April 2020 E-Book Monthly Magazine on Anthropology

CURIOUS EDITION: APRIL 2020 E-BOOK MONTHLY MAGAZINE ON ANTHROPOLOGY

Fossil skulls rewrite the stories of two ancient human ancestors

How Cultural An Anthropological Supreme Court Anthropologists Approach reverses High Court Redefined To Lockdown order in defence of Humanity 100 per cent reservation for Scheduled Tribes Curious April 2020

“Curious” seeks to Paper -1 enlighten the spirit of anthropology amongst the 1. Surprise Discovery Reveals Neanderthals Loved Seafood And Were students. It provides an Excellent Fisher people opportunity for students to 2. How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity keep them updated about 3. Fossil skulls rewrite the stories of two ancient human ancestors the recent developments in 4. Neanderthals: "Tree Rings" in Juvenile Teeth Reveal Cold, Harsh the field of anthropology Existence in a holistic perspective. 5. Homo erectus Existed 200,000Years Earlier than Previously Disclaimer: The views Thought expressed in the various 6. Australopithecus afarensis Had Ape-Like Brain Organization, But articles are those of the Prolonged Brain Growth Like Humans authors and they not 7. Oldest ever piece of string was made by Neanderthals 50,000 years necessarily reflect the ago. views of Vijetha IAS 8. 2 Million-Year-old Ancient Human Skull Fossils Rewrite the Academy. The “STORY OF US” advertisements apart from 9. Ancient Bones Tell a Swinging Story About Our Tree Climbing Vijetha if any added to this Ancestors- Story document regarding career 10. Who Were the Denisovans? guidance/books/ 11. Regular climbing behavior in a human ancestor institutions shall be 12. Will Asia Rewrite Human History? verified by such claims. 13. In a pandemic, science and humanities work side by side 14. Neandertals had older mothers and younger fathers For corrections/additions 15. Genetic information from an 800,000-year-old human fossil has kindly write to us at been retrieved for the first time. www.vijethaiasacademy.com 16. Forensic Anthropology in a Changing Climate 17. Scientists have discovered an earlier origin to the human language pathway in the brain

Paper - 2

1. White as Milk and Rice: Stories of India’s Isolated Tribes’ review: At The purpose of home in the world of the Halakkis, Konyaks, Marias anthropology is to 2. Reverse migration of peoples due to lockdown may destroy India’s make the world tribal communities 3. An anthropological approach to lockdown safe for human 4. SC Scraps 100% Reservation in Scheduled Areas, Fueling Debate. differences. -Ruth Benedict

CURIOUS APRIL 2020 Anthropology: The holistic study of Man

VIJETHA IAS ACADEMY

COURSE STARTS ON: 1 July/15 July-2020

Avenue: 7/50, 2nd floor, Near Roop Vatika, Shankar Road, Old Rajendar Nagar , New Delhi-110060

Syllabus: Paper 1 1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following: Neanderthal Man- La-Chapelle-aux-saints (Classical type), Mt. Carmel (Progressive type).

Neanderthals were apparently much more partial to seafood than previously thought: new research shows that Neanderthal communities living in Portugal during the last ice age were just as keen on fishing as our modern human ancestors.

Molluscs, crustaceans, fish, birds, and marine mammals like dolphins and seals made up as much as half the diet of these Iberian ancients, the new study shows. That makes them resourceful fisher- hunter-gatherers, with behaviours closer to modern-day Homo sapiens than anyone realised. By Alison George Neanderthals on the Iberian coast

The excavation at the cave of Figueira Brava near Setubal in Portugal revealed middens (domestic waste dumps) dated to around 106,000 and 86,000 years ago, packed with bones and shells from marine animals. These would have been eaten alongside more traditional fare like deer and goats.

The finding is a significant one – the fatty acids provided by this sort of seafood diet, such as Omega-3, can boost brain development. These sorts of eating habits perhaps contributed to the "emergence of cognitive and behavioural modernity" in ancient people, the researchers say.

"Figueira Brava provides the first record of significant marine resource consumption among Europe's Neanderthals," write the researchers in their published paper.

"Consistent with rapidly accumulating evidence that Neanderthals possessed a fully symbolic material culture, the subsistence evidence reported here further questions the behavioural gap once thought to separate them from modern humans."

The sheer amount of seafood remains discovered, and the distance of the settlement from the coast (about two kilometres or a little over a mile), suggests that Neanderthals used baskets and bags to go fishing with, the researchers say.

This ability to plunder food from seas and rivers has long been regarded as an exclusively human trait, not something we shared with Neanderthals – and that makes the findings at this coastal site significant.

Previous evidence for a seafood diet amongst Neanderthals has been patchy: while it has been observed in other parts of the world, it hasn't been clear just how widespread these evolving eating habits actually were.

Experts know much more about the diets of early modern humans in southern Africa around the same time, and the new study suggests that the make-up of this diet isn't all that different from the one adopted by Neanderthals who lived by the coast of Portugal.

CURIOUS APRIL Figueira Brava

Considering that snacking on seafood and exploiting marine resources could well have played a big part in triggering the expansion of the early human beings and pushing forward the increasing sophistication of our societies, pinning down exactly when and where it happened is an intriguing challenge for anthropologists.

As comprehensive as this discovery is, it's only one part of the world – we don't have a pattern yet. The researchers think that traces of other similar communities may have been washed away from rising sea levels during the end of the last ice age, so there might not be any more to find.

Even so, it sheds substantially more light on the lifestyles and behaviours of the Neanderthals – and suggests that in their taste for seafood at least, they perhaps weren't all that different from our early ancestors.

(Source : Science)

April 2020 . Curious

Syllabus: Paper Social Anthropology

How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity

A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?

Not that long ago, Margaret Mead was one of the most widely known intellectuals in America. Her first book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published in 1928, when she was twenty-six, was a best-seller, and for the next fifty years she was a progressive voice in national debates about everything from sex and gender to nuclear policy, the environment, and the legalization of marijuana. (She was in favor—and this was in 1969.) She had a monthly column in Redbook that ran for sixteen years and was read by millions. She advised government agencies, testified before Congress, and lectured on all kinds of subjects to all kinds of audiences. She was Johnny Carson’s guest on the “Tonight Show.” Time called her “Mother to the World.” In 1979, the year after she died, President Jimmy Carter awarded her the Medal of Freedom. The celebrated cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, photographed in 1930.

