L'aventure humaine.

A tiny hominin found on the island of Flores, Indonesia has...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:19:22 -0400

A tiny hominin found on the island of Flores, Indonesia ~~has shaken up the world of paleoanthropology~~ births a new perspective for Lord of The Rings fans. Human Origins scientist, Matt Tocheri walks you through your anthro-boner. You will unite or you will fall.

Skeletons locked in eternal embrace (from the Neolithic period):...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:16:00 -0500

Skeletons locked in eternal embrace (from the Neolithic period): The couple are thought to have died young because both had all teeth intact.

Of course they were. Enjoy this Archaeological find with your sappiness, my antropoloogs!

It is said that if you stare into his infinite beard long...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:22:07 -0500

It is said that if you stare into his infinite beard long enough, you will catch a glimpse of all the universe’s knowledge for exactly 203 seconds.

“I would define politics as the composition of a common...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:21:05 -0500

“I would define politics as the composition of a common world”

Click Bruno Latour’s beautiful face for an interview with this French social anthropologist on politics, ethics, nature, and so on.

american anthropological association, a stand against the criminalization of drugs.

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 04:56:59 -0500

american anthropological association, a stand against the criminalization of drugs.:

commonunity:

follow the link to read the complete post.

American drug policy has direct effects on discrimination against Mexicans and Central Americans. We do not know how much Mexico’s drug war has cost. It is not a simple calculus, as many of the expenses are incurred at the state and local levels, and indirect costs are many. At the federal level, though, budgetary expenditures in security increased from 4.8% of the budget in 2005 to 6.6% in 2010. It is safe to say that, with an official increase of 3.2 million people living in poverty in the 2008-2010 period, US drug policy stimulates Mexican migration to the United States, even as it contributes to the criminalization of the migrant. Human rights violations stemming from immigration policies in places like Alabama, Arizona, and Georgia are a legitimate concern for the AAA; so is the violation of human rights exposed by the recent Human Rights Watch’s report on the Mexican Drug War.

Finally, there is the direct implication of drug policy for the practice of anthropology.

Concerned with the implications of the drug war for the practice of anthropology within Mexico, we held a small focus-group meeting with 6 anthropology students from various Mexican institutions. Each author also had numerous private and a few collective discussions of these issues. Here are some of the points that were raised in these conversations.

American anthropologists who are familiar with Mexican anthropology know that field research has been central to the practice of the discipline there. Indeed, Mexico’s undergraduate programs have traditionally included a rigorous fieldwork component in the curriculum. Some of those field projects have either been cancelled or seriously stymied by lack of support and confusion as to how best to face the current situation of insecurity. Mexican students’ ability to do field research is seriously in jeopardy.

Several schools have taken informal measures to discourage field research in specific regions; others have eliminated individual fieldwork, and tried to substitute it with brief group expeditions. Teachers are often unsure of how to act in the face of rumors and press reports on insecurity in significant numbers in rural and urban communities. Curricular innovation is cautious and slow by design in Mexican universities, so there has not yet been an adequate general response to the new situation in the teaching of anthropological methods. Because safety conditions have deteriorated rapidly, most of these measures that teachers and students have taken are ad hoc, and have not yet been streamlined into formal policies. But safety concerns are there, and they are very real.

Mexico’s Colegio de Antropólogos y Etnólogos does not have an emergency hotline or publish tallies of anthropologists who have been killed, raped or kidnapped during fieldwork. It should; and so should the AAA. We do not yet have an organization that collects and denounces these facts, the way journalists do.

Protection against the new risks connected to fieldwork is a subject that came up insistently in our conversations. In Mexico, like everywhere else, students carry out the bulk of anthropological field-research. But they have no health and life insurance coverage to cover fieldwork risks. They are receiving little support, or even recognition of the need of support. Most publicly funded field research in Mexico is done by way of grants, with senior researchers hiring undergraduate and graduate student field researchers. These assistant positions generally carry no health and life insurance attached to fieldwork risks. Universities that foster student field research rarely provide health or life insurance coverage. Fieldworkers are unprotected.

It is time for American anthropologists to get actively involved in the movement for the decriminalization of drugs in the United States, and in the support of their colleagues south of the border. Currently, US drug-policy runs against American public interest, it has failed to reduce drug consumption, and its favorite remedy – prison – is worse than the sickness that it is meant to cure. American drug policy is ravishing Mexico, increasing immigration to the United States, and justifying discrimination against immigrants.

If these reasons prove to be insufficient to mobilize our association, we should add one final consideration: American drug policy is making the practice of anthropology in Mexico hazardous, at precisely the time when our research is most sorely needed.

University of Missouri and Arizona State University researchers...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:40:05 -0500

University of Missouri and Arizona State University researchers have found a bone that indicates human ancestors had arches in their feet.

Click the photo for the article!

Ancient Organisms Found Alive in Salt Crystals

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:21:05 -0500

Ancient Organisms Found Alive in Salt Crystals:

“They are trapped alongside a type of algae called Dunaliella, which just so happens to produce the food the archaea need to survive—the sugar alcohol glycerol,”

“Because of climate change, we can see and feel winter...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:57:06 -0500

“Because of climate change, we can see and feel winter days get colder and the sea, it’s warmer. And, because of that, it’s more difficult to hunt in the winters.”

Noam Chomsky, on consciousness

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:10:06 -0500

Bertrand Russell asked, “How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?”

