ZOMG Anthropology

Your one stop shop for all the anthropology that tumblr has to offer. I solemnly swear to bring you cool anthropology stuff. Ya dig?

[archaeologyrocks101-blog]

#Bones Has Been Making The Same Mistake For 10 Seasons

The oversimplification of ancestry determination from the skeleton is exposed to the public in buzzfeed of all places. While the popular TV show bones was created and written by a forensic anthropologist, it has failed miserably at portraying the science accurately. A missed opportunity…

[scientific-women]

Things My Male Tech Colleagues Have Actually Said to Me, Annotated

[zomganthro]

The author recalls actual words uttered to her by sexist male colleagues in the tech sector.

“Wow, you’re pretty strong!” Thanks. I worked out once, in 2006. There was also the time I did almost an entire push-up.

[theolduvaigorge]

Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

“Back in July of last year, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” sounds otherworldly to our ears, although modern-day musicologists can only guess at the song’s tempo and rhythm.

When we reach even further back in time, long before the advent of systems of writing, we are completely at a loss as to the forms of music prehistoric humans might have preferred. But we do know that music was likely a part of their everyday lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evidence for the kinds of instruments they played. 

In 2008, archeologists discovered fragments of flutes carved from vulture and mammoth bones at a Stone Age cave site in southern Germany called Hohle Fels. These instruments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may supplant earlier findings of flutes at a nearby site dating back 35,000 years. The flutes are meticulously crafted, reports National Geographic, particularly the mammoth bone flute, which would have been “especially challenging to make.” 

At the time of their discovery, researchers speculated that the flutes “may have been one of the cultural accomplishments that gave the first European modern-human (Homo sapiens) settlers an advantage over their now extinct Neanderthal-human (Homo neanderthalis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowledge about Neanderthals, including new evidence of interbreeding with Homo sapiens, these conclusions may have to be revised” (read more).

***The video is not new but I thought worth a blog to contrast against this previous post.

(Source: Open Culture)

[zomganthro]

The music is quite haunting! Always reblog.

[theolduvaigorge]

“Replicas of crania (left to right) Upper Cave China 101+103, Mladec 1 Czech Republic”

(Source: @ChrisStringer65 on Twitter)

[piecomic]

[archaeology]

Yup. A fine line between archaeology and grave-robbing.

[archaeologicalnews]

Nine Mile Canyon primitive rock shelter vandalized

PRICE — The leader of a nonprofit archaeology organization says he’s baffled by an act of vandalism that was recently discovered in Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon.

Jerry D. Spangler, executive director of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance, confirmed Tuesday that members of his group discovered the vandalism at a primitive rock shelter in the canyon on March 16 and reported it to the Bureau of Land Management office in Price.

The vandals buried two wire cables in the floor of the shelter, Spangler said. They also moved delicate archaeological material around inside the shelter to build new walls, according to Ahmed Mohsen, manager of the BLM’S Price field office.

“It’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” said Spangler, who has more than two decades of experience in the field. Read more.

[archaeology]

Almost 6,000 years ago, the man was placed behind the woman with his arms around her body, and their legs were intertwined. They were buried. Why they were interred in this manner is not yet determined, but the international team that discovered them in Greece is still searching for answers, according to team member Michael Galaty, a Mississippi State University archaeologist. “There’ve only been a couple of prehistoric examples of this behavior around the world, but even when couples are buried together, they’re beside each other and not typically touching,” he said. “This couple was actually spooning. We assume they were partners of some kind, and because of DNA analysis, we do know they are male and female.” Not only does Galaty head MSU’s anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures department, but he also serves as interim director of the university’s Cobb Institute of Archeology. Another question for the researchers to examine is how the couple died, which happened around 3800 B.C., Galaty said. While archaeologists are unsure whether the man or woman died first, they are sure the couple’s times of death are close together. “This is unique in Greece, and we’re analyzing the skeletons and bones to find out more about what was going on, how they died and why they may have been placed there,” he said.

More here.

[theolduvaigorge]

Early Modern Humans and Morphological Variation in Southeast Asia: Fossil Evidence from Tam Pa Ling, Laos

by Fabrice Demeter , Laura Shackelford, Kira Westaway, Philippe Duringer, Anne-Marie Bacon, Jean-Luc Ponche, Xiujie Wu, Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, Jian-Xin Zhao, Lani Barnes, Marc Boyon, Phonephanh Sichanthongtip, Frank Sénégas, Anne-Marie Karpoff, Elise Patole-Edoumba, Yves Coppens and José Braga

“Little is known about the timing of modern human emergence and occupation in Eastern Eurasia. However a rapid migration out of Africa into Southeast Asia by at least 60 ka is supported by archaeological, paleogenetic and paleoanthropological data. Recent discoveries in Laos, a modern human cranium (TPL1) from Tam Pa Ling‘s cave, provided the first evidence for the presence of early modern humans in mainland Southeast Asia by 63-46 ka. In the current study, a complete human mandible representing a second individual, TPL 2, is described using discrete traits and geometric morphometrics with an emphasis on determining its population affinity. The TPL2 mandible has a chin and other discrete traits consistent with early modern humans, but it retains a robust lateral corpus and internal corporal morphology typical of archaic humans across the Old World. The mosaic morphology of TPL2 and the fully modern human morphology of TPL1 suggest that a large range of morphological variation was present in early modern human populations residing in the eastern Eurasia by MIS 3″ (read more/open access).