Today, Margaret Mead lives on as an “icon”—meaning that people might recognize the name, and are not surprised to see her face on a postage stamp (as it once was), but they couldn’t tell you what she wrote or said. If pressed, they would probably guess that Mead was an important figure for the women’s movement. They would be confusing Mead’s significance as a role model (huge as that undoubtedly was) with Mead’s views. Mead was not a modern feminist, and Betty Friedan devoted a full chapter of “The Feminine Mystique” to an attack on her work. Mead mattered for other reasons. One of the aims of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air” (Doubleday) is to remind us what those were.

Mead was a cultural anthropologist, and the rise of cultural anthropology is the subject of King’s book. It’s a group biography of Franz Boas, who established cultural anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States, and four of Boas’s many protégés: Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, and Mead. King argues that these people were “on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to prove that—despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom—humanity is one undivided thing.”

Cultural anthropologists changed people’s attitudes, King believes, and they changed people’s behavior. “If it is now unremarkable for a gay couple to kiss goodbye on a train platform,” he writes, “for a college student to read the Bhagavad Gita in a Great Books class, for racism to be rejected as both morally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid, and for anyone, regardless of their gender expression, to claim workplaces

CURIOUS APRIL and boardrooms as fully theirs—if all of these things are not innovations or aspirations but the regular, taken- for-granted way of organizing society, then we have the ideas championed by the Boas circle to thank for it.” They moved the explanation for human differences from biology to culture, from nature to nurture.

A lot of this story has been told, but King is an intelligent and judicious writer, and he has woven a concise narrative that manages to work in a fair amount of context. His subjects were all unusual characters, and their lives are colorfully related. Obviously, legal and political actors had at least as much to do with the changes in social attitudes that King writes about as anthropologists did. But he makes a good case with the cards he has dealt himself. On the other hand, issues around race, gender, sexuality, and “otherness” are still very much with us, although in slightly altered form. And when people discuss them they no longer solicit the wisdom of anthropologists. What happened?

Boas was born and educated in Prussia. He moved to the United States in 1886, when he was twenty-eight, and a decade later, after some false starts, became a professor of anthropology at Columbia. For many years, he was institutionally embattled, at least partly because of his left-wing politics. King says that at one point the anthropology department was moved into three rooms up seven flights of stairs in the journalism building —one room for Boas, one for a secretary, and the third left empty.

Somehow, Boas managed to train an entire generation of scholars in what was, until after the Second World War, a tiny academic field. The historian Lois Banner has calculated that forty-five Ph.D.s in anthropology were awarded in the United States between 1892 and 1926, and that nineteen of the recipients studied under Boas. By 1930, she says, most American anthropology departments were chaired by Boas students.

Like two other influential professors, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, both of whom were his exact contemporaries, Boas was a turgid writer. But he was intellectually fearless; he had energy and charisma; and though he made a fierce impression—his face was scarred from sabre duels he had fought as a student in Germany—his students were devoted to him. They called him Papa Franz. He retired from teaching in 1936, but remained active professionally until his death, in 1942.

Boas was trained as a physicist. His student work was in psychophysics, the science that measures things like sensory thresholds, and his dissertation was an effort to determine the degree to which light must increase in intensity for people to perceive a change in the color of water. This might seem an utterly sterile topic for research, but Boas reached an unorthodox conclusion: it depends. Our perception of color is a function of circumstances. Different observers have different perceptions depending on their expectations and experiences, and those differences are not innate. They are, consciously or unconsciously, learned. It made no sense, Boas decided, to talk about a general law of sensory thresholds.

It’s an academic adage that a scholar’s career consists of footnotes to the dissertation, and, in a way, this was true for Boas. He was an empiricist: he collected facts, and he was not inclined to theoretical speculation. But he thought that the basic fact about human beings is that the facts about them change, because circumstances change. Our lives may be determined, by some combination of genes, environment, and culture, but they are not predetermined.

Boas’s revolutionary work was a study, undertaken for a congressional committee and published in 1911, on the bodily form—head size, height, hair color, age at pubescence—of the children of recent European immigrants. The impetus was public anxiety that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe would, through intermarriage, dilute the racial stock (sometimes identified as “Nordic”).

April 2020 . Curious Boas’s finding, which was that the cranial index of children born in America differed from that of children of the same background born in Europe, rocked the field. It upset long-believed claims that racial differences, including what we would now call ethnic differences, are immutable. The evidence proved, Boas said, “the plasticity of human types.” It also showed that variations within groups are greater than variations between groups.

In 1911, this was not what most white scientists and politicians wanted to hear. Boas’s career spanned an exceptionally active period of Aryan supremacy. Boas witnessed the legalization of Jim Crow; the widespread acceptance of social Darwinism and eugenics; imperial expansion, including the American occupation of the Philippines; drastic restrictions on immigration; the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan; and the coming to power of Adolf Hitler. (Boas was Jewish.) Often, science was invoked as a justification for colonization, segregation, discrimination, exclusion, sterilization, or extermination. Boas devoted his life to showing people that the science they were relying on was bad science. “He believed the world must be made safe for differences,” Ruth Benedict wrote when Boas died.

f innate biological differences don’t account for the observed variety of roles and practices among human groups, then something else must be at work. Boas thought there were several factors, and one was culture.

Using the term required some redefinition. In the nineteenth century, “culture” was generally regarded as an attainment; it was something societies acquired as they advanced, marking a stage in the growth of a civilization. Boas is one of the people responsible for the sense we have in mind when we use the phrase “culture in the anthropological sense”—that is, the sense of culture as standing for a way of life. One of his major contributions was to show that pre-modern societies—“primitive” was the accepted term—have cultures in exactly the same way that modern societies have them, and that the minds of people who live in those societies are no different from the minds of everyone else.

