Anthropology.net

I don’t regularly make announcements about my life, but I wanted to let you that blogging here will be sparse because I’m leaving to Turkey to do some fieldwork. I should return in two weeks time, unless we find something that needs a bit more time or if the PKK and Turkish government have another flare up like they did earlier this year. Hopefully, the former rather than the latter will happen.

I’ll be doing paleoanthropology research, but unlike my field season last year in Ethiopia, I’ll be hitting much older localities — we’re talking about the Miocene not the Plio-Pleistocene. This means I’ll be looking for hominoids, not necessarily hominins. But I’ll be elated to find either, in fact I’ve been dreaming about finding something like last year’s Ouranopithecus turkae! I wouldn’t be disappointed to find a really old H. erectus, Neandertal.

I imagine I’ll be stumbling upon a lot of archaeological material too. I’ll try to document as much as I’m allowed to and put it up on my Flickr account when I can. I also imagine that internet connectivity will be limited in the field, as will my time and energy to loiter around online. That being said, I’ll see y’all later!

From John Lynch, of Stranger Fruit, comes the upsetting news of Charles Lockwood‘s untimely death. He died in a motorcycle accident in London.

For those that don’t know who Charles Lockwood was, he was a paleoanthropologist who investigated the evolution of skull anatomy in hominins. Last year, his book “The Human Story: Where We Come From & How We Evolved,” came out. John Lynch has had the pleasure to do research with him, and has posted several citations where he and Locwood, along with Bill Kimbel published their geometric analysis of temporal bone variation in hominins. Do check them out.

Unfortunately, I never met Charles but have read almost a dozen of his papers. The last paper I remember reading of his was his July 2007 study with Claire Terhune and Bill Kimbel — where they concluded that their comparative sample of 520 extant and fossil hominid temporal bones indicated that H. erectus exhibited more intraspecific variation than other hominids. I was impressed with this paper and have always understood him to be an archetypal, high quality anatomist and field scientist — someone who inspired me. He will be missed.

I want to introduce you to a new guest blogger here at Anthropology.net, Tasha Spawn. Tasha is currently a student at University of North Dakota. Her primary anthropological interests are on topics like sexuality, gender, identity, the concept of race, equality, and male/female relationships. In our emails, Tasha expressed that she looks forward to sharing her opinions, hosting lively discussions about anything that has to do with anthropology… even if she has not explored it before before.

I’m especially interested in what Tasha has to say about the concept of race. Hopefully a post or two on that will come in due time. In the mean time, I look forward to read whatever Tasha decides to post on. As you may have noticed, the site currently is sparse on cultural posts… And Tasha’s interests are right in line with this gap… So I really welcome her enthusiasm with helping fill out this discrepancy!

On Primatology.net, I just blogged about some unethical marketing tactics by Palabea.com that I want you to be aware of. Palabea is a startup social networking site with something like 50,000 users. There are some press reports circulating the wires promising Palabea will provide users with an opportunity to talk with “Albert,” a cyber chimp who has a Facebook profile. They are using the “Albert, the CyberChimp” fanbase to leverage growth in their site and generate revenue.

In that post, I address how the principle investigator, John Marlowe is fake. I also talk about how the institutions and publications are also fake. A founder of Palabea is the registered owner of CyberChimps.org, the online platform of the Cyber Chimp spin machine. Furthermore, the photos of “Albert” are doctored images of Ayumu, a real chimp, who is studied to understand primate cognition. Here are two examples:

I have no interest in slamming down Palabea. But I do not want misleading marketing to affect the public’s understanding of primatology. There is some honest primate cognition research out there, experiments that explore non-human language capabilities. This sort of hyped up fake stuff jeopardizes the scientific process and the integrity of primatology; it needs to be regulated… Palabea’s marketing will confuse the public by establishing fake institutions, projects, individuals, and “information.” I really don’t want this misinformation to spread to the mainstream press.

In order to prevent this poor attempt at viral marketing from spreading further, I’ve submitted my Primatology.net post to Digg. Please digg this news up and let others know about it.

One other way to help out is to add Albert the CyberChimp as a friend on Facebook and report the fake profile. I would do it myself, but “Albert” banned me from being his friend after I published the Primatology.net post! It is against Facebook’s Terms of Service (under the User Conduct section) to have fake profiles, and Albert’s is no-where-close to real.

“In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: … impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;”

So that poll I asked y’all to take last week has been closed. As promised, I want to share the results. Even though almost 1,000 viewers checked the post out, I didn’t get nearly as many responses as I hoped for. Still, there is some useful data…

Based upon the 55 people that did take the poll, we have a much different demographic than what the Facebook fan page shows. I’ve been thinking about why that is so. It could be that Facebook fans are just that, fans, and not regular readers and contributors to the site.

I’m most surprised by the disproportionate distribution of males and females. I anticipated at least a 50:50 male to female ratio, because Facebook fan page mentions that at least 60% of Anthropology.net fans are female, but I guess a lot more guys read this site. I did notice that an outstanding majority of Facebook fans of Anthropology.net are females from Turkey — and could have thrown off the demographics there. The language barrier could be a reason as why they aren’t represented in the poll.

