All biological 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.

Female lower back has evolved to accommodate strain of pregnancy

404132862 — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:12:52 -0500

According to a new study by researchers at Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin, women's lower spines evolved to be more flexible and supportive than men's to increase comfort and mobility during pregnancy, and to accommodate the special biology of carrying a baby for nine months while standing on two feet.

Edward O. Wilson awarded 2007 Catalonia International Prize

404132862 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:42:44 -0500

Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, has been selected from a pool of 235 nominees, from 227 institutions in 27 countries, to receive the 2007 Catalonia International Prize.

Wilson was cited by the selection jury for the courage and honesty he has shown while defending his theories, "when it was and was not politically correct" to do so.

The Catalonia award is presented annually by the Catalan government to acknowledge contributions to the development of cultural, scientific, or human values around the world.

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.

Jane Goodall: A life in the field

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:20:12 -0400

As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee — a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood.

Beginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that revolutionized the scientific understanding of these close human relatives.

Goodall, a onetime secretary who skipped past a bachelor's degree to do a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Cambridge, famously discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, thrive in socially complex families, and even engage in warfare.

I know just how you feel

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:40:37 -0400

When people talk with psychotherapists, the best results occur if both feel similar emotions, when both “like” each other. But do most therapists really connect with patients this way? No one has ever tried to directly measure the biology of empathy between the two.

To fill this gap, a group of researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital measured involuntary biological reactions by both patients and therapists during a regular psychotherapy session. Attention and inattention, expressions of pleasure and satisfaction, and words of care and understanding also were caught on videotape.

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."

Gilby blogs from Ugandan forest

50443248 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:52:08 -0400

Ian Gilby was following a chimpanzee through Uganda's Kibale Forest, observing behavior and testing revised data collection methods. Gilby had done his doctoral dissertation on chimpanzees in Tanzania and was studying long-term data about male chimp interactions.

But on this late January morning, it was the elephant that got his attention.

Evolving ideas

50443248 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:17:32 -0400

Is the problem with evolution A) people don't believe in it; B) people believe in it but don't understand it; or C) evolution comes packaged with troubling implications that we don't want to accept? According to speakers at a spirited Askwith Education Forum - "How Do We Teach Evolution" - on Feb. 22 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the answer is "all of the above."

From the point of view of Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor, "The real issue is that large numbers of people don't believe that organisms evolve, and our first problem that we have to integrate into teaching about how they evolve is to begin by convincing doubters that organisms do evolve."

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.

Biological clock genes identified

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:07:54 -0400

"We've identified the molecules that we believe form the essential gears of the 24-hour clock," says researcher Steven Reppert, who is a professor of pediatrics at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. "This understanding could lead to quicker and more efficient ways to reset the clocks of those suffering from jet lag or genetic sleep disorders, or those trying to adjust to shift work." That's good news for those whose sleep cycles are disrupted. Shift and travel adjustments can be made by exposure to illumination from so-called "light boxes," but such resetting is time-consuming. And as natural sleep potions, melatonin supplements have not lived up to their hype.