Boas did his first field work with the Inuit living on Baffin Island, in northern Canada. He had intended to study hunting patterns and the like, but the more time he spent with the Inuit the more he realized that their particular way of doing things reflected a particular way of seeing the world. The Inuit way was not the European way, but it wasn’t inferior. In some respects, he thought, it might be better. The Inuit seemed, for example, to be more hospitable than Europeans. Immersion in Inuit life made him see his own culture from the outside. He learned, as he put it, “the relativity of all education.” (to be continued…)

Do you know? What does herd immunity mean? Herd immunity refers to preventing an infectious disease from spreading by immunising a certain percentage of the population. While the concept is most commonly used in the context of vaccination, herd community can also be achieved after enough people have become immune after being infected. The premise is that if a certain percentage of the population is immune, members of that group can no longer infect another person. This breaks the chain of infection through the community (“herd”), and prevents it from reaching those who are the most vulnerable.

April 2020 . Curious Boas eventually concluded that there is not one human culture but many, and he started referring to “cultures,” in the plural. He was engaged in ethnography, and he believed that the job of the ethnographer was to disappear, in effect, into the culture of the people being studied, to understand from the inside what it means to be male or female, to give or receive a gift, to bury one’s dead. The ethnographer needed to get the society’s jokes. This meant leaving one’s ethnocentrism at home. “Get nowhere unless prejudices first forgotten,” Ella Deloria wrote in her notes on one of Boas’s lectures. “Cultures are many; man is one.”

“All my best students are women,” Boas told an anthropologist friend in 1920. Columbia College did not admit women—it was the last of the Ivies to go coed, in 1983—but the graduate school and Teachers College did. And Boas also taught at Barnard, which is right across the street.

Ella Deloria came to Boas by way of Teachers College. She was born on a South Dakota reservation, and belonged to an eminent Sioux family. Her father was an Episcopal priest; her mother was the daughter of a high-ranking U.S. Army officer. She went to Oberlin, then transferred to Teachers College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1915. In her final year, she received a summons from Boas, who enlisted her in a lifelong project of his, recording Native American languages.

Deloria was never officially a Boas student. But she worked as his assistant and attended some of his lectures, and he employed her to fact-check the work of early ethnologists and linguists who had studied the Plains Indians. Boas was not surprised to learn that a lot of their findings were worthless. In 1941, the year before Boas died, he and Deloria published “Dakota Grammar.” King says it is one of the few works in his career that Boas agreed to co-author.

Of the women King writes about, Ruth Benedict was professionally the closest to Boas. She had a bachelor’s degree from Vassar and got interested in anthropology when she took courses at the New School. She entered the graduate program at Columbia in 1921, and, after getting her degree, became what King calls Boas’s “lieutenant” in the department. Boas struggled to get her a regular faculty position; she was finally made an assistant professor in 1931.

When Boas retired, Benedict was the most famous member of the Columbia department. Her book “Patterns of Culture,” a study of three groups—the Zuñi (of the American Southwest), the Kwakiutl (of British Columbia), and the Dobu (of Papua New Guinea)—was published in 1934 and became one of the best-selling works of academic anthropology ever written. The university, it is almost unnecessary to say, decided to go with a man as the new chair. He was Ralph Linton, a critic of Benedict’s work. They did not get along.

In 1946, Benedict published a second fantastically popular book, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” a study of the culture of Japan. Linton left Columbia that year and Benedict was finally promoted to full professor in 1948. Two months later, she had a heart attack and died. She was sixty-one.

It was Benedict who recruited Margaret Mead to anthropology. Mead entered Barnard as a sophomore in 1920. She was an English major, then a double English and psychology major, but she took an introduction-to- anthropology class with Boas in her senior year, and Benedict was her T.A. Benedict persuaded Mead to enroll in the graduate program. They also fell in love.

Benedict was fourteen years older than Mead, and Mead was married. So was Benedict. Their intimacy lasted for the rest of Benedict’s life, and through two more marriages for Mead. (That relationship is the subject of a book, by Lois Banner, called “Intertwined Lives.”) Mead’s choice to do her field work in Samoa, studying adolescence, was encouraged by Boas, who wrote a foreword to the book that resulted and that launched her career.

April 2020 . Curious Zora Neale Hurston entered Barnard in 1925, when she was thirty-four. (No one knew her age; Hurston always lied about it.) After graduating, she spent two years in the doctoral program before dropping out, but by then Boas had got her started collecting African-American folklore in central Florida, where she had grown up. She published her findings in 1935, as “Mules and Men,” with a preface by Boas, but the real importance of the work she did was that it provided material for the astonishing representation of African-American speech in her singular novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” That book was published in 1937 and slowly sank from view—Richard Wright accused Hurston of minstrelsy—but it was “rediscovered” in the nineteen-seventies, and is now a staple text in English-literature courses.

The anthropology these people practiced had two motives that might seem, from an orthodox scholarly perspective, extracurricular—except that knowledge is always pursued for a reason. One motive was to record ways of life that were rapidly disappearing. Even in the nineteen-twenties, it was almost impossible to find groups of humans untouched by Western practices. The island that Mead’s research subjects lived on was an American possession. It had an Anglo-American legal system, and the Samoans were all Christians.

Mead did her best to minimize these circumstances, because she wanted to capture behavior and mores that were remote from American Christian moral and legal conceptions—in particular, Samoan attitudes toward premarital sex, which is the part of the book that got all the attention. So she centered her account on what she took to be the distinctively “Samoan” aspects of her subjects’ lives.

Early-twentieth-century anthropologists were highly self-conscious about this recovery mission. They worried that the world was losing its cultural diversity. “Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known,” Benedict wrote. “This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples.” The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who did his field work among indigenous groups in west-central Brazil in the nineteen-thirties, once suggested that the word “anthropology” should be changed to “entropology”—the study of the homogenization of human life across the planet. Cultural anthropology was the West’s way of memorializing its victims.

The other motive—and this is what accounts for the popularity of Mead’s and Benedict’s books, and of Hurston’s novel—was to hold up a mirror. What is of interest to the anthropologist is difference, but all difference is difference from something, and the “something” in these books is the anthropologist’s own culture.

April 2020 . Curious This is true even for Hurston. She was raised in Florida, but she attended college in the North and was part of the Harlem Renaissance. She was cosmopolitan. She wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God” because she wanted to show Northern readers a way of life that was barely conceivable to the integrationist mentality (which she did not share): African-Americans living happily in the South and having virtually no contact with whites.

