More discussion on that preprint (yes just a preprint and getting Nature commentary!) about when exactly did the #Neanderthal gene flow into modern humans happen. Acc to Iasi et al, from 47 Ka for about 6000 years. Interesting here is the 'introgression deserts' with immediate selection against Nean genes for certain areas.
Sand makes up coastal bioinfrastructures in Guyana, as Sarah Vaughn shows in a recent essay, https://roadsides.net/vaughn-010/. Groynes used to prevent erosion "reinforce the shoreline’s existing sandy terrain." These groynes themselves contain sand. The essay is part of a special issue entitled "Bioinfrastructures" co-edited by Raúl Acosta and S.AND team member Lukas Ley. Check out the full open access issue here: https://roadsides.net/collection-no-010/
Through the term "bioinfrastructures," Ley and @raulaco reckon with the surge in projects to (re)create lively urban landscapes: While this shows that "infrastructure is never just a single entity or one discrete thing but rather an evolving set of multispecies and material relations," they also interrogate the ambivalent politics of bioinfrastructures.
What is the significance of bioinfrastructures "for larger political projects, emancipatory movements and Indigenous sovereignty?"
Deep in #Papua New Guinea, the speakers of #Tayap have stopped using their native tongue. In 'A Death in the Rainforest', an anthropologist recounts his journey over three decades to find out why.
FREE community #fediscience please BOOST!
🌘TOMORROW 🌑
Tues May 7, 18:30 (BST)
with Will Buckner
LIVE @UCLanthropology and on ZOOM
'The sensory ecology of deception in human societies'
Everybody welcome FREE, LIVE and online! Just turn up!
Evolutionary anthropologist Will Buckner will be speaking LIVE in the Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor of the UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW
**NB We can now use the front door in Taviton St again **
You can also join us on ZOOM (ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak)
#JustFinished The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
This was a great book! Graeber and Wengrow integrate new archeological discoveries with anthropology and turn common belief on its side. In the same way that we used to think that evolution was a progressive march to new and improved species, we also thought that human development was on an upward arc to better things, with capitalism and
While drinking my morning coffee here in Tainan, I stumbled across a piece about my book Stealing With the Eyes, calling it a "post-modern assault on anthropology," and saying I'm guilty of "a morbid and fantastic expression of liberal guilt."
Here's my response (there's a link to the original article in the piece as well).
Tues April 23 18:30 (BST)
with #MarkJamieson
LIVE @UCLanthropology and on ZOOM
'Shifts in kinship from matrilaterality to patrilaterality in a Miskitu village'
Everybody welcome FREE, LIVE and online! Just turn up!
Mark Jamieson, Senior Lecturer at UEL, will be speaking LIVE in the Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor of the UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW
We can now use the front door in Taviton St again!
You can also join us on ZOOM (ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak)
Radical Anthro summer talks start up next
Tues April 16, 18:30 (BST)
with #ChrisKnight on
LIVE @UCLanthropology and on ZOOM
Everybody welcome FREE, LIVE and online!
Chris Knight, founder of Radical Anthropology Group and author of 'Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture' is speaking LIVE in the Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor of the UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW (the entrance may still be through the Archaeology Institute in Gordon Sq). You can also join us on ZOOM (ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak)
Chris will discuss myths of matriarchy, which are found all over the world. Is there any truth in the idea that women once exercised political power over men? Many feminists have dismissed such stories as ideological narratives invented simply to justify men's rule. Does biology prevent women from exercising real political power? Does sexism prevail everywhere? Has patriarchy always existed? He will discuss the ethnographic, archaeological and genetic evidence for and against these ideas.
I had this amazing discussion with Elizabeth Ferry on @newbooksnetwork about my Caribbean futurism scifi book, SORDIDEZ. We talked about being Anthropologists writing fiction, & the differences between scholarly + artistic styles of storytelling. I read a bit from the prologue and we also chatted about the peculiar naming conventions for Hurricanes. #scifibooks#anthropology#IndigenousFuturism#puertorico#taino#speculativeprose
"Since the 19th century, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have obtained, studied, and stored more than 30,000 human remains, one of the largest such collections in the United States." A LOT of stolen bodies. #bioethics#anthropology
I want a more current book on human evolution for freshman/sophomore college students to read that has the sensibilities of Chris Stringer's Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth
"""
If modern human intelligence evolved 60,000 years ago, why did civilization not develop until 10,000 BC? This question lies at the heart of the sapient paradox, one of the great mysteries of human existence. Potential explanations range from a reconsideration of prehistory to the power of collective learning to early humans getting stuck in "gossip traps."
"""
The connection to social media and "cancel culture" seems like a stretch (as this social pressure has nowhere near the same consequences as institutionalized power), but the idea that big societies with high levels of specialization require a different mechanism for organization than raw social pressure sounds sensible.
Perhaps unsurprisingly this is how democracy manifests in the modern world, via electoral politics.
I hate the time before elections when streets are filled with billboards of politicians' faces. Just an endless stream of faces, names and numbers. Votes being cast based on party association and perceived reputation.
"Civilization" did not "start" 10,000 years ago. This is a profoundly flawed model of human culture and economics, and constitutes a racist trope that treats hunter-gatherer cultures and economies as "uncivilised".
What started 10,000 years ago was agriculture, and shortly afterwards feudalism and slavery.
The baseless claim that hunter-gatherers have no "civilisation" has been used for centuries to justify continent-wide land theft and genocide of hunter gatherers by agricultural societies. It has no place in science.
"The researchers devised a way to disentangle the extensive genetic mixing of populations that has occurred since the dispersal out of the hub in order to pinpoint this region."
