Publishers Wiley InterScience have made available a handful of pretty interesting papers, which concentrate on anthropological studies in Australia and neighbouring Asia, and are listed as follows: "They Always Seem to be Angry": The Cronulla Riot and the Civilising Pleasures of the Sun Andrew Lattas Materialising Oceania: New Ethnographies of Things in Melanesia and... Continue Reading →
Tool Use in Wild Orang-utans Modifies Sound Production: A Functionally Deceptive Innovation? – Proc. R.Soc B.
Here's the abstract of a paper which is freely available from the Royal Society, in which deceptive communication facilitated by tool use in Bornean orang-utans comes under the spotlight. The kiss-squeak may not be familiar to all, so here's a link to a page at the University of Zurich where different types can be heard,... Continue Reading →
Environmental Impact of the 73 ka Toba Super-eruption in South Asia – ScienceDirect
A new paper by Martin A.J. Williams et al, on the Mount Toba eruption 73,000 years ago, proposes that the destructive aftermath of the event caused widespread de-forestation in India, some 3,000 miles distant from Sumatra, the island on which the volcano was located. Here's the abstract of that paper which is behind a paywall,... Continue Reading →
Hobbits Are Indeed A Separate Species, Said Researchers.
Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York confirmed that the Hobbits, or Homo floresiensis, are indeed a separate "human" species instead of a population of diseases Homo sapiens. The 7th Human Evolution Symposium, Hobbits in the Haystack: Homo floresiensis and Human Evolution was held this year at Stony Brook. A recent full-body... Continue Reading →
Four Stone Hearth #80 @ Middle Savagery
Although I somehow completely missed this latest Four Stone Hearth in that I didn't even remember it was happening this week, the 80th edition is nevertheless now online at Middle Savagery, so be sure to check it out. The first few entries look at tool use, Ardipithecus ramidus and of course, Neanderthals, without whom no... Continue Reading →
Into the Uncanny Valley – Seed Magazine
This via Mind Hacks - Seed Magazine have published a piece by Joe Kloc, in which he looks at the relationship between humans and life-like robots, with regard to the so-called 'uncanny valley' effect, described here at Wikipedia: (Masahiro) Mori's hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion,... Continue Reading →
The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples – by Alun Salt, PLoS ONE
Alun Salt will doubtless be known to many readers here, not least for his interest in archaeo-astronomy, research which looks into the ways in which ancient peoples regarded the sky from the perspective of its solar, lunar and planetary components. I just got word that he has published the linked paper, for which this is... Continue Reading →
The FOXP2 Molecular Network Begins Taking Shape – Babel’s Dawn
Here's a link to a brief article by Edmund Blair Bolles regarding the current research into FOXP2, from which this is the introduction: A letter to the current issue of Nature has caused a stir among those interested in the evolution of language. It looks at the FOXP2 gene in more detail than any paper... Continue Reading →
Michael Gazzaniga: Split brains and other heady tales – ‘All in the Mind’
I'm still mostly offline, hence the brevity of posting in recent weeks, but nevertheless I still have time today to point readers in the direction of this week's podcast from 'All in the Mind', from ABC Radio National, in which cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's chat on left-brain/right brain research is reprised. I'd recommend this to... Continue Reading →
Open Access – ‘Learning to Share’
The Times Higher Education supplement, as mentioned by PLoS, has an interesting and informative article on the current state of play regarding open access, peer review, copyright and funding, amongst other items for consideration. As will be apparent, there are deep divides between the publishing companies, universities, academics and libraries as to what degree... Continue Reading →
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