The idea behind all these books is that we can’t see our way of life from the inside, just as we can’t see our own faces. The culture of the “other” serves as a looking glass. As Benedict put it in “Patterns of Culture,” “The understanding we need of our own cultural processes can most economically be arrived at by a détour.” These books about pre-modern peoples are really books about life in the modern West.

Given this aim, the emphasis falls, almost unavoidably, on the exotic, and for the nonprofessional audience exoticism is a big part of the appeal. The jacket illustration for “Coming of Age in Samoa” featured a topless girl. The trick was to turn this appeal inside out, so that what appear at first to be outlandish and sometimes repellent practices come to seem natural and sensible, and our own practices, whose reasonableness we had taken for granted, start to appear tribal and arbitrary. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing about Benedict, called this “portraying the alien as the familiar with the signs changed.”

Soon after Mead’s death, cultural anthropology began losing its voice in public debates. King thinks that the reason for this was the rise of anti-relativism. He points out that cultural relativism is the principal target of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” which was published in 1987 and helped launch the culture wars of the ensuing decade. Bloom attacked both Mead and Benedict, and the notion that teachers who preach cultural relativism are turning American students into unpatriotic nihilists has been a recurrent theme in political rhetoric ever since.

It’s true that Boas and Benedict spoke of “relativity,” and that at the end of “Patterns of Culture” Benedict refers to “coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.” But everything else in Benedict’s book contradicts the assertion that all cultures are “equally valid.” The whole point is to judge which practices, others’ or our own, seem to produce the kind of society we want. The anthropological mirror has a moral purpose.

The term “culture” is responsible for some of the confusion. We think that to call something part of a group’s culture is to excuse it from judgment. We say, That’s just the lens through which people in that society view the world. It’s not for us to tell them what to think. Our ways are not better, only different. What it all boils down to (to paraphrase Montaigne) is: We wear pants; they do not. That would be relativism.

But to say that a belief or a practice is culture-relative is not to place it beyond judgment. The whole force of Boasian anthropology is the demonstration that racial prejudice is cultural. The belief that some races are superior and some inferior is learned; it has no basis in biology. It is therefore subject to criticism.

Boas spent his entire life telling people that intolerance is wrong. King says that cultural anthropology pushes us to expand our notion of the human. That may be so, but it has nothing to do with relativism. King’s anthropologists are prescriptivists. They are constantly telling us to unlearn one way of living in order to learn a way that is better by our own standards.

Mead argued, for instance, that American families are too insular and put too much pressure on growing children. The example of Samoa, where families are extended and children can move around among the adult members, suggested that American teen-agers could be healthier and happier if we relaxed our notions of how families ought to function. There was nothing natural and inevitable about American social structures.

April 2020 . Curious But there were also changes within the field of anthropology itself. Soon after Mead’s death, the concept of culture began to be targeted. The arrows flew from multiple directions, and some of the criticisms exposed tensions within the Boasian tradition. Although the concept had been given an enormous amount of work to do, the meaning of “culture” was never settled on. In 1952, two anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber (who was Boas’s first Ph.D. student) and Clyde Kluckhohn, published “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.” They list a hundred and sixty-four definitions from the literature.

As an instrument of analysis, the term is impossibly broad. If we mean by “culture” something like the lens through which a group of people ineluctably see the world, then “culture” becomes synonymous with “consciousness,” and it seems absurd to generalize about “Navajo consciousness” or “Western consciousness.” All distinctions are lost. On the other hand, if we do distinguish a group’s culture from, say, its social structure, then we dilute the term’s explanatory power. Culture becomes epiphenomenal, a reflection of underlying social relations.

And there are ethical issues, which, as King acknowledges, Boas and his students were mostly oblivious of. Mead spent nine months, interrupted by a hurricane, in Samoa; she interviewed fifty girls in three small villages on one of the five inhabited American Samoan islands; she never returned. Yet she wrote things like “High up in our list of explanations we must place the lack of deep feeling which the Samoans have conventionalised until it is the very framework of all their attitudes toward life.” She presumed to understand not only Samoan practices but the Samoan way of being in the world. She was speaking for Samoans.

Benedict had done field work with only one of the three groups she wrote about in “Patterns of Culture,” and she never set foot in Japan. Lévi-Strauss, after his time in Brazil, did hardly any field work. He got his facts from published books and articles. This kind of ethnography began to look like crypto-colonialism, the Western scientist telling the “native’s” own story, sometimes without even talking to a native.

There was also the question of how deep cultural difference really runs, an issue aired in the nineteen-nineties in a dispute between two anthropologists, Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere, over how to interpret the death of Captain Cook, in the Hawaiian Islands, in 1779. Were the islanders who killed Cook inside their own perceptual fishbowl, operating with a completely different understanding of how the world works from that of Cook and his crew? Or, underneath the cultural appurtenances of Hawaiian life, were the islanders behaving rationally and pragmatically, much as any other people might?

And there was the complaint, directed at Mead and Benedict, but also at Lévi-Strauss and Geertz, that the cultural approach is ahistorical. The cultural anthropologist freezes a way of life in order to analyze it as a meaningful pattern. But ways of life are in continual flux.

Boas was a firm believer in this: he was interested in what he called “diffusion,” the spread of forms and practices across space and time. Deloria, too, thought that the notion of recapturing Native American life before the arrival of the Europeans was delusional. Native American life was being lived right now, in an evolving mixture of pre-Columbian customs and twentieth-century American ways of life.

But Benedict was looking for patterns. In “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” she wrote, “I started from the premise that the most isolated bits of behavior have some systemic relation to each other.” And from this premise she undertakes to explain “what makes Japan a nation of Japanese.” Japanese-ness is a rock, washed over by waves of history.

April 2020 . Curious And what is gained from swapping out “racial difference” for “cultural difference”? As the South African anthropologist Adam Kuper has pointed out, cultural differences between blacks and whites were used to justify apartheid. Making the differences cultural enables people to say, “I’m not a racist —I just want to preserve our respective ways of life. I don’t want to be replaced.”

