The next edition of the anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth will be at Walking The Berkshires, this coming Wednesday, January 2nd, so if you'd like to submit written content of your own, or indeed content you've read elsewhere, please send it along to submit@fourstonehearth.net, or directly to the hosting site itself, greensleevesenviro AT sbcglobal... Continue Reading →
Watch Discovery Channel’s Bone Detectives
I've been on a much needed time out from blogging. The last half dozen or so posts from me have been embarrassingly personal and critical, so I decided to take a hiatus while on vacation to tone down the bitterness. But my break didn't keep me from following current anthropology news. Far from it, I've... Continue Reading →
Four Stone Hearth XXX @ The Greenbelt
The anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth has hit the big three-o, and this time round, FCD Ridger at The Greenbelt is our host, so head on over to read her excellent compilation of posts and essays from around the blogosphere. The next edition of this blog carnival, and the first of 2008, will be... Continue Reading →
Four Stone Hearth 30 @ The Greenbelt, Dec. 19th – Call for Submissions
There's still plenty of time to submit articles for the next edition of the anthropology blog carnival, Four Stone Hearth, over at The Greenbelt, so if you have written or read something you consider suitable for the event, please send it along, either to kmdavisus AT yahoo dot com, or to submit@fourstonehearth.net. There are also... Continue Reading →
A Human Ancestor for the Apes?
Do we really need to consider turning everything upside down by considering the existence of a human ancestor for the apes? This suggestion definitely has the quality of blasphemy against religious doctrine. It just feels wrong and goes against our deeply held beliefs and understanding of the world. However, this is exactly where the evidence... Continue Reading →
Evolution of Lordosis and Pregnancy
The report published in Nature by Whitcome, Shapiro, and Lieberman reports on a longitudinal study of 19 pregnant women to show how the center of gravity moves forward as the pregnancy progresses and also identifies male/female differences in lumbar curvature or lordosis. They make the point that this assembles into a neat evolutionary adaptationist story... Continue Reading →
Welcoming Aaron Filler to Anthropology.net
I'm in the middle of my finals week, and am stressed out. Coincidentally it happens to be a very big week in anthropology news. I know I haven't reported on Hawks' new human evolution acceleration paper and I just missed the new study suggesting that the curvature of the female human spine is an evolutionary... Continue Reading →
Digitizing Dance
This short comical clip got me to think if anyone out there has considered digitizing dance? This is can be more than a new type of ethnographic research. One could not only digitize dance as a sort of cultural preservation but one could begin to do really interesting statistics and comparisons of cross cultural dances... Continue Reading →
Aaron Filler’s Video Documents Bipedalism in Siamangs
Aaron Filler published a very hard to accept paper about three months ago stating bipedalism could have originated 20 million or so years ago and all of the other great apes lost this adaptation whereas the human lineage kept it. Last night, he sent me three emails to share a new video where he describes,... Continue Reading →
Anthropologist Meredith Small says DNA testing is a scam
Here is Meredith Small, an anthropologist at Cornell University and a primatologist, who has focused her life work on observing behavior, writing a slam on DNA testing over at LiveScience. I don't know how she gets the authority to call genetic ancestry testing a scam if she specializes in behavior. But that's really not the... Continue Reading →