Anthropology

Prehistoric Human Feces Biomarkers Help Track Ancient Climate Change

The race is on to blame everything related to ecological change on human footprints- even the past can be re-framed as anthropocenic climate change and University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientists have shown how to do just that, by using a biomarker ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 27 2012 - 11:02am

Religion In America: Evangelicals Surge As Catholics Wane

The percentage of Americans who say they are strong in their religious faith has been steady for the last four decades but a new sociology analysis claims that religious groups who have become more staunchly devout have surged while others, notably Roman ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 27 2012 - 12:00pm

More Accurate History- Using Genetics

A new approach used to analyze genetic data to learn more about the history of populations says it can describe in detail events in recent history, over the past 2,000 years, more accurately than in the subjective texts used by people in the humanities. T ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 5 2012 - 1:30pm

Cavemen Were Better At Animal Art Than Leonardo Da Vinci

Prehistoric artists wanted to tell a story as accurately as possible, and so they were better at portraying the walk of four-legged animals than modern man, according to a new paper.  Most quadrupeds have a similar sequence in which they move each limb as ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 6 2012 - 10:36am

DNA Evidence Shows Gypsies Began Their Exodus From India 1,500 Years Ago

Modern-day gypsies,  Europe's widespread Romani population, are now as diverse in language, lifestyle, and religion as any demographic but they all share a common past. And that past started about 1,500 years ago  in northwestern India, according to ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 9 2012 - 12:30pm

Hybridization Among Primates: What Interbreeding Howler Monkeys May Tell Us About Human Evolution

Whether or not different species of early humans interbred and produced offspring of mixed ancestry- hybridization- has been the subject of recent studies but the findings are not universally accepted. ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 8 2012 - 6:00am

Neolithic Carpentry: 7,000 Year Old Wooden Wells Made Without Metal Tools

Prehistoric farming communities in Europe constructed water wells out of oak timbers- it seems early farmers were skilled carpenters long before metal was discovered or used for tools.   These first Central European farmers migrated from the Great Hungari ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 20 2012 - 11:03am

Big 5 Universal Personality Traits? There May Only Be A Big 2

For decades, the consensus among psychologists has held that a group of five personality traits- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism- are a universal feature of human psychology. Not so, say anthropologists writing in ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 8 2013 - 6:00pm

It's Jared Diamond Versus The Social Sciences

Jared Diamond is not impressed by modern social sciences, like psychology and anthropology, because of the need to try and make claims about human nature by doing surveys or visiting a place and then framing the results through their own- not to invoke the ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Jan 17 2013 - 4:22pm

Ladies, If You Want More Sex, Do More Housework

Sociologists have settled an important debate- namely, do women really want a man that does housework. The answer is 'no', according to an important new paper which found that married men and women who divide household chores in traditional ways ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 3 2013 - 7:19pm