But all these criticisms of the premises of Boasian cultural anthropology (and there were others) had less impact than the direct attack made by the anthropologist Derek Freeman, a New Zealander, on “Coming of Age in Samoa.” Mead’s controversial finding in that work was that Samoan teen-agers engage in full sexual relations before marriage, with multiple partners, and largely without shame or guilt or even jealousy. She gave this as one of the reasons that Samoan adolescents didn’t exhibit the angst and the rebelliousness that American teen-agers did. The point was that adolescence is a culturally determined phase of life, not a biologically determined one.

In two books published after Mead’s death, “Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth” (1983) and “The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead” (1998), Freeman claimed that Mead had been tricked by her native informants, and that Samoan sex life was far more fraught than she represented it. Freeman’s books kicked off a wave of reconsideration.

King consigns the entire controversy to an endnote, as he does later challenges to the reliability of Boas’s findings in his 1911 study of the bodily forms of the children of immigrants. He does this because subsequent investigations suggest that the accusers were wrong and that Mead and Boas were both substantially correct. But he therefore misses the significance of those episodes. For what was under assault was the whole culturalist account of human behavior, and what the disputes symptomized was a swing back toward biology.

The new biologists are not like the scientists Boas did battle with in the early twentieth century. They agree with Boas that “man is one.” But they think this means that there exists a single “human nature,” and that the success or failure of different forms of social organization depends on how faithful they are to this species essence.

This has become almost the default mode of analysis among social and political commentators, who like to cite work by cognitive scientists, endocrinologists, and evolutionary psychologists. In the most reductive version of the new biologism, life is programmed, and culture is simply the interface. Even the social science that is most popular, like behavioral economics, is human-nature-based. Nurture is out.

And yet the issues on which Boas and Mead made their interventions, issues around race and gender, are now at the center of public life, and they bring all the nature-nurture confusion back with them. The focus of the conversation today is identity, and identity seems to be a concept that lies beyond both culture and biology.

April 2020 . Curious Is identity innate, or is it socially constructed? Is it fated, or can it be chosen or performed? Are our identities defined by the existing state of social relations, or do we carry them with us wherever we go?

These questions suggest that the nature-culture debate was always misconceived. As Geertz pointed out years ago, it is human nature to have culture. Other species are programmed to “know” how to cope with the world, but our biological endowment evolved to allow us to choose how to respond to our environment. We can’t rely on our instincts; we need an instruction manual. And culture is the manual.

Only we can tell us how to live. There is nothing that prevents us from deciding that the goal of life should be to be as unnatural as possible. “Human nature” is just another looking glass.

(Source: Newyork Times)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus:1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following. Homo erectus: Africa (Paranthropus), Europe (Homo erectus heidelbergensis), Asia (Homo erectus javanicus, Homo erectus pekinensis).

Fossil skulls rewrite the stories of two ancient human ancestors

Found in a hilltop cave, the oldest known Homo erectus and Paranthropus robustus fossils shed light on a critical period of hominin evolution.

In the winter of 2015, Jesse Martin and Angeline Leece were extracting what they thought were baboon remains from a piece of rock. The two students at La Trobe University in Australia were part of an expedition to collect and study fossils from the Drimolen quarry northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. As they cleaned the skull fragments and pieced them back together, however, they realized the fossils did not come from a baboon, but instead comprised the braincase of a young Homo erectus, a species never before identified in South Africa.

“I don’t think our supervisors believed us until they came over to have a look,” Martin recalls.

The braincase was described in the journal Science today, together with the skullcap of another ancient hominin, Paranthropus robustus, found at the same site. A suite of different dating techniques all hinted that the two species’ braincases were more or less the same age—about two million years old. This would make them the earliest fossils ever found for their respective species, according to the new study coauthored by Martin and Leece.

“I think they have made a strong case for the oldest Homo erectus in Africa, and in fact, in the world,” Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand said.

The enigmatic origins of Homo erectus

The age of the fossils was particularly surprising for the Homo erectus skull. Most paleoanthropologists believe that this human ancestor arose in East Africa, where several younger Homo erectus fossils—as well as the likely remains of older Homo species—have been found. Some have even hypothesized that Homo erectus originated outside of Africa, because the oldest known fossils from the species—before this new find— were discovered at the site of Dmanisi in Georgia.

April 2020 . Curious An Asian origin for H. erectus now seems exceedingly unlikely, Martin says. “The first problem for that idea is that the earliest evidence for Homo erectus is now from South Africa. But the bigger problem is that there is no candidate ancestor for Homo erectus in Asia. If you dig any deeper at sites where Homo erectus remains have been found, there are no hominins there.”

The discovery of the new braincase in South Africa, however, does not necessarily mean that Homo erectus originated there either. “Based on the current evidence, my guess is it emerged somewhere in Africa we haven’t looked yet,” Martin says.

Marcia Ponce de Léon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Zürich in Switzerland who was not involved in the new study, agrees that “it is reasonable to call the new fossil Homo erectus.” A 2013 study by Ponce de Léon and colleagues described a 1.8-million-year-old hominin skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, identifying it as likely belonging to one of the earliest Homo erectus to leave Africa.

As the species migrated across continents, it continued to adapt to new environments. “Every population of every species continues to evolve wherever it goes,” Ponce de Léon says. Tracing the spread and adaptation of Homo erectus halfway across the globe could help scientists learn more about the way our wandering ancestor survived in the different environments it encountered.

“This was really the first human experiment with globalization,” Martin says.

Three hominins in southern Africa

Two million years ago, Homo erectus wasn’t exactly abundant. “They appear to have been outnumbered 10 to 1 by Paranthropus robustus,” Leece says.

As its name indicates, Paranthropus robustus—one of the “robust australopithecines”—had a very stout skull, particularly large teeth, and an impressive crest on top of the braincase where its massive chewing muscles were attached. “The leading theory is that they were eating tough foods—not necessarily things that needed crunching, but foods that were fibrous and require a lot of chewing, like certain tubers or grasses,” Leece says.

The even older species Australopithecus sediba was also still roaming the region. The fossil record suggests this is about when Australopithecus started to be replaced by Paranthropus and Homo, a critical time in the evolution of our predecessor species.

For most of the year, Homo, Paranthropus, and Australopithecus species had plenty of available resources, and all three were likely eating more or less the same things. But winters can be harsh in this area, Martin says. “In the morning, it’s freezing, and according to estimates, it would’ve been even colder then. So this was quite a tough climate for a hominin.” Under those challenging circumstances, Paranthropus robustus’s powerful jaws and ability to eat tough, fibrous foods probably provided it with a significant advantage.

