Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #physicalanthropology, aggregated by home.social.
Архэ выложили новье от Дробышевского - https://youtu.be/777QIdjsc6w?si=k0xU_vc5BqKgRD8M
Ну, как новье, лекция читана 23/09-25, но выложили несколько часов назад :)
Как обзор, имхо, очень хорошо, а если нужно больше, то на трубе есть, емнип, доклады людей, которые непосредственно работают с материалами Сунгиря.
#Archaeology #Sungir #PhysicalAnthropology #BiologicalAnthropology #PublicLecture #PublicScienceLecture #PopularScienceLecture #Drobyshevsky #PopularScience
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Another three books from our January clearance sale, some of which have been review candidates for some time now.
- Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World, a shocking and eye-opening reportage written by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman and published by Hurst Publishers.
- Making Faces: The Evolutionary Origins of the Human Face, written by Adam S. Wilkins, published by Belknap Press. Not one I was planning to review, but I find it very hard to pass up a bargain on an interesting book on human evolution and physical anthropology.
- Unfit for Purpose: When Human Evolution Collides with the Modern World, written by Adam Hart, published by Bloomsbury Sigma. One of several books that explores the mismatch between our evolutionary legacy and the modern world we have created for ourselves. I expect them to be amusing reads all!
#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #EnvironmentalIssues #PalmOil #PlantationForestry #FoodAdditives #Evolution #HumanEvolution #PhysicalAnthropology #Anatomy #PopularScience @bookstodon
📄 New publication: "The Digitization of Human Skeletal Collections: New Challenges and Perspectives" #OpenAccess
Human skeletal remains are a crucial source for understanding biocultural and evolutionary processes. Yet, their study and management are challenged by social, religious, and political factors, placing them in a ‘grey area’ within cultural heritage. Human skeletal collections often carry colonial legacie (...)
📄 New publication: "Biocultural Perspectives of Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence in the Past: Challenges, Complexities, and Interdisciplinarity" #OpenAccess
This article offers an introduction to this special issue which focusses on emerging biocultural insights into non-adult lives. The five papers included in this issue are deliberately temporally, geographically and topically diverse to showcase the range of (...)
New publication: "Chronic fluoride poisoning during the Roman period in Cumae (Italy): a diagnostic approach to skeletal fluorosis in cremated human remains"
Skeletal fluorosis is a pathological condition resulting from prolonged ingestion of large quantities of fluoride and causing increased bone formation and density. This disease is often endemic in volcanic areas where groundwater frequently contains high levels o...#OpenAccess
New publication: "Understanding the Origin of Superficial Bone Changes in Qafzeh 9 Skull (Middle Paleolithic, Southwestern Asia): Contribution of Three‐Dimensional Imaging"
Objectives: Deciphering the origins of bone alterations is crucial in paleoanthropology for understanding biological variation and distinguishing between taphonomy, normal anatomy, growth‐related changes, and pathological conditions. Materials and Methods: Qaf...
New publication: "Investigating Development in Human Evolution: Specificities, Challenges, and Opportunities"
ABSTRACT Unlike developmental biologists, paleoanthropologists primarily investigate development using skeletal remains, specifically fossilized and already‐formed bones and teeth. Focusing on peri‐ and/or postnatal growth, they reconstruct development from fragmented “snapshots” of individual trajectories at various ont...
New publication: "Paleoneurology: an evolving science?"
Dans le cadre du Master 2 Sciences du Vivant de l’université EPHE-PSL (cursus IMaGHE, parcours Physiopathologie Intégrative, PPI), des étudiants se sont confrontés à la rédaction d’une Nouvelle scientifique. Selon la spécialisation choisie par les étudiants (Neurosciences ou Cancérologie), l’équipe pédagogique leur a proposé de faire une synthèse d’articles sur deux thématique...
New publication: "Assessing Histotaphonomy: A Pilot Study Using Image Analysis for Quantitative Scoring of Bone Diagenesis"
ABSTRACT This pilot study focusses on improving the methodological approach of histotaphonomy by integrating image analysis software for assessing bone diagenesis in both bone histological sections and microcomputed tomography (μ‐CT) scans of the same bone slice. Femurs and ribs from six individuals buried at...#OpenAccess
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Two second-hand copies of #PhysicalAnthropology books from Cambridge University Press: What #Teeth Reveal About Human #Evolution and Evaluating Evidence in Biological #Anthropology. Taschen had a sale on recently, so I bagged myself a copy of The Fantastic Worlds of #FrankFrazetta at less than half price
#Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon #FantasyArt @bookstodon
New publication: "First direct dating of the Late Neanderthal remains from Subalyuk Cave in Northern Hungary"
The Subalyuk hominin remains were uncovered in 1932 in a cave of the same name in the Bükk Mountains, near the village of Cserépfalu in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county, Northern Hungary. The remains represent two individuals, an adult and a young child who have been described in a few publications since th... #PhysicalAnthropology #Archaeology https://doi.org/10.1127/anthranz/2023/1716
New publication: "Population affinities in pre‐colonial West Africa: The case of the burial cave Iroungou (Gabon, 14th–15th century CE)"
Introduction: Our knowledge of the populations of sub-Saharan Africa in the periods before European colonization is limited. Few archeological sites containing human remains have been identified, and written sources for these periods are rare. The discovery in 2018 of the Iroungou se... #PhysicalAnthropology #Archaeology https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24997
New publication: "Imagination et construction mentale. La fabrique du discours scientifique" #PhysicalAnthropology https://doi.org/10.46608/schola1.9782356135032
New publication: "Mandible and teeth characterization of the Gravettian child from Gargas, France" #PhysicalAnthropology https://doi.org/10.4000/bmsap.9810
I just remembered --- 34 years ago today I successfully defended my dissertation and earned my PhD -- wow. In some ways it seems like yesterday and in others it seems like 100 years ago.
