLoS One let alone the open access initiative. But I really would like them to show a little bit more professionalism, especially with handling their flagship domain, plos.org. Oh yeah, let me remind you that PLoS had performance problems with their content management system that handled all their journals earlier this year. The problem would slow their site to a crawl, driving readers away in frustration over wasted time. It is fixed now, but it took months!

P.S. I ended up finding that article the ‘hard way’ via clicking around plosone.org.

Emanuel Lusca recently contacted wishing to guest blog here at Anthropology.net. As a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, double majoring in anthropology and philosophy, I think Emanuel will fill some gaps in my lack of coverage of cultural anthropology topics… so I’m really excited to have him on board.

In his email, he explained that his anthropological interests are wide spread, stemming from his belief that anthropology is a self-reflexive exercise that aims to understand and explore oneself through the “other.’ He’s particularly interested n the intersection of ontology and epistemology in terms of the law, science, language and power. He told me he’s heavily influenced by thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Laura Nader, Bruno Latour, and others.

Currently, as a result of his religious upbringing, he is exploring the possibility of multiple understandings and lived realities in a shared world and the resulting ontological consequences and reconfiguration of power. He is applying to doctoral programs in cultural anthropology. And, the underlying question he is grappling with is how it is possible that demons be ontologically objective for a believer, and ontologically subjective for the theorist?

I welcome Emanuel to Anthropology.net, and hope you do as well!