One theory holds that Australopithecus sediba may have been a direct ancestor to the genus Homo, including the species Homo erectus. The authors of the new study question this theory, however, as the newfound Homo erectus skull is older than Australopithecus sediba remains found at the nearby site of Malapa.

Berger, who was part of the team that found the Australopithecus sediba fossils at Malapa in 2010, believes that even though the Homo erectus skull is older, Australopithecus sediba still could have been an ancestor to the species. “Mother species can easily exist at the same time and place as their descendant species do,” he says.

April 2020 . Curious Regardless of which of these species emerged first, one thing is clear: Over a million years later, only Homo erectus still walked the Earth.

Homo erectus conquers the world

While the hyperspecialized skull of Paranthropus robustus may have served it well in certain environments, the trait may have ultimately become its downfall, Leece says. When the environment changes, extreme adaptations can become a handicap.

Comparing the two newly analyzed braincases, it becomes clear that Homo erectus, while initially outcompeted by Paranthropus robustus, was working on a revolutionary adaptation of its own. H. erectus’s characteristic tear-shaped braincase suggests the early member of the Homo genus was expanding and reorganizing its brain.

The Homo erectus skull Martin and Leece wrested out of the rock did not belong to an adult. Judging by the extent to which the bones of the skull had already fused, the braincase came from a child between two and six years old. At this tender age, its brain would already have been larger than that of most Australopithecus and Paranthropus adults. And impressions on the fossils show that the child’s brain was still growing, pushing the skull bones outward. “We can even see blood vessels,” Martin says.

Whereas Paranthropus robustus evolved a kind of “portable grinding stone,” Homo erectus “adapted to be adaptable” and to solve all kinds of problems that it would have encountered along its journey from Africa to Asia and parts of southern Europe, Martin says. The species’ increasingly nimble brain allowed it to outsmart other animals by fashioning tools, collaborating with others, and perhaps even pondering the future.Homo erectus survived for nearly two million years, making it the most successful species of Homo ever known.

(Source:National Geography)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus:1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following. Neanderthal Man- La-Chapelle-aux-saints (Classical type), Mt. Carmel (Progressive type).

Neanderthals: "Tree Rings" in Juvenile Teeth Reveal Cold, Harsh Existence

One light ring plus one dark ring signifies one year of a tree’s life. Embedded in these rings is information about the climate in which the tree has grown, each circle a snapshot of the past. Hominins have time machine rings too, although they are trickier to spot. In a study released Wednesday, scientists gain incredible insight into the day-today lives of Neanderthals by examining where these rings take root: in teeth.

This study, published in Science Advances, is the first to use teeth to examine the influence of ancient climate on hominin development. The teeth the team analyzed came from three individuals, all uncovered in the same archeological site in the southeast of France: two Neanderthal children that lived 250,000 years ago, and one modern human child who lived 5,000 years ago. With the human child’s teeth serving as a point of comparison, the team discovered that Neanderthal children appeared to live especially harsh lives, marred by intense environmental elements.

April 2020 . Curious Study co-author Shara Bailey, Ph.D. is a New York University associate professor of evolutionary anthropology. The Neanderthal teeth, she tells Inverse, reveal that the juveniles lived through some rough climatic times in which they “experienced stressful events that affected their development during the winter when resources would have been low.”

The fact that these harsh experiences are literally written in their teeth gives a glimpse into the day-to-day aspects of Neanderthal existence.

“It is difficult to make general statements about Neanderthals as a whole, given that this is a very limited study,” Bailey says. “However, these results suggest that the groups in which these individuals lived did not have sufficient cultural buffering, like food storage, that could have protected the children from nutritional or other environmental stressors.” Her colleague and the lead author Tanya Smith, Ph.D. explains how tiny teeth revealed so much information in the video below.

In the rings of the teeth, she and her team found barium, lead, and oxygen, which recorded each individual’s history of nursing, weaning, chemical exposure, and seasonal climate variation. As a tooth grows during fetal and childhood development, a new layer of trace elements is formed every day. Each “growth ring” pulls in the chemicals that circulate the body, and because the rings grow in layers, they reveal a chronological record of exposure.

The oxygen isotopes in the Neanderthal teeth revealed that these children lived through very cold winters and more extreme seasonal periods than the modern human child. “What I find the most fascinating about this study is the amount of information we can derive about an individual’s life by analyzing what’s in their teeth,” co-author and Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine assistant professor Christine Austin, Ph.D., tells Inverse. “We were able to go back in time, 250,000 years, and pinpoint the seasons in which these individuals were born, nursed, and weaned, and when they got sick or were exposed to toxins like lead. That’s a lot of information from some very old teeth!”

One set of the Neanderthal teeth also contained elevated barium, which is directly correlated to consumption of breast milk. It indicated that the child was born in spring and was nursed for about two and a half years. While this may seem like a long time — the World Health Organization that babies exclusively nurse for six months — traditional modern humans who live in hunter-gatherer environments also tend to nurse their children for the same amount of time. This breastfeeding time period, the scientists reason, is perhaps a link between living populations and Neanderthals.

What truly surprised the researchers was discovering that both Neanderthal children were exposed to lead, which has never been documented before in prehistoric samples. Traces of lead in the teeth demonstrate that these children were exposed to lead at least twice during the deep winter or early spring. There’s still some speculation to how these children became exposed to lead in a pre-Industrialized world, but the scientists do have some theories.

“Lead mines are relatively close to the area where these teeth were found, so it’s likely there was a small amount of lead in the food and water these individuals ingested throughout their time there,” Austin explains. “The intense, short duration exposures we saw could be due to another source specific to the cooler seasons, such as to fires that contained lead containing wood or other materials.”

April 2020 . Curious This handful of teeth paints a picture of what it meant to be a Neanderthal child, living in a harsh environmental world where the overarching rule was adapt or die. Seasonal stressors live on in the teeth of those ancient humans, little clues about our relatives huddled in the cold.

“I continue to marvel at the details on nutrition, stress, and weaning we can glean from fossil hominin teeth,” Bailey says. “The finding of lead was particularly surprising and I hope we can follow up with additional studies to explore this in other individuals.”