(Open access source: PLoS ONE 10(4): e0121193, 2015)

[ancientart]

Aboriginal rock art from Ubirr, Kakadu National Park, NT, Australia.

Photo taken by Michael Wifall.

[drlibertybell]

Ethnographic Interventions

This video was produced in response to an invitation from the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography at York University in Toronto, Canada. 

You can find more on the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography

On the World wide web: http://imaginativeethnography.org/ 

On FB:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Centre-for-Imaginative-Ethnography/322350767907852?fref=ts

[misanthropologica]

“If anthropology is held together by its moral optimism, a generosity toward humanity that ideally articulates itself through provocative, counter punctual arguments, then we need to consider how and to what effect our moral optimism and counterpunctualism travel along and across academic and nonacademic routes.” -Andrea Muehlebach (2013: 305) from “On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology” American Anthropologist (115)2: 297-311

[sdzoo]

Trachypithecus cristatus cristatus - Silberner Haubenlangur - Silvered leaf-monkey by Kowari

[ruralarchaeologist]

Ah yes, the archaeologist’s lounge chair

[oosik]

In Bethel, fish skin artists stitch projects from tossed-aside scales and fins

During the last week, a group at a workshop in Bethel learned fish skin sewing, crafting purses, baskets and earrings. They skinned freezer-burned chum salmon and saved the meat for a local musher. They scraped away the remaining bits of flesh and membrane with dull knives, ulus or their fingernails. They stored the skins in a solution of 70 percent rubbing alcohol. They rubbed the skins to soften them, and washed them in Dawn dish soap to remove the oils.

The more of the membrane removed, the more translucent the finished piece will appear. Then they cut and, with synthetic sinew, sewed tiny stitches into the skins. For a basket, skins can be molded over a container to harden into their final shape. Their teacher, Karen Denise McIntyre, lived for nearly three decades in Bethel but learned to sew fish skins in Sitka. She moved there more than a year ago to get away from the dusty roads in the Western Alaska hub that exacerbated her asthma. Read more…

[theolduvaigorge]

What 300,000 year old eggshells reveal about the environment of the Paleolithic

“In the 1990s the discovery of the oldest man made and completely preserved wooden hunting weapons made the Paleolithic excavation site in Schoningen internationally renowned. Contained within the 300,000 year-old deposits on a former lake shore in what is now Lower Saxony organic materials remain excellently preserved, including eggshells that Dr. Jordi Serangeli and Professor Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen, together with colleagues from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage (NLD) were able to identify as eggshell remains from various species of birds. 

This represents an exceptionally rare category of finds and with the systematic evaluation of these eggshells, the researchers expect within the next years to achieve significant contributions to the re-construction of the climatic conditions during this inter glacial period as well as new insights into the behavior of migratory birds and the human diet 300,000 years ago. The finds are few centimeters width and less than a millimeter thick. They were recovered during the actual fine excavations and the sorting of the residual finds, and have been compared with the eggs of today’s European birds in the Natural History Museum in Braunschweig and in the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Based upon the thickness, the curvature and the surface texture of the eggshells as well as the distance between and the shape of the pores allowed us to define five excellently preserved fragments: One showed similarity with the eggshell of the crane (Grus grus), a further fragment a duck (probably Mallard, Anas platyrhynchos).

Three other fragments show similarities with the eggs of modern day whooper swans (Cygnus cygnus). These birds today breed, as a rule in sub-arctic-temperate areas such as Iceland, Scandinavia and Siberia. This landscape is characterized by low vegetation, the temperature being a few degrees lower than in Central Europe.The eggshells also raise the question whether in addition to horse meat eggs could have played a role in the human diet between March and the end of May as an important food source for the people in the spring. This could also be another reason why the hunters and gatherers sought out the lakeshore.”

(Source: Universität Tübingen)

[magictransistor]

Venus Figurines from the European Paleolithic Era; c. 25,000-40,000 BCE.

Venus of Dolní Věstonice, Venus of Kostenki, Venus of Kostenki (Rear), Venus of Willendorf and The Venus of Hohle Fels. (top to bottom)

[cool-critters]

Mohol bushbaby (Galago moholi)

The mohol bushbaby is a species of primate in the Galagidae family. It is found in Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. There are two recognised subspecies. Its head-body length is around 8.8 - 20.5 cm. The diet of the Mohol bushbaby consists of insects such as grasshoppers, termites and beetles, as well as gum from inside Acacia stem. It is a social animal and has been known to spend several hours grooming and playing in groups of two or three. It sleeps in a group during the day, but disperses to forage alone at night, moving swiftly through the trees by running, walking or leaping from branch to branch.

photo credits: wikia, primates, David Haring