I kinda had an idea the majority of the readers are those with at least a Bachelor’s degree, but I am surprised the site reaches a different age demographic than I what I had in mind. One last observation, I think there’s something interesting going on with the majority interest in bio-physical anthropology compared to the predominate background in the social sciences. Of course this is by no means statistically significant data, we don’t really have enough respondents to even establish a normal distribution. Hopefully next year we’ll have more data.

Today is Anthropology.net’s one year anniversary on WordPress.com. I’ve been running this blog for more than one year but I decided to scrap some of the old site because of technical difficulties. It was a bittersweet decision. Initially, Anthropology.net lost a lot of readership. All the inbound links were broken, and that dropped the site’s page rank with the search engines.

Despite these losses, Anthropology.net has bounced back remarkably — even surpassing the readership it once had. One of the major successes I have seen is that Anthropology.net has had over half a million unique visitors to the site! That translates to an average of 1,400 visitors a day. My high school wasn’t even that large. To think that a population larger than my entire high school is visiting this niche site on a daily basis is amazing and humbling. The graph below documents the traffic growth per month for this last year.

But visits alone haven’t built Anthropology.net into what it has become. Commenting on the posts has also skyrocketed. Anthropology.net currently hosts over 1,350 of our comments. While I moved some of the old content last year, I could not migrate the comments at all. To think that you all are submitting your thoughtful comments everyday is a testament to dedicated and lively community behind this site.

This growth in traffic and commenting has all been because of the move to WordPress.com. The move relieved a lot of the system administration woes that bogged me down in the past. I remember having to deal with database backups, upgrades, and performance issues all the time. This took up time and energy from reading science papers and writing about them. I now have more time to read and write more thoroughly.

With these successes in mind, I really look forward to the future. I know I’ve made some massive mistakes on more occasions than I’d like to admit. I also know I frequently make smaller mistakes. I’m always catching my typos and grammatical mistakes after I hit the publish button, which is embarrassing. These are things I’ve been learning to improve on along the way… and I’m not deterred from continuing to blog here one bit.

One last thing… I’ve always been curious to know a bit more about Anthropology.net’s readers. I think it is important to know just to understand where people are coming from and at what levels Anthropology.net reaches. I know from the Facebook fanpage, which has 231 fans, that 65% of our readership are female. The majority of the fans are between the ages of 18-34. This is somewhat useful, but is limited to only those with Facebook accounts and subscribed as fans of Anthropology.net.

So to get a better break down, I’ve setup this short 10 question survey. Please fill it out honestly. The survey closes on Saturday, May 31st 2008 at midnight, Pacific Standard Time. I’ll share the results with everyone once it is done. If you don’t think the survey captures who you are, please comment in the thread below! I’m really interested in knowing more about y’all.

This coming Wednesday, May 7^th, will mark the 40^th edition of Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology blog carnival that began life here at Anthropology.net – so if you have anything you’d care to contribute to this next edition, you can send it via submit@fourstonehearth.net or instead to remote central, the hosting blog this time round.

The latest edition of the anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth is now up and ready to be read – as ever we are offered a very nice mix of writing from around the anthropological zone of the blogosphere.

The next edition will be at remote central on May 9th – so for now, many thanks to Jason for putting this one together.

I caught some obscure news of an upcoming conference in Los Angeles that’s packing panels with some big names in anthropology, such as Frans de Waal, Ian Tattersall, Craig Stanford, Donald Johanson, Marc Hauser, Christine Kenneally, and Bruce Lahn. They’ll all be discussing “What Makes Us Human?” which also happens to be the title of the conference.

I’m pretty sure this question has at least once been on almost every human’s mind, and I’m really interested to know what’s gonna be discussed. Unfortunately, the short notice and the awkward timing of the conference (starting the morning of Monday, April 28 and running through Tuesday, April 29) won’t work with my schedule. That’s unfortunate, but the press release does indicate the media will have the opportunity to interview six panelists, which hopefully will result in news pieces and what not. If any readers are gonna attend, please contact me and let me know what you think of the conference.

A related sidenote, earlier this year, one of the panelists, Marc Hauser discussed what he thinks are four factors that make human cognition unique at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I covered that news and a little discussed brewed about. You maybe interested in checking it out.

One last thing that caught my eye, the press release mentions,

“News of the recently discovered ancient European toothed hominin jawbone fragment, as reported in the March 27, 2008 scientific journal Nature, has raised more questions about human origins. This important find comes at a time when some of the world’s most respected thinkers and researchers… will have the opportunity to discuss its significance.”

I don’t think that the 1.2 million year old mandible from Atapeurca makes any significant waves in figuring out what makes us human. The mandible only tells us that first settlement of Western Europe could be related to a really early migration out of Africa.

The next Four Stone Hearth will be published this coming Wednesday, April 23rd, and for this edition, Hominin Dental Anthropology will be the hosting blog, so if you have any anthropology articles you’ve written or read that you’d like to see included, please send them along, either to Jason at Hominin Dental Anthropology, or by submitting here.

There is still an ongoing need for bloggers willing to host this carnival, with the next vacant slot on May 18th – so if you’d like to host a future edition, just drop a line to host@fourstonehearth.net