Anthropology.net

On the lighter side of anthropology…  The Onion takes a satirical look at what outrageously pseudoscientific research into human origins might look like.  Their headline reads:

“Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat”
‘Wait, That Can’t Be Right,’ Scientists Say”

In addition to being funny, the article, by contrast, helps show the strict standards of evidence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and peer-review process of actual paleoanthropological research.  Also, our close relationship with other primates is highlighted when one fake Onion researcher observes that “…humans don’t look like goats.”  In other words, don’t expect any presentations on “goat people” at professional anthropological conferences anytime soon.  Enjoy!

- Jay Fancher

Anonymous is not a force to be reckoned with. Scientologists have felt their wrath for sometime, Sarah Palin did as well, as have MasterCard & Visa post-Wikileaks fiasco. I’m sure Aaron Barr is now realizing the impact Anon has. Aaron Barr is head of an internet security company, HBGary Federal. His company was contracted by Bank of America as a counter Wikileaks impending release of cables that will incriminate BofA.

Anon vs. Scientology

Ars Technica has written up a 3 page account of the situation, which is absolutely fascinating. The tl;dr seems like its comes straight out of a B movie. Aaron’s ingenious plan was to ‘infiltrate’ Anon…He joined IRC channels in an attempt to sabotage Anon and get names of those in the organization.

His problems started here. Aaron failed to realize Anon is not a true organization. At its core, Anon is an anti-organization, as anarchist as you can be, with no leadership and an ever-changing membership. Aside from infiltrating the chat groups, Aaron attempted to flesh out members of Anon via a guilt-by-association method using something akin to 6-degrees-of-separation and social media. He revealed himself to the group, claiming to research them.

What ended up completely backfired on Aaron. Anon was pissed. In traditional hacking manner, they hacked his company’s site and replaced the front page. They also managed to get a hold of at least 44,000 of his emails and release them via torrents. They deleted 1 TB of his backups, wiped his devices and to top it all of, got a hold of his Twitter and LinkedIn accounts where they posted messages as him. For a company that was in the midst of a sale, Anon effectively ruined that.

This leads me to a open up a discussion regarding the Anthropology of Hackers, a timely piece that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday by NYU’s Gabriella Coleman. In her write up she outlines her 13 week curriculum on the culture of hacking, covering topics like open source, privacy & anonymity, and the dawn of the nerds. Ironically, almost all are relavent to HBGary Federal, given Aaron’s troubles. I wonder how they’d benefit from a crash course in Coleman’s class. Looking at Coleman’s course topics, there’s a lot to consider regarding hacking. The most relevant to this topic is the material covered in Weeks 11 & 12,

Week Eleven: Anarchism and the Politically Minded Hacker

Many hackers express some degree of ambivalence over the politics of hacking as Patrice Riemens has argued and as hackers themselves have raised. This is not the case with a small but well organized cadre of hackers located primarily in Latin America, Europe, and North America who havecharted collectives, many of them influenced by the political philosophy of anarchism. To grapple with anarchism as a political philosophy (which, similar to hacking, is plagued with a parade of misconceptions), we turn to David Graeber‘s fantastic pamphlet, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. We also read Jeff Juris’s ethnographic work about technology activists during the counter-globalization era Networking Futures.

Week Twelve: Trolls and the Politics of Spectacle

If anyone has been paying attention to the Internet in recent years, it has been impossible to miss a class of provocateur and saboteur: the Internet troll, whose raison d’être is to be as offensive as humanely possible via raunchy (but often humorous and quite esoteric) language, images, pranks, and tricks, basically, doing it for what they call the “lulz.” To get a sense of the cultural logic and exploits of trolls we read “The Trolls Among Us” by Mattathias Schwartz. To help us grapple with the nature of spectacle, we read a couple of chapters of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe. We read excerpts from Lewis Hyde’s magnificent book on tricksters to consider whether the troll might be an example of these mythical creatures that have dazzled countless societies with their trickery. We watch a talk on a protest movement against the Church of Scientology whose roots lie in the act of trolling buteventually turned into a morally serious protest movement, which nonetheless retained the tactics of spectacle as part of its political arsenal.

