All anthropology stories

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.

Redheaded strangers

404132862 — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:10:48 -0400

Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads.

Yale honors E. O. Wilson with Verrill Medal

404132862 — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:58:23 -0400

Yale honors Wilson with Verrill Medal

Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus E.O. Wilson received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal from Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History on Wednesday (Oct. 17) in New Haven, Conn. Awarded by the curators and trustees of the museum, the medal was established in 1959 to honor “some signal practitioner in the arts of natural history and natural science.” Wilson was given the award for his career-spanning efforts to educate the public about the ecological consequences of human behavior.

Maya, Aztec monument casts get the shake-out, dust-off

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:29:30 -0400

Plaster reproductions of Maya and Aztec carvings, which preserve precious details now lost on the originals, are leaving dusty, haphazard storage for cleaning, cataloging, and crating that will prepare them for a new era of usefulness and relevance.

Made more than a century ago, the plaster casts, housed at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, re-create the elaborate stone carvings that adorned Maya and Aztec cities that once buzzed with life across Central America.

The original carvings held images of rulers and rituals as well as examples of script that have proven key to deciphering the Maya’s written language, a process ongoing today.

American Indians bless search for Harvard roots

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:40:24 -0400

With a ceremonial blessing and a cautionary reminder of native peoples’ historic oppression, a group of American Indian leaders joined an assemblage of experienced and budding archaeologists Wednesday (Sept. 26) to begin the search for Harvard’s Indian College roots.

Buried somewhere under Harvard Yard’s well-manicured lawn lie the remnants of both the Old College and the Indian College, which more than 350 years ago combined to make up Harvard.

For 10 years, beginning in 1655, Harvard’s fourth building and first brick structure housed five students from New England tribes who studied side by side with English students.

Only one of those, an Aquinnah Wampanoag named Caleb Cheeshahteamuck, would go on to graduate, becoming Harvard’s first Indian alumnus in 1665.

Farmer, Magaziner: Get involved!

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:25:36 -0400

Physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer and Ira Magaziner, a one-time policy adviser in the Clinton White House, brought humor, counsel, and cautions to a public conversation on student engagement Sept. 20.

Greeting them was a packed-to-the-ceiling John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, where the crowd was noisy, young, and ready to laugh — egged on by Farmer’s explosive wit. Magaziner, measured and lugubrious, happily played the young doctor’s straight man.

Not that the panel was a laughing matter. With audience questions included, it was a 90-minute look at global health challenges and related avenues for student activism.

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.

Archaeological bookends in Copan Valley

90581724 — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:15:07 -0400

COPAN RUINAS, Honduras - A short drive from the main Maya ruins at Copan, a forested hillside holds a cluster of mounds that Peabody Museum archaeologists believe date from near the end of the great Maya civilization that once dominated the region.

On April 17, 2007, Peabody Museum director and Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology William Fash, along with director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program Barbara Fash and two Harvard graduate students, walked the site with Honduran government officials charged with regulating and overseeing archaeological activity in the Central American nation.

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."

Figs likely first domesticated crop

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:14:57 -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 report their findings in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Wakeley examines ancestral lines

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:26:51 -0400

John Wakeley is devising new ways to trace the evolutionary road taken by humans and the creatures with whom we share planet Earth by creating new models that examine how DNA has changed over time.

A theoretical population geneticist, Wakeley's research focuses on how our DNA changes as it is passed from generation to generation. He is examining how the tendency of humans to live in groups separated by ethnicity or by physical barriers like mountains and rivers affects DNA's random changes.

Understanding groupings of individuals can be critical to figuring out why our DNA carries particular patterns today. That's because changes in patterns of genetic variation due to genetic drift - one of the major forces behind evolution - occur more rapidly in smaller populations and subpopulations.

Blogging from the Ugandan forest

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:25:50 -0400

A Web log, or blog, co-written by Harvard researcher Ian Gilby, working in Uganda's Kibale Forest, makes vivid the family lives of chimpanzees. The blog, on the Anthropology Department Web site, also provides an unusual glimpse into the daily life of a field scientist.

The blog was the brainchild of Alex Georgiev, a graduate student in anthropology who was working with Gilby last fall to update the Kibale Chimpanzee Project's Web site. Georgiev argued that the Web site ought to have changing features that bring people back again. The blog was one way to do that, Gilby said.

In addition to drawing people to the Web site, however, Gilby said the blog is a new way for scientists to communicate to the public.

Ancient humans brought bottle gourds to Americas from Asia

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:43:07 -0400

Thick-skinned bottle gourds widely used as containers by prehistoric peoples were likely brought to the Americas some 10,000 years ago by individuals who arrived from Asia, according to a new genetic comparison of modern bottle gourds with gourds found at archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere. The finding solves a longstanding archaeological enigma by explaining how a domesticated variant of a species native to Africa ended up millennia ago in places as far removed as modern-day Florida, Kentucky, Mexico, and Peru.

The work, by a team of anthropologists and biologists from Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, Massey University in New Zealand, and the University of Maine, appeared on the Web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Integrating genetics and archaeology, the researchers assembled a collection of ancient remnants of bottle gourds from across the Americas. They then identified key genetic markers from the DNA of both the ancient gourds and their modern counterparts in Asia and Africa before comparing the plants' genetic makeup to determine the origins of the New World gourds.

"For 150 years, the dominant theory has been that bottle gourds, which are quite buoyant and have no known wild progenitors in the Americas, floated across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa and were picked up and used as containers by people here," says Noreen Tuross, the Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Much to our surprise, we found that in every case the gourds found in the Americas were a genetic match with modern gourds found in Asia, not Africa. This suggests quite strongly that the gourds that were used as containers in the Americas for thousands of years before the advent of pottery were brought over from Asia."

The work was supported by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of Natural History and by Harvard's Department of Anthropology and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Chinese salt evidence spared from flood

50443248 — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:37:45 -0400

American and Chinese researchers digging at an imperiled site of ancient salt production found the earliest known evidence of salt manufacturing in China.
Salt manufacturing is regarded as an important step in the development of complex societies because its trade not only spurred economic activity, it also encouraged communication along trade routes, prompted ethnic diversification in cooking, and opened new regions to settlement.

Archaeologists found evidence of large-scale salt production dating to the first millennium B.C. at a site called Zhongba, on the Yangtze River northeast of Chongquing. The site, upstream of the enormous Three Gorges Dam project, flooded in 2004 after excavation was complete and is now under the waters of the dam's manmade lake.