all Department of Anthropology stories

Invention of cooking drove evolution of the human species, new book argues

50443248 — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:33:34 -0400

“You are what you eat.” Can these pithy words explain the evolution of the human species?

Yes, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, who argues in a new book that the invention of cooking — even more than agriculture, the eating of meat, or the advent of tools — is what led to the rise of humanity.

New department reflects the evolution of human evolution

50443248 — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:17:07 -0400

Earlier this month, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) made official what scientists worldwide have known for years: Harvard is a hotbed of research and teaching in the field of human evolutionary biology — the study of why we’re the way we are.

Scholars discuss ‘medicalization’ of formerly normal characteristics

404132862 — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:57:31 -0400

Not long ago, a majority of Americans described themselves as “shy,” a condition of reticence or caution that for ages just seemed natural.

In a discourse on blushing, Darwin thought of shyness — “self-attention” — as an adaptive trait. In a poem, Emily Dickinson described it as something that follows emotional pain: “a formal feeling comes — / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.”

Culture skews human evolution

50443248 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:32:21 -0400

The rise of agriculture 10,000 years ago meant the end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for which human beings had been optimized by millions of years of evolution and the beginning of an era where culture encourages habits unhealthy for us and for the world around, with uncertain evolutionary outcomes.

“Our bodies are not that well designed for the world we have created,” said anthropology professor Daniel Lieberman.

Student diggers take Harvard’s roots from dirt to display case

404132862 — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:24:18 -0500

Emily Pierce ’10 was up to her hips in Harvard Yard, standing in a square hole in the ground, carefully scraping soil as she sought bits of archaeological treasure: a button here, a piece of bone there — clues that together could weave a tale of Harvard’s early years.

Chimps in wild appear not to regularly experience menopause

404132862 — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:05:03 -0500

A pioneering study of wild chimpanzees has found that these close human relatives do not routinely experience menopause, rebutting previous studies of captive individuals which had postulated that female chimpanzees reach reproductive senescence at 35 to 40 years of age.

Together with recent data from wild gorillas and orangutans, the finding -- described this week in the journal Current Biology -- suggests that human females are rare or even unique among primates in experiencing a lengthy post-reproductive lifespan.

Male voice pitch predicts reproductive success in hunter-gatherers

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:17:39 -0400

Deeper voice pitch predicts reproductive success in male hunter-gatherers, according to a new study from researchers with Harvard University, McMaster University, and Florida State University.

This is the first study to examine the correlation between voice pitch and child-bearing success, and the results point to a role for voice pitch in Darwinian fitness in humans.

The study, published online this week in the journal Biology Letters, was led by Coren Apicella, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University, with David Feinberg of McMaster University and Frank Marlowe of Florida State University.

Scientists have something to chew on

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:20:15 -0400

In a groundbreaking study, two Harvard scientists have for the first time extracted human DNA from ancient artifacts. The work potentially opens up a new universe of sources for ancient genetic material, which is used to map human migrations in prehistoric times.

Before this, archaeologists could only get ancient DNA from relics of the human body itself, including prehistoric teeth, bones, fossilized feces, or — rarely — preserved flesh. Such sources of DNA are hard to find, poorly preserved, or unavailable because of cultural and legal barriers.

By contrast, the genetic material used in the Harvard study came from two types of artifacts — 800 to 2,400 years old — that are found by the hundreds at archaeological sites in the American Southwest.

New research challenges previous knowledge about the origins of urbanization

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:42:36 -0400

Ancient cities arose not by decree from a centralized political power, as was previously widely believed, but as the outgrowth of decisions made by smaller groups or individuals, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh.

Published in the Aug. 31 issue of the journal Science, the research was led by Jason Ur, assistant professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University, with Philip Karsgaard of the University of Edinburgh, and Joan Oates of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research of the University of Cambridge.

Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:39:11 -0400

Hairless, clawless, and largely weaponless, ancient humans used the unlikely combination of sweatiness and relentlessness to gain the upper hand over their faster, stronger, generally more dangerous animal prey, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman said Thursday (April 12).

Just days before Monday’s 111th running of the Boston Marathon, Lieberman presented his theories of the importance of running to ancestral humans to explain why we’re the only species that voluntarily runs extraordinarily long distances, such as the 26.2 miles in the marathon.

Indonesia's strategies to fight bird flu run afoul of reality

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:50:11 -0400

If Indonesia is able to execute a comprehensive bird flu plan written by the government, it will take great strides toward controlling the outbreak in the sprawling island nation, a visiting professor who has studied the region said Friday (March 9).

Unfortunately, there's little chance of that happening.

"There's a level of rhetoric and a level of reality and an increasing gap between rhetoric and reality," said James Fox, visiting professor of Australian studies in Harvard's Anthropology Department.

Fox, visiting Harvard from Australian National University, delivered a grim assessment of the spread of bird flu throughout Indonesia, "The Course of Avian Flu in Indonesia: Implications and Possibilities," as part of the Asia Center's ongoing Modern Asia Series.

Seeing the forest, from the trees

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:17:48 -0400

It was Valentine’s Day 2000 and Alain Houle was not quite sure what to do. He was alone in a fruit tree and the chimps were coming back.

“I thought I’d be killed,” Houle said later. “They climbed up, looked at me, barked at me, and then settled down to eat.”

After Houle climbed down that day, he returned to the research station in Uganda’s Kibale National Park and met Richard Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, who has studied the park’s chimpanzees since 1987.

Though Houle was in the park studying the diets of monkeys for his doctoral work at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Wrangham expressed interest in Houle’s experience and said that chimpanzees had never been studied at eye-level in the treetops before.

Orangutan research yields conservation dividends

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:06:40 -0400

Cheryl Knott remembers the first time she heard the sound of chainsaws shattering the quiet in Indonesia's Gunung Palung National Park.

It was the late 1990s and Knott, an associate professor of anthropology who studies orangutan biology in the park's rain forest, said researchers at the Cabang Panti Research Station listened as the ominous sound grew ever nearer.

"There were illegal loggers in the National Park, thousands of loggers," Knott said. "Every morning, you could hear the sound of chainsaws, and knew they were getting closer."

Past, present of flu pandemics examined

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:25:53 -0400

The global response to bioterrorism and AIDS is increasing health system capacity in a way also useful if avian flu strikes, according to experts attending an interdisciplinary conference on Asian flus.

The bad news, however, is that vast disparities in health care systems still persist and, despite the expanding capacity in recent years, bird flu could still have a devastating impact.

"I think of what happens if avian flu comes to Lesotho. The mortality and morbidity would just be devastating," said Jim Kim, who heads Harvard Medical School's Department of Social Medicine and serves as the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights in the Harvard School of Public Health.

Tamed 11,400 years ago, figs likely first domesticated crop

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:27:59 -0400

Archaeobotanists have found evidence that the dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees in the Near East some 11,400 years ago, roughly 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley, and legumes were domesticated in the region. The discovery dates domesticated figs to a period some 5,000 years earlier than previously thought, making the fruit trees the oldest known domesticated crop.

Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and Mordechai E. Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University reported their findings in the journal Science.

"Eleven thousand years ago, there was a critical switch in the human mind - from exploiting the Earth as it is to actively changing the environment to suit our needs," says Bar-Yosef, professor of anthropology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and curator of Paleolithic archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. "People decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying on what was provided by the gods. This shift to a sedentary lifestyle grounded in the growing of wild crops such as barley and wheat marked a dramatic change from 2.5 million years of humans as mobile hunter-gatherers."

The research was sponsored by the American School of Prehistoric Research at Harvard's Peabody Museum, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Shelby-White-Leon Levy Foundation, and the Koschitzky Foundation at Bar-Ilan University.