This is a very interesting time to be looking at the intersection of technology and culture. There are anthropologists doing some fascinating work researching the sense of identity in online communities like World of Warcraft and Facebook… These groups share an online space, often with avatars and complex long-lasting interactions.

But with Anon there’s no identity.

Anon remains behind ever-changing screen names and masked localities behind proxies. I’m sure if you’ve ever taken an Intro to Cultural Anthropology course you would have touched on Erik Erikson’s theories of personality, We know what defines identity is a loose association of markers like behavior, language, dress, shared spaces, etc. Anon is disparate to any modern definition of identity. They do not share the same space, language, or any other measure of similarity except for behavior and ideology…

“We are Anonymous.  We are Legion.  We do not forgive.  We do not forget.  Expect us.”

I’d really like to get to hear Coleman’s take on this current event, or any cultural anthropologist for the matter. So if you’re interested, please chime in on your take on this all — What do you understand on Anon and how are they similar/dissimilar to other groups?

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is a strange organization. I often wonder how it operates, but then I realize I don’t even wanna know because there’s often no real logic to their madness. Take into consideration these cases:

Case 1: About 4 years ago the AAA decided to close access to almost all their journals, directly against the Federal Research Publication Access Act. This spurned a lot of discussion regarding ownership of publication, author’s rights and the AAA’s motivation behind it. Most of us wondered how could the AAA, who didn’t fund the research, produce the data, and write up the analysis, close off the information to the world? Here was a bit of my outcry over the matter, archived by afarensis in June of 2006,

“The hypocrisy that surrounds the AAA when it begged for anthropologists to protest to the US government to not cut funding but their recent resiliency to not give back is outstanding in this matter. I don’t get why the AAA won’t open their eyes and see that this form of publishing helps to ensure long-term access to scholarly articles. Unlike articles that are licensed in traditional article databases, like their closed AnthroSource, public libraries and institutions of the people (like universities) can create local copies and repositories of these resources. People, by working together to make repositories of open access literature, can ensure continued access to these scholarly publications into the distant future.”

From this idiocy, a nice project spun off but hasn’t in my opinion been a viable alternative. Unfortunate.

Case 2: Once upon a time the AAA was an organization that scoffed at social media and Web 2.0, specifically blogs. It’s hard to dig up exact references since many links have died… But I do distinctly remember them issuing a statement saying blogs are useless forms of communication, with a little wink wink nod nod to this said blog.

When they redesigned their homepage a couple of years ago, they deployed several blogs. They even sent me emails asking for link exchange. Sure people are allowed to change their minds, but I wondered what’s with the change in heart? Suffice to say, I didn’t add them back.

Case 3: The AAA just had their annual meeting and yes, everyone’s reporting that decided to do away with science. It’s true, Peter Wood of the Chronicle, writes on them actively deciding to nix science out of the Mission Statement. I’ve copied and pasted the presumed edits to the mission statement he provided below the read more link.  Another related decision made is defining the role of AAA, away from ethnography and scientific experiments and observations to anecdotal and subjective journalism… Again without ethnology and ethnography — what is cultural anthropology?

Alice Dreger of Fetishes I Don’t Get, writes on some of the anger she experienced from other scientific anthropologists,

“The primatologist Sarah Hrdy (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote, “My reaction is one of dismay-actually, even more visceral and stronger than that-albeit not surprise.” The scientists I talked to want to know (as I do) exactly what is the AAA Executive Board’s justification for all this. They are confused about whether they should bother to fight, or just give up and depart the AAA already.”

The Society for Anthropological Sciences, a division of the AAA, objected to these changes, I am sure most do. I don’t understand why this change is being done. In a time and age when we need to strive to objective data to make informed decisions, this organization is moving away from that, and consciously. Why?

Could it because anthropology is largely not considered a science outside of the discipline — so the AAA chooses embrace what most think of us?