#genetics #anthropology #physicalanthropology #biologicalanthropology #doctorate
As we discussed earlier, this increasing coherence and self consistency, together with increasingly incontestable empirical evidence, forced #anthropology to split into two separate fields.
What happened next, was that each of these two fields began developing their own specialisations. #PhysicalAnthropology began specialising in osteology, odontology, taphonomics, genetics, etc, while #SocialAnthropology began specialising in kinship, religion, language and economics.
In both cases, these specialisations drew the two respective fields of anthropology into closer and closer harmony with other related fields, which is exactly how science works. Terms like 'inter-disciplinary' and 'trans-disciplinary' research have recently become buzzwords in the humanities, but they are so deeply foundational to the sciences that they are generally taken for granted. Science works effectively precisely because its various branches are all closely vertically integrated.
So this was more-or-less the trajectory of both #PhysicalAnthropology and #SocialAnthropology from the inception of their parent discipline of anthropology in the 1870s onwards. As we noted earlier, World War II finalised the formal distinction between the two fields once and for all. Physical anthropology became increasingly integrated with biology, while social anthropology remained firmly within that domain of research that we know as 'the social sciences'.
Then, after WW2, the global #decolonization movement started TBC
Earlier on in this thread we talked about the definition of scientific fields according to the logical relations linking them together. We talked about this logic as based around three interrelated terms and definitions: 1) An object of study; 2) Parameters of study, and; 3) A causal model.
As Thomas Kuhn pointed out back in the 1960s, a scientific field is forced to reorganise itself whenever its existing object of study, parameters and causal model are no longer able to describe and explain new information it has encountered. When this happens, the field usually has to split off and develop new specialisations. #Anthropology did this in the early 20th century when it split into #PhysicalAnthropology and #SocialAnthropology. Pretty much every other scientific field has been doing this continuously since the industrial revolution started, as parameters of study become more and more extensive, and causal models become more and more specific.
The humanities don't work in the way that sciences do though. They have a different mode of 'discovering new knowledge'. Without segueing too much, it is important to understand that part of the way humanities discover new knowledge, is by attaching themselves to new information discovered by the sciences, and by engaging in philosophical discussion about those new discoveries. This is a very important function that helps to regulate the way science is applied, particularly in terms of its social impacts.
As the data on this purported object of study trickled in over the next 50 years, it bacame clear to those who were collecting this data that *social variation* between communities of people and *physical variation* between communities of people were actually two different objects of study, with two different causal models - one biological and the other other cultural. The discipline of #anthropology consequently developed two subsidiary or 'child' fields: #PhysicalAnthropology and #SocialAnthropology, each with its own causal model.
Because the adjacent scientific discipline of biology advanced so much more rapidly than the science of culture (thanks to the utility of biology in medicine and the agricultural and sector), the science of #PhysicalAnthropology matured rapidly.
By contrast, the science of culture remained stymied by politics and ideology, particularly in the context of the 20th century wars between democratic and fascist forces, and later between capitalist and communist forces. Despite these impediments #SocialAnthropology nevertheless managed to develop some relatively formal and empirical models for predicting cultural causes of community-level social interaction.
This is where we get onto the issue of *specialisation* in scientific fields.
Similarly, #PhysicalAnthropology has recently become more popularly known as #BiologicalAnthropology, both of which are alternate terms for the same child field of the parent discipline of #anthropology. 'Physical anthropology' takes its name from 1a) the field's object of study, i.e. *physical* variation within and between communities. Meanwhile, 'biological anthropology' takes its name from 3a) the field's causal model of *biological* processes, e.g. genetics, osteology, odontology, etc.
The upshot (if we can call it that) is that we have been left with a very clear distinction between two different child fields within the parent discipline of #anthropology:
One of these fields, #PhysicalAnthropology, is now defined by 1) an object of study comprising physical variation within and between communities of people; 2) parameters of study comprising the known history and known geographic extent of both individuals and communities, and; 3) a causal model comprising *intra-species biological processes* e.g. genetics, osteology, odontology, etc.
In the 70 years leading up to World War 2, there developed a gradual but increasingly clear divergence between #anthropology that focused on human physicality, and anthropology that focused on human sociality.
Much of the research in #PhysicalAnthropology consolidated its focus on fossils and prehistoric human remains, giving rise to the specialised branch known as #Paleoanthropology. This is a branch of anthropology that uses a causal model of biological evolution to focus on *inter-species variation* between different evolutionary branches of our genus, all of which are now extinct apart from our own species, Sapiens.
Simultaneously, much of the research in #SocialAnthropology consolidated its focus on distinct variations in communally-shared ideas, and the links between those ideas and observable patterns of social interaction in regionally distinct communities.
However, until World War 2 there persisted a stubborn strain of research that continued to assert a link between human biology and sociality. This research tended to orbit around the pseudoscientific #philosophy of eugenics, and so-called 'social Darwinism'. Anthropologists who supported this pseudoscience claimed that certain forms of social organisation, which they alleged to be 'dysfunctional', were the result of biological evolutionary failures.
Anthropologists who endorsed eugenics were prominent all over the world, not only in Nazi Germany, but also in the USA, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere.
Written in the bones: Medieval skeletons tell story of social inequality in Cambridge - Enlarge / The remains of an individual buried in an Augustinian friary,... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=1737096 #physicalanthropology #forensicarchaeology #12daysofchristmas #bioarchaeology #skeletaltrauma #science