Anthropology

David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.

“Tansi, today we are going through some random phrases,” Julia Ouellette says to the camera. She holds up slips of paper with English words while repeating the Cree translations quickly and then slowly. “tantahtwaw,” she says, holding a paper that says “how many,” emphasizing each syllable. “tantahtwaw. Repeat after me.”

The decades out-of-date genetics taught in most U.S. schools stokes misconceptions about race and human diversity. A biological anthropologist calls for change.

Throughout the mountains of the American West, carvings hidden on the trunks of aspen trees tell the stories of the sheepherders who made them as they passed through with their flocks. Most of the men who etched these arborglyphs into the living trees were Basques who, starting with the Gold Rush of the 1840s, had immigrated from the Basque Country that straddles the Pyrenees Mountains.

Five hundred years ago, in a mountain-rimmed ocean fjord in southeast Alaska, Tlingit hunters armed with bone-tipped harpoons eased their canoes through chunks of floating ice, stalking seals near Sít Tlein (Hubbard) glacier. They must have glanced nervously up at the glacier’s looming, fractured face, aware that cascades of ice could thunder down and imperil the boats – and their lives. As they drew near, they would have asked the seals to give themselves as food for the people and talked to the spirit of Sít Tlein to release the animals from his care.

Extensive social networks between different hunter–gatherer groups in the Congo Basin existed long before agriculture arrived in the region. This continent-wide exchange preserved a cultural diversity that evolved thousands of years ago, as researchers from the University of Zurich have shown based on musical instruments, specialized vocabulary and genetic information.

The last pandemic was bad, but COVID-19 is only one of many infectious diseases that emerged since the turn of this century.

Indigenous people entered North America at least four times between 12,000 and 24,000 years ago, bringing their languages with them, a new linguistic model indicates. The model correlates with archaeological, climatological and genetic data, supporting the idea that populations in early North America were dynamic and diverse.

Frequent disturbances to human societies boost the ability of populations to resist and recover from subsequent downturns, a Nature paper indicates. The study, which analyzes 30,000 years of human history, has implications for future population growth and resilience and for contemporary resilience-building initiatives.

Competition between species played a major role in the rise and fall of #hominins – and produced a “bizarre” evolutionary pattern for the #Homo lineage – according to a new University of Cambridge study that revises the start and end dates for many of our early ancestors.

A pair of archaeologists, one with Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, the other with the University of Warsaw, both in Poland, has found evidence suggesting that rock carvings found in a southern part of Peru may have been inspired by people singing while consuming hallucinogenic plants. In their study, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Andrzej Rozwadowski and Janusz Wołoszyn analyzed rock carvings found in Toro Muerto.

Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It's possible we were just smarter, but there's surprisingly little evidence that's true.

As synthetic prayer flags and scarves pollute the Himalayan region, a team of scholars and activists work to spread sustainable materials drawn from Indigenous knowledge.

Smithsonian article linked about the new study: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/research-reveals-the-natives-of-easter-island-invented-a-written-language-from-scratch-180983793/

In Ecuador, Shuar people, an Indigenous group in the region, face increasing threats to their ways of life from industrial mining. But some find strength and courage to resist through knowledge gained by using hallucinogenic plants.

An eye-catching new study shows just how different the experience of walking home at night is for women versus men.