Answers:

Aristotelian lines: the world is structured in a certain way and that the human mind is able to perceive this structure, ascending from particulars to species to genus to further generalization and thus attaining knowledge of universals from perception of particulars. A “basic of pre-existent knowledge” is a prerequisite to learning.
a more fruitful approach shifts the main burden of explanation from the structure of the world to structure of the mind. What we can know is determined by “the modes of conception in the understanding. What we do know, then, or what we come to believe, depends on the specific experiences that evoke in us some part of the cognitive system that is latent in the mind.
conformity of objects to our mode of cognition, the mind provides the means for an analysis of data as experience, and provides as well a general schematism that delimits the cognitive structures developed on the basis of experience. (Kant’s idea)

Chomsky’s answer to that question:

Or systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct. We interpret experience as we do because of our special mental design. We attain knowledge when the “inward ideas of the mind itself and the structures it creates conform to the nature of things.

It is generally assumed that in these domains, social environment is the dominant factor. The structures of mind that develop over time are taken to be arbitrary and accidental; there is no “human nature” apart from what develops as a specific historical product. According to this view, typical of empiricism speculation, certain general principles of learning that are common in their essentials to all (or some large class of) organisms suffice to account for the cognitive structures attained by humans, structures which incorporate the principles by which humans behavior is planned, organized, and controlled. I dismiss without further comment the exotic though influential view that “internal states” should not be considered in the study of behavior.

Why has it been so causally assumed that there exists a “learning theory” that can account for the acquisition of cognitive structures through experience?

No doubt what the organism does depends in part on its experience, but it seems to me entirely hopeless to investigate directly the relation between experience and action.

If we are interested in the problem of “causation of behavior” as a problem of science, we should at least analyze the relation of experience to behavior into two parts:

1. relates experience to cognitive state

2. mechanism, which relates stimulus conditions to behavior, given the cognitive state

the proper way to exorcise the ghost in the machine is to determine the structure of the mind and its products.

Body and mind are two substances, one an extended substance, the other a thinking substance. The first falls within mechanical philosophy, the latter not.

Liaoning discovers largest Yan tomb

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:05:06 -0500

Liaoning discovers largest Yan tomb :

After analyzing the unearthed pottery as well as the construction style of tomb passages and coffins, experts confirmed that this large tomb was built by the Yan Kingdom during the Warring States period.

Speculation on exhuming Pablo Neruda's body

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 03:25:37 -0500

Speculation on exhuming Pablo Neruda's body:

To study whether or not he was poisoned by government officials for opposing Pinochet…

Excellent documentary. Essentially, the film covers a specific...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:34:00 -0500

Excellent documentary.

Essentially, the film covers a specific course (Man: A course of Study), taught in the United States following the educational reforms of the seventies. The goal of the course was to teach children about what it means to be human while avoiding ethnocentric biases. The class attempted to portray humans as animals beyond cultural boundaries and used a specific film series (Netsilik Film Series) in doing so. These sequences captured the traditional life of a small Inuit community and showed controversial scenarios such as seal hunting and infanticide; this involved gruesome scenes with an element of gore and a large amount of blood. Not unusually, this lead to plenty of controversy within North American families who strongly opposed exposing their children to that amount of blood and hostility. Politicians, specifically John B Conlan, congressman from Phoenix, Arizona, petitioned against government funding for the course. He stated: “But we found the Netsilik tribe at least as portrayed in this program as extremely primitive, too primitive a society to say this should be an example for our students to follow”. He felt that the government should not be funding a course that taints children such as this one.

What seems to be the prominent point of the film is the strong political presence in education. In a sense, there are very particular standards education follows regarding each subject. There is a sole way of thinking for math, biology, humanities, and so on. If a child strays away from these paradigms, they are cast out of the educational realm and deemed as incompetents.

I figured if I wrote excessive amounts on the summary, you would press play.

By the way,

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:05:48 -0500

There was really no need to specify that the transgender woman in the article I posted a while ago was a person. You would not say male person or man person, these characteristics are usually assumed when paired with a photo of a human skeleton. Either way, I apologize for offending anyone: I had no intention of “dehumanizing” her.

Now, I swear by the sun god Utu on this very day — and my...

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:44:00 -0500

Now, I swear by the sun god Utu on this very day — and my younger brothers shall be witness of it in foreign lands where the sons of Sumer are not known, where people do not have the use of paved roads, where they have no access to the written word — that I, the firstborn son, am a fashioner of words, a composer of songs, a composer of words, and that they will recite my songs as heavenly writings, and that they will bow down before my words……

- King Shulgi (on the future of Sumerian literature)

100,000-year-old ochre toolkit and workshop discovered in South...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:16:17 -0500

100,000-year-old ochre toolkit and workshop discovered in South Africa.

It is the latest anthropological craze. Click the photo for the article.

Not pompous anthropologist friendly as it tends to cover some...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:55:26 -0400

Not pompous anthropologist friendly as it tends to cover some basics.

Rick Scott and his views on the irrelevance of anthropology.

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:04:45 -0400

Rick Scott and his views on the irrelevance of anthropology.:

My favorite part is that his daughter majored in anthropology. He is right, let us morph our youth into capital gain and manufacture them based on what is better for the “state”. Why would anyone need to know anything about humanity to progress as humans?

Inca suspension bridge next to George Washington Bridge.

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:48:05 -0400

Inca suspension bridge next to George Washington Bridge.

5,000-year-old transgender woman from Prague.

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:15:00 -0400

5,000-year-old transgender woman from Prague.:

Need I say more?

A voyage to remember. What is it with anthropological...

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:55:51 -0400

A voyage to remember. What is it with anthropological breakthroughs and South America?