(Source: Inverse)

Homo erectus Existed 200,000 Years Earlier than Previously Thought An international team of paleoanthropologists has unearthed a 2-million-year-old skull of Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors to be nearly human-like in their anatomy and aspects of their behavior, in the fossil- rich Drimolen cave system north of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Homo erectus is one of our direct human ancestors and is best known for migrating out of Africa into the rest of the world. They walked upright and were a more human-like species than the other hominins found in the Cradle of Humankind. Homo erectus had shorter arms and longer legs. They could walk and run for longer distances over the African grasslands than the others. “The Homo erectus skull we found shows its brain was only slightly smaller than other examples of adult Homo erectus,” said Professor Andy Herries, a researcher at La Trobe University and the University of Johannesburg and corresponding author of a paper published in the journal Science. “It samples a part of human evolutionary history when our ancestors were walking fully upright, making stone tools, starting to emigrate out of Africa, but before they had developed large brains.” The 2-million-year-old fossil, designated DNH 134, was reconstructed from more than 150 individual fragments recovered from the Drimolen site over a five-year period. “Before we found DNH 134, we knew that the oldest Homo erectus in the world was from Dmanisi in Georgia dating to 1.8 million years ago,” said co-author Stephanie Baker, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Johannesburg. “The newly-discovered fossil demonstrates that Homo erectus, our direct ancestor, clearly evolved in Africa,” added co-author Jesse Martin, a Ph.D. student at La Trobe University. The age of the DNH 134 skullcap shows something else — that at least three hominins lived in southern Africa at the same time.

April 2020 . Curious “Unlike the world today, where we are the only human species, two million years ago our direct ancestor was not alone,” Professor Herries said.“We can now say Homo erectus shared the landscape with two other types of humans in South Africa, Paranthropus robustus and Australopithecus.” “This suggests that one of these other human species, Australopithecus sediba, may not have been the direct ancestor of Homo erectus, or us, as previously hypothesized.” “The new crania offered an unparalleled insight into how three different human species, with quite different adaptations, shared a changing environment together,” said co-author Angeline Leece, a Ph.D. student at La Trobe University. “The discovery raises some intriguing questions about how these three unique species lived and survived on the landscape,” said co-author Dr. Justin Adams, a researcher at Monash University. “One of the questions that interests us is what role changing habitats, resources, and the unique biological adaptations of early Homo erectus may have played in the eventual extinction of Australopithecus sediba in South Africa.” “Similar trends are also seen in other mammal species at this time. For example, there are more than one species of false saber-tooth cat, Dinofelis, at the site — one of which became extinct after two million years.” “Our data reinforces the fact that South Africa represented a truly unique mixture of evolutionary lineages — a blended community of ancient and modern mammal species that was transitioning as climates and ecosystems changed.”

Source: Sci-news

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus:1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following .Australopithecus

Australopithecus afarensis Had Ape-Like Brain Organization, But Prolonged Brain Growth Like Humans

Human brains are three times larger, are organized differently, and mature for a longer period of time than those of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. Together, these characteristics are important for human cognition and social behavior, but their evolutionary origins remain unclear. To study brain growth and organization in the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis (famous for ‘Lucy’ and ‘Selam’ from Ethiopia’s Afar region) more than 3 million years ago, an international team of in the hominin family tree, as it digital endocasts of the interior researchers scanned eight fossil is widely accepted to be of Australopithecus afarensis’ skulls using conventional and ancestral to all later hominins, skulls, where the anatomical synchrotron computed tomography. including the lineage leading to structure of the brains could be Published in the journal Science modern humans. Advances, the findings show that visualized and analyzed. Based while Australopithecus “Lucy and her kin provide on these endocasts, they could afarensis had an ape-like brain important evidence about early measure brain volume and infer structure, the brain took longer to hominin behavior — -they key aspects of cerebral reach adult size, suggesting that walked upright, had brains that organization from impressions infants may have had a longer were around 20% larger than of the brain’s structure. those of chimpanzees, and may dependence on caregivers, a human- A key difference between apes have used sharp stone tools,” like trait. and humans involves the said Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged, organization of the brain’s Australopithecus afarensis inhabited director of the Dikika field parietal lobe — important in eastern Africa more than 3 million project and researcher at the the integration and processing years ago — Lucy herself is University of Chicago. estimated to be 3.2 million years old of sensory information — and — and occupies a key position in The scientists produced high- occipital lobe in the visual resolution center at the rear of the brain.

April 2020 . Curious The exceptionally preserved endocast of Selam, a skull and associated skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis infant found at Dikika in 2000, has an unambiguous impression of the lunate sulcus — a fissure in the occipital lobe marking the boundary of the visual area that is more prominent and located more forward in apes than in humans — in an ape-like position. The scan of the endocranial imprint of an adult Australopithecus afarensis fossil from Hadar (A.L. 162-28) reveals a previously undetected impression of the lunate sulcus, which is also in an ape-like position.

Some scientists had conjectured that human-like brain reorganization in australopiths was linked to behaviors that were more complex than those of their great ape relatives. Unfortunately, the lunate sulcus typically does not reproduce well on endocasts, so there was unresolved controversy about its position in Australopithecus.

“A highlight of our work is how cutting-edge technology can clear up long-standing debates about these 3- million-year-old fossils,” said Dr. William Kimbel, a paleoanthropologist in the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.“Our ability to peer into the hidden details of bone and tooth structure with CT scans has truly revolutionized the science of our origins.”A comparison of infant and adult endocranial volumes also indicates more human-like protracted brain growth in Australopithecus afarensis, likely critical for the evolution of a long period of childhood learning in hominins.

The pace of dental development of the Dikika infant was broadly comparable to that of chimpanzees and therefore faster than in modern humans. But given that the brains of Australopithecus afarensis adults were roughly 20% larger than those of chimpanzees, the Dikika child’s small endocranial volume suggests a prolonged period of brain development relative to chimpanzees.“The combination of apelike brain structure and humanlike protracted brain growth in Lucy’s species was unexpected,” Dr. Kimbel said.

“That finding supports the idea that human brain evolution was very much a piecemeal affair, with extended brain growth appearing before the origin of our own genus, Homo.”Among primates, different rates of growth and maturation are associated with different infant-care strategies, suggesting that the extended period of brain growth in Australopithecus afarensis may have been linked to a long dependence on caregivers.