Again it is hard to get into the minds of such a dysfunctional organization. They seem to never make the right decision. An analogy that works in my mind is the AAA is to anthropologists as the Clerical Theocracy of the Islamic Republic are to Iranian population. As many governments help make decisions to move forward and advance their society, both the AAA and the mullahs regress their organizations further back in time.

Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t bothered to translate this page, but I’ve stumbled across a collection of 56 family portraits from East Asia that I wanted to share with you. The images give us a quick glimpse of all the different cultures and ethnicities that make up the far East, along with the lat/long of where these people are found. Check it out.

Ethnic Mongol

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.

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

In regards to my previous post from yesterday, I’d like to quickly share this quote I’ve found from Clay Shirky, a Interactive Telecommunications teacher at NYU. He spoke to TED last year on Facebook, Twitter, and the like, and he was recently asked to comment about the usage of these tools in Iran. Here’s what he had to say,

“… this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.”

Check more of his question and answer session with TED.

Joyce Marcus has published a bold review in the Annual Review of Anthropology where she argues that anthropology must be willing to generalize — cultures must be compared and contrasted in order identify similarities in the ways cultures have responded to challenges. In other words, relativism has no place in trying to understand the evolutionary pattern to human social structure.

She further argues that such a comprehensive and comparative analysis of cultural evolution must be done with collaboration between ethnologists and archaeologists. She stresses the impact of archaeology has in investigating cultural evolution, using the transition to agriculture and animal domestication as a critical moment when we can see the emergence of institutions not seen in previous lifestyles. She further relates the relationship between ethnology and archaeology is analogous to that,

“… between zoology and vertebrate paleontology. Zoologists are able to study both muscle tissue and behavior at a level of detail unavailable to paleontologists. Paleontologists, however, can find the muscle attachments on fossil bones that provide evidence for specific muscles; they can then draw on the zoological literature both on those muscles and on the behavior they reflect. Paleontologists can also elucidate long-term trends and recover the skeletons of transitional species unknown to zoology; such fossils show us the order in which certain structures (and hence behaviors) arose. In an important sense, the fossil record is the proving ground for any theory of change based on comparisons of living species.”

In order for us to understand how cultures evolve, she’s very right, cultural anthropologists and archaeologists do need to collaborate. Hell, archaeologists even need to understand that they’re not just digging up cultural noise. Both disciplines need to agree upon a common terminology and see that cultures can be compared. But I don’t know if many cultural anthropologists are ready to hang up their relativist coats on the hanger just yet.

Joyce Marcus (2008). The Archaeological Evidence for Social Evolution Annual Review of Anthropology, 37 (1), 251-266 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085246

A new paper in PNAS reports on an interesting find from a 12,000-year-old Natufian burial complex in the Hilazon Tachtit cave site in Israel — a shaman, which is unlike any other Natufian burial known to date. Before I get into the details of the paper, let me first introduce the Natufian culture and the ecological context members of this culture lived in.

Map of the Hilazon Tachtit Cave Site, Israel

The Natufian culture existed in the Levant from 14,500 to 11,500 years before the present. They were hunter gatherers at first and had a microlithic industry, perfecting short blades and bladelets. Two different human burials at the Ein Mallaha and Hayonim sites include dogs, suggesting they domesticated dogs around 12,000 years ago. The spread of the culture can be estimated by the presence of Anatolian obsidian and shellfish from the Nile-valley being found at Ein Mallaha.

Around 12,800 to 11,500 years ago a climate shift occurred. There are many names for this climate change, I’ll call it the Younger Dryas event. During this period, there was a rapid return to glacial conditions caused by a significant reduction of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. And by rapid I mean it happened within 10 years. The cold and dry Younger Dryas climate lowered the biological carrying capacity of the Levant. This ecological change from the Younger Dryas forced cultures into planting seeds obtained from elsewhere, and practicing agriculture.

