https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJon4qIMYs Dr. Heide Castaneda on Protests, Medical Anthropology, and Migrant Health During COVID-19 Season 1 Episode 3 Recorded 2 June 2020 In this episode, William, of the podcast A Partial Perspective, talks with Dr. Heide Castañeda, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida. They discuss issues in legal anthropology and how she... Continue Reading →
Anthropology of Policing
Race is a social construct. We have spoken on the concept of race, here, before. Anthropology has been at the forefront of redefining race, ancestry, and ethnicity. And many anthropologists have advocated for concepts such as race to be phased out of our culture and our police. Current events have elucidated the importance of continuing... Continue Reading →
Qesem Cave’s 400,000 Year Old Stone Tool Making Classroom
Israel's Qesem cave is approx. 12 km east of Tel Aviv. At 420,000 to 220,000 years old, it is a lower Paleolithic site. Qesem cave has flint blades, scrapers, knives, as well as flakes and hammer stones. All stages of stool tool making has been found from the site. In 2010, archaeologists called it the the oldest... Continue Reading →
What happens when you get a archaeologist, an ecologist, and a paleontologist to in the same room to look at old data with a new lens? You get, "Productivity, biodiversity, and pathogens influence the global hunter-gatherer population density," published in PNAS, where the influence of environmental conditions on the abundance of pre-industrial humans is investigated.... Continue Reading →
Levallois Stone Tools In India 385,000 Years Ago
A study published today in the journal Nature analyzed more than 7,200 stone tools from middle Paleolithic Attirampakkam creekside site in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Archaeologists from the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education have been unearthing these tools for the last 20 years from the site. There aren't any human remains, yet,... Continue Reading →
Göbekli Tepe Skull Cult
The internet has been buzzing about a potential 11,500-12,000 year old skull cult from Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. Göbekli Tepe was just discovered several years ago. The site is decorated with pillars depicting carvings of headless humans, snakes, and scorpions. It is thought be world's oldest known Neolithic monumental religious complex. Yesterday, in Science Advances German... Continue Reading →
Interpreting Paleolithic Funerary Rites from Broken Ochred Pebbles
Claudine Gravel-Miguel, archaeology doctoral student at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, research has taken her to the Caverna delle Arene Candide in Italy. In the 1940's this cave was discovered. 20 individuals were buried there. The site is about 11,000 - 13,000 years old. For decades, as excavations progressed,... Continue Reading →
The Cardiac Health of the Tsimane
A lot of discussion is constantly had about what is the healthiest diet; low fat or low carb. An interesting study was published in the Lancet recently where anthropologists teamed with cardiologists to study cardiac health of Amazon's Tsimane. The Tsimane are Bolivian. They live off and around the Maniqui River located in the Amazon... Continue Reading →
A Nose In The Air: The Influence of Climate & Nose Morphology
British anthropologist Arthur Thomson, in the late 1800's published his observations on nose size and shape. He noted that humans from humid, warm climates have wider, shorter noses than humans from colder, dryer climates who have more narrow, longer noses. He carried on his observation postulating that the shape of the nose was influenced by the... Continue Reading →
