"Isn’t it odd that the true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?"

John Hawks extracts a juicy bit from that NYT article about the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.

Hawks (who's a paleoathropologist) also has nice closeup of a museum reconstruction of Homo erectus (who seems to be an unusually nice person with lovely skin).

And: A story about a monkey midwife:

I think this is cool not because it shows that monkeys need midwives (they don't) but because it shows that the behavioral flexibility that may have enabled midwifery in early humans is very extensive among primates. A delicious placental incentive may seem inventive, but humans are mystifyingly strange in being among the few mammals who don't regularly consume the placenta after birth.

Note: don't regularly. Not: don't ever. I have Googled it. I know what people do.

"[O]ne of the rare intellectual vocations that do not demand a sacrifice of one’s manhood."

= What Susan Sontag said about anthropology in 1963.

Quoted in a NYT article titled "How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist."

"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African..."

"... that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

Says the famous paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey. That's a funny quote, isn't it? It starts out so big. If only everyone would accept evolution, then... then what? What would follow? He doesn't say World Peace. He says a chance of a better response to challenges.

I'm sure the people who don't believe in evolution think if only everybody would believe that God created human beings in His own image, that we'd have a better chance of responding better to challenges.

Here's a poll about what works, pragmatically, not about what is true. That is: DO NOT use this poll to express your belief in the existence of God and His role with respect to the creation/evolution of human beings:

What belief is more likely to overcome disharmony among the people of the world?
	God watches over and loves His Creation, humanity.
	Humankind arose from evolution, with no divine plan or supervision at any point.
pollcode.com free polls

Anticipating your possible need to express your belief in what is true, I am providing this additional poll:

What is actually true (or most likely true)?
	There is a God, and He created human beings in their current form.
	There is a God, and He created the process of evolution that unfolded over the eons.
	Human beings evolved without the participation of any God.
pollcode.com free polls

"It’s not simply a brutal killing. This act of violence at the heart of it is really sacrifice of a very striking kind."

After violent murder and mutiliation, they "then drink the juices the decomposing body releases, after which they retrieve parts of the body to kill their next victims."

Ideology and irony: Stephen Jay Gould mismeasured "The Mismeasure of Man."

A new study shows that Gould — who purported to show that ideology influenced the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton — was himself the one who got the data wrong.

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls... “demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions”...

Dr. Gould, who died in 2002, based his attack on the premise that Morton believed that brain size was correlated with intelligence. But there is no evidence that Morton believed this or was trying to prove it.... Rather, Morton was measuring his skulls to study human variation, as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately....

But the Penn team... identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in his reports, finding that in only 2 percent of cases did Morton’s measurements differ significantly from their own. These errors either were random or gave a larger than accurate volume to African skulls, the reverse of the bias that Dr. Gould imputed to Morton.

“These results falsify the claim that Morton physically mismeasured crania based on his a priori biases”....

Does that mean Gould was the ideologue? Did Gould consciously or unconsciously slime Morton? Gould isn't around anymore to explain. He died in 2002, presumably a rich man, having sold many books that said many things readers enjoyed hearing, including the defamation of a man who'd died a century before he was born. But all the skulls remain, to be measured and evaluated by the living.

Ah, but what does John Hawks — our local (UW) blogging paleoanthropologist — have to say? 

Some of Gould's mistakes are outrageous, with others it is hard for me to believe that the misstatements were not deliberate misrepresentations.

For example, let's take the story about pushing seed into the skulls. Here is a paragraph from Lewis and colleagues, with direct quotes from Gould:

Gould famously suggested that Morton's measurements may have been subject to bias: “Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action”... While Gould offers this as only a “plausible scenario,” and did not remeasure any crania, subsequent authors have generally (and incorrectly) cited Gould as demonstrating that Morton physically mismeasured crania...

In other words, Gould made up the whole thing. It was an utter fabulation. It is disgraceful that later authors have cited this idea as fact.

Truly shocking.

"Sunday's travel theme here in Rome was death."

"OK, for an anthropologist you have to imagine this is more cheerful than it sounds...."

It is not the distance of time that touches me about these people. I study bones that are tens or hundreds of thousands of years old, distances so vast as to be unimaginable in human terms. Yet the bone persists. The individual is marked in it, and touching her bones creates an immediacy of connection, like traveling through time.

Did all human language originate at the same place (in southern Africa)?

New Zealand biologist Quentin D. Atkinson has an article that's getting a phenomenal — phoneme-able? — amount of attention. The NYT says:

[Atkihnson] has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa...

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks asks:

Why should the origin of languages have had the largest inventory of phonemes? If small populations typically lose phonemic variation, why would sparse hunter-gatherer populations of Africa have built up the largest store of sounds just as they were getting started talking?

Perhaps when people were first talking, they made a lot of sounds, more like animal sounds. Then came the breakthrough: words. Once the idea of words arrived, you didn't need so many sounds. You can get lots of words out of very few sounds, differently arranged. The attention shifted to word making, and people didn't struggle to come up with more sounds. Indeed, they took advantage of the easy ones everyone could say and shed the extras.

"I am just about to go crazy today. I just can't seem to escape the 'gay caveman' story."

Oh! The tribulations of paleoanthropology blogging. UW professor John Hawks must hit the ground running when news breaks from the Stone Bronze Age. The news folk are after him for an academic opinion and he says: "Dudes! I could be wrong, but I think that to have a 'gay caveman', you need a skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain't either!"

IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro said:

So it's probably not a gay caveman after all, merely a Bronze Age Bea Arthur.

What a letdown.

EDH said:

We have rare prehistoric video!

"Last fall anthropology declared itself no longer to be a science."

Is that a fair statement of what happened?



Note that John Hawks is at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (where I am), which made this other segment — "Does academic blogging fit a university’s mission?" — especially interesting to me. According to Hawks, the UW has always been especially savvy about the value of blogging professors. And here's Hawks's blog. (Did you know it's "Darwin Day" here on campus today and also Friday and Saturday? I guess the commitment to science represented by the celebration of Darwin doesn't exclude calling 3 days a "day.")

"Some humans are 4% Neanderthal."

Okay.

Would it trouble you to learn that you are part Neanderthal?
	Yes! I'd be upset to know that I am not entirely human.
	Not at all! It would be thrilling. I'd be proud and fascinated.
	I am whatever I am and have always been. It would make no difference.
pollcode.com free polls

"Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness...."

The last link of a 65,000-year-long chain.

MORE: Here, including an audio clip, described — accurately — as "haunting."

"French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous. Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth."

"And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don't dare use the word 'structuralist' anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism."

Said Claude Lévi-Strauss, asked, in the 1980s, about post-structuralists like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism... "Mythologiques" ... ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

"Mortality" is the last word of the obituary written by Edward Rothstein for Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died last Friday, at the age of 100.

Meet Ardi.

Our 4.4-million-year-old (possibly direct) ancestor.

"With its outsize bulbous breasts and hugely exaggerated genitalia..."

... and incredibly tiny head (or is it a loop so the headless figure can be worn as a pendant?):



It's the oldest depiction of the human figure — at least 35,000 years old.

Is it a good or a bad sign when a university sees the need to hire a "Professor of Conservative Thought"?

This is the proposal for an endowment at the University of Colorado. Amusingly enough, the idea bugs liberals and conservatives:

"Why set aside money specifically for a conservative?" asks Curtis Bell, a teaching assistant in political science. "I'd rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective."...

[David] Horowitz fears that setting up a token right-winger as The Conservative at Boulder will brand the person as a curiosity, like "an animal in the zoo."...

"Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they're planning to study conservatives. That's hilarious," says [George] Will....