Illustration of the Shaman Grave from Hilazon, Tachtit, Israel

Okay going back to the paper, archaeologists have recently excavated the Hilazon Tachtit cave site. Hilazon Tachtit is located about 15 km west of the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The site is dated to be 12,400 – 12,000 years old, right at this ecological and cultural transitional period. The site is primarily a burial ground of at least 28 Natufian individuals. Most of the remains are buried in one collective pit, but one burial was special. The remains of a 45 year old woman was separate and accompanied by lots of animal remains. She had bone spurs on her pelvis and spine, indicating she suffered physical ailments. Accompanying her burial are the remains of the tail bones from a cow, a wing bone from a golden eagle, a forearm of a boar, 50 tortoise carapace pieces, two marten skulls and a large foot from another person. She’s intricately buried in a certain position with a stones arranged in a certain fashion and unlike the other individuals.

Some Animal Remains From the Shaman Burial in Hilazon Tachtit, Israel

The authors argue that she was a shaman. Although the term shaman originally comes from the Tungisic speaking people from Siberia, many gatherer groups and small-scale agricultural cultures have had a shamanistic role — a member of the community who functioned as an intermediate between the human and spirit world. They were healer-magician hybrids. The elaborate burial of this physically disabled woman accompanied with tortoises, cow tails, eagle wings, and fur-bearing animals fall in line with our observation of other shaman burials found throughout the world.

The presence of a shaman in this critical transitional period of human cultural evolution suggest that the seeds of organized religion were already planted. Now, there are controversial depictions of shamans in cave art from 15,000 years ago, but this 12,000 year old burial is the first physical evidence of the ideological and socioeconomic changes that accompanied the forager-to-farmer Neolithic transformation. The development of spiritual ideas and religion are a big part of human cultural evolution. We don’t know exactly when human ancestors developed such thoughts, it could certainly be earlier than 12,000 years ago, but at least we now know that early Neolithic peoples, like the Natufians had at least one shaman.

When do you think religious thoughts emerged during human evolution. Oh yeah, I have to ask, does anyone roll shaman in WoW?

L. Grosman, N. D. Munro, A. Belfer-Cohen (2008). A 12,000-year-old shaman burial from the southern Levant (Israel) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0806030105

I mentioned the drawn out process of me trying to download this new paper, “Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution,” the other day. I’ve read it and although I found it to be a difficult and theoretically dense paper, I believe you should also read the open access piece if you have any interest in understanding how culture evolved and the possible mechanisms of egalitarian behavior early on in human evolutionary history. The paper’s first author is Sergey Gavrilets, a theoretical evolutionary biologist from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The other co-authors are also from the same institution.

You may know Gavrilets’ other piece on cultural evolution, the 2006 paper in which he and Aaron Vose built a mathematical model to test out the social brain hypothesis — creating situations where genes control brains which invent and learn strategies that are then used by individuals to gain advantage in competition for mates. He’s continued researching the evolution of social behavior, and in his most recent piece he and his team tackle the dynamics of coalition formation.

The observation that Gavrilets et al. make is that while our closest living evolutionary cousins form alliances and cooperate in groups, their social systems are extremely hierarchical. The most glaring example can be seen in a gorilla troop where a dominant silverback presides over a few adolescent males and a harem of females. The group dynamic is fluid throughout life history, but each member of the system ultimately plays a role in the dominance hierarchy.

But early human societies, such as the quintessential hunter-gatherer society, is generalized as being egalitarian. Prior to the agricultural revolution, hunting and gathering is thought to have been the only subsistence strategy deployed by early human cultures. Studying modern day hunter gatherers, ethnographers have noted that such societies distribute dominance much more equally and thus tend to be non hierarchical. Leaders are comparatively weaker than their subordinates which reverses the pyramid of power.

So why was there such a big behavioral shift during our evolutionary history? We may never know for sure. There are ideas floating around that all seem to suggest the lack of food and realization that cooperation, rather than competition, was more beneficial for overall survival. When food sources became more dependable, as seen after the Neolithic and the dawn of agriculture and pastoralism, is when we’ve seen a return to a traditional hierarchy.

Gavrilets and team created a complex model which ultimately relied on probability to solve problems. They simulated alliance formation among a group of individuals who had different fighting abilities. Their system distinguished between conflicts that existed only between pairs of individuals and conflicts that were composed of more than two individuals. In situations that conflicts existed solely between two individuals, a very structured hierarchy emerged, favoring the ones best able to fight for their interests. In situations that composed of more than two individuals, there was interference or a balance of power, where the hierarchy was biased towards one result over another.

With an increase of group size, Gavrilets et al. were able to see an increase in dyadic conflicts. When members of a group were aware of other conflicts, of which they were not directly related, there was also an increase of dyadic conflicts. Naturally, larger coalitions have a higher probability of winning a conflict and a positive outcome increased affinity between members of the coalition.

Again, this was a rather hard paper to read, and I’ve left out a lot of details. I’m a bit unclear about what was rewarded to drive forward the model, i.e. what were they fighting for? Some of you may write off models as being controversial and reductionist. You’re right. For starters, it is difficult to interpret methods and the data doesn’t seem like it factors in the interactions of so many different variables — some come from evolutionary, ecological, behavioral, and social factors and all acting simultaneously. It is also awkward to evaluate relevant time-scales, aside from generation turnover, and to figure out possible evolutionary dynamics.

But the model did show that the tendency towards egalitarianism is rapid — it consistently happened in the course of several generations. Under situations where all members of a group were a part of one alliance, where not all members were equal, they still remained united. But alliances weren’t permanent. They would phase and out of intensity. Outsiders were also a crucial part of keeping the dynamic alive.

Gavrilets and crew suggest that egalitarianism came along with changes in mating systems and influenced by primate mother-daughter bonding. They also noted that the emergence of language most definitely facilitates the formation of alliances. One last thing, the authors sent out a warning against considering modern day humans under such constraints, because when we join alliances, our decisions are strongly affected by how much we perceive to get out of the alliance versus the costs and risks of being a part of the alliance, which are factors not included in the model.

All aside, this model is informative but it is by no means the way human social behavior evolved. I’ve already outlined some of the caveats to modeling. To further supplement, there are exceptions to the rule that all hunter gatherer societies are/were egalitarian. Non-egalitarian hunter gatherer systems, such as the Haida, have been well documented by ethnographers. I also remember one of my anthropology professors telling me her accounts of living with outcasted Dassenach people. They were forced out of the pastoral lifestyle and into a hunting for crocodiles and fish one. But, they still retained the social structure despite the shift in subsistence.

Sergey Gavrilets, Edgar A. Duenez-Guzman, Michael D. Vose, Erik I. Svensson (2008). Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution PLoS ONE, 3 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003293

What you may call the hip or pelvis is actually formed by the joining of ilia, ischia, pubis bones to the sacrum and the coccyx. The shape of the human pelvis is unique amongst primates and part of the complex of anatomical changes which allow us for bipedal motility.

The Male Pelvic Girdle

Between males and females, the pelvis is significantly different. I’ll review some of the features that should be common knowledge to anyone with a forensic or physical anthropology background. For starters, where the two pubis bones meet, at the lower edges of the two inferior public rami, there is a feature called the subpubic angle. Males have an angle smaller than 90 degrees, while females have a larger one. You need not take a protractor to make this observation. If you got a pelvic girdle with subpubic angle wider than a right angle then you most likely have a female… anything smaller and you have a dude.

But there is more, under the posterior inferior spine of the illium, and above the ischial spine, exists a feature called the greater sciatic notch, a sort of passage way for the piriformis muscle and the sciatic and posterior femoral cutaneous nerves. In females the notch is broader than males. Another feature, the biiliac width, a metric measurement made from the widest point between the two ilia is also a sex determining feature. Relative to their overall body sizes, females have large biiliac widths. The two ilia seem to flare out wider in a female. With a wider biiliac width, comes a wider pelvic inlet or the circumference of the lesser pelvis forms.

The Female Pelvic Girdle

So why do females have larger pelvic inlet, width between the two ilia, and a larger subpubic angle? That’s because they give birth. A wider pelvis allows for better distribution of the added weight that comes during pregnancy. A wide pelvic inlet allows for more space to hold the baby in utero. Furthermore, passing the largest brain to body size mammal through a narrow pelvis would not only be painful, but poses a serious danger to both the mother and baby during childbirth.

The average female adult has a biiliac width of 28 cm. Certain populations, such as Greek women have biiliac widths of 27.5 +/- 2.29 cm, falling within the average (Steyn et al., 2008). Inupiat women have widths averaging 28.6 +/-  0.2 cm, Finns at 27.9 +/- 0.2 cm (Ruff et al., 2004). But, east Asian populations, such as the Japanese have smaller pelvises, with less variation. The average billiac width of women from Japan is around 27.2 +/- .02 cm (Ikoma et al., 1988).

This all makes sense, east Asian people are on average smaller than white people or people from Africa. In fact, anthropologists have regularly relied on estimating body size and mass from biiliac measurements. The average Japanese woman is 153 cm tall, while European women from Germany or the Netherlands average 166 cm in height. You can see such a distinction when comparing Finnish and Japanese pelvic girdles. Asian newborns babies are also have smaller weight at birth (3.2 kg) compared to white babies (3.4kg). A  white woman with a wider pelvis can give birth to larger white babies.

So what happens when a white man, with big white genes, reproduces with a small Asian woman? Well, Razib pointed out a new study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology which reviews the impact of such couplings. The paper, “Perinatal outcomes among Asian–white interracial couples,” documented that 33% of such couples surveyed had caesarean deliveries. The latest NIH data on the caesarean rate in the United States is 30%.

The authors suggest that the reason why such couples have 3% more C-section deliveries is that the smaller Asian pelvis is less able to accommodate babies of a certain size. The Asian-white couples had larger babies, with a median 3.36 kg for Asian-mother/white-father versus 3.21 kg for babies from Asian-Asian couples.

There’s a much larger discussion to be had than just reviewing a review of the anatomy and evolutionary history of such a study. Ever so recently, we hosted yet another post on the anthropology of race, which summarized that, “race does not exist in the world in any ontologically objective way.” If you’ve been a regular reader, you would know I’ve tackled this mantra many times. What could be anymore ontologically objective than such a study?

The nature of an Asian is on average smaller in body size than other humans. Of course there is variation. There are some large Asians, but the are very few. The majority are smaller in comparison to other humans. Studies like this show that Asian-mother and white-fathers produce larger babies and have increased rates of C-sectiond deliveries.

There are serious health issues with C-section deliveries, and thus serious, tangible biologically race related issues when people from two different populations mate and increase their chance of having a C-section delivery. The health issues I mention are the increased childbirth mortality rate. On average 1 in every 10,000 women who gives a natural birth will die during childbirth, while 1 in every 2,500 women who undergo C-sections will die during childbirth. In otherwords, women who give birth via C-section are 4x as likely to die. Furthermore, caesarean deliveries increase the risks for malpresentation, placenta previa, antepartum hemorrhage, placenta accreta, prolonged labor, uterine rupture, preterm birth, low birth weight, and stillbirth in their second delivery. The paper also outlines the higher prevalence of gestational diabetes for such interracial couplings.

That all being said, race is not just a social construct. How we interpret biological differences, such as pelvis size, skin color, etc. are not socially constructed but real observations, made from quantiative analysis. There are distinct anatomical, genetic, even behavioral differences that are not derived soley from stereotypes.

Michael J. Nystrom, Aaron B. Caughey, Deirdre J. Lyell, Maurice L. Druzin,Yasser Y. El-Sayed (2008). Perinatal outcomes among Asian–white interracial couples in American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology 199 (4), (385.e1-385.e5) DOI: 10.1016/j.ajog.2008.06.065