Alternatively, slow brain growth could also primarily represent a way to spread the energetic requirements of dependent offspring over many years in environments where food is not always abundant.In either case, protracted brain growth in Australopithecus afarensis provided the basis for subsequent evolution of the brain and social behavior in hominins and was likely critical for the evolution of a long period of childhood learning.

(Source: Sci-news)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: 1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following:Neanderthal Man- La-Chapelle-aux-saints (Classical type), Mt. Carmel (Progressive type).

Oldest ever piece of string was made by Neanderthals 50,000 years ago

A piece of 50,000-year-old string found in a cave in France is the oldest ever discovered. It suggests that Neanderthals knew how to twist fibres together to make cords – and, if so, they might have been able to craft ropes, clothes, bags and nets.

“None can be done without that initial step,” says Bruce Hardy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. “Twisted fibres are a foundational technology.”

His team has been excavating the Abri du Maras caves in south-east France where Neanderthals lived for long periods. Three metres below today’s surface, in a layer that is between 52,000 and 41,000 years old, it found a stone flake, a sharp piece of rock used as an early stone tool.

Examining the flake under a microscope revealed that a tiny piece of string (pictured top right), just 6 millimetres long and 0.5 millimetres wide, was stuck to its underside. It was made by twisting a bundle of fibres in an anticlockwise direction, known as an S-twist. Three bundles were twisted together in a clockwise direction – a Z-twist – to make a 3-ply cord.

April 2020 . Curious “It is exactly what you would see if you picked up a piece of string today,” says Hardy. The string wasn’t necessarily used to attach the stone tool to a handle. It could have been part of a bag or net, the team speculates.

The string appears to be made of bast fibres from the bark of conifer trees, which helps establish that it isn’t a stray bit of modern string, because “nobody at the site was wearing their conifer pants at the time”, says Hardy.

“It’s so fine. That’s really surprising,” says Rebecca Wragg Sykes at the University of Bordeaux in France. This suggests the string wasn’t used for heavy-duty tasks, but instead as some kind of thread, she says.

Before this find, the oldest known string came from 19,000 years ago. This was discovered in the Ohalo II site near the Sea of Galilee, Israel, and is associated with modern humans. But Hardy says the newly found string was made by Neanderthals, as there were no modern humans in this part of Europe at this time.

This raises the question of whether modern humans learned some of their skills from Neanderthals, says Wragg Sykes.

Hardy thinks the string shows that Neanderthals were as smart as us. They were very similar to us, says Emma Pomeroy at the University of Cambridge, whose team has found evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead. “Neanderthals engaged in complex behaviours that we thought they weren’t capable of ,” she says.

(Source: Newscientist)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: 1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following:Homo erectus: Africa (Paranthropus), Europe (Homo erectus heidelbergensis), Asia (Homo erectus javanicus, Homo erectus pekinensis).

“2 MILLION-YEAR-OLD ANCIENT HUMAN SKULL FOSSILS REWRITE THE “STORY OF US”

DEEP BENEATH THE DUST of the Cradle of Humankind, in the rolling hills northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, archaeologists discovered a treasure trove of insights into the lives of our human ancestors.

For over a century, scientists have carefully excavated fossils which reveal how our ancient cousins lived, fought, loved, and even walked.

Now, unusual skull fragments and a constellation of fossil clues challenge the very core of the story of our human ancestors.

These new discoveries reveal ONE TRAIT divided which species survived, and which died out: ADAPTABILITY.

In this fossil trove, scientists discovered a skullcap belonging to a toddler Homo erectus.

The specimen, which researchers have named DNH 134, is the first Homo erectus fossil found in South Africa ever. It is also the earliest example of Homo erectus discovered to date. It offers solid proof that our direct human ancestor is some 150,000 TO 200,000 years older than scientists thought.

Previously, the oldest Homo erectus in the world was found in Dmanisi, in Georgia, dating to 1.8 million years ago, the researchers explain. This two-year-old's skull shows they were around as many as two million years ago.

“Homo erectus was perhaps the first species we would look at and recognize as being more human- like,” Andy Herries, coauthor on the new study and paleoanthropologist at La Trobe University in Australia, tells Inverse.

Homo erectus were perhaps the first true trailblazers of the hominin family. They were the first human species to leave the African continent, and they extended their range all the way to Asia, Herries explains.

April 2020 . Curious “This is ultimately the beginning of the STORY OF US, as the great generalists, able to live in all different environments on Earth."

Amazingly, the team also found the EARLIEST KNOWN PARANTHROPUS ROBUSTUS SKULL fragment too, which they named DNH 152.

The parallel discoveries reveal that three species of hominins, Homo erectus, Parathropus, and Australopithecus africansis, lived in the South African highlands simultaneously.

Herries and his team published their findings Thursday in the journal Science.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HOMO ERECTUS

The Homo erectus skull fragments were discovered in the Drimolen Main Quarry, a notoriously challenging place to excavate, Herries says. The fossil-containing rocks there can be "as hard as concrete,” he says.

Dating the fossils once they are recovered is also a difficult process.

By using a combination of novel technologies and by comparing the skulls to other fossil fragments of lizards, bats, and soil samples, the team reconstructed a timeline of the young Homo erectus’ life and death.

The two skull fossils, DNH 134 and DNH 152, reveal that not only did they all live together, but Homo erectus, Paranthropus, and Australopithecus all possessed distinct traits that speak to their place in the human family tree.

For example, Australopithecus was more ape-like than human-like, and experienced serious “dietary stress” compared to their other hominin cousins, Herries says.

When the two other hominin species came on the scene, they developed flexible, new ways of operating that may have given them an evolutionary edge.

"Paranthropus robustus and Homo erectus arrived on the South African landscape with completely different ways of adapting to the world around them, and new technology in the form of stone and bone tools,” Herries says.

Paranthropus robustus were shorter than Homo erectus and Australopithecus, and possessed larger teeth. That trait enabled them to eat tough, hard plants, like roots and tubers.

Homo erectus, by comaprison, were taller and more slender than their peers, and ate easier to digest foods, like fruits and berries.

April 2020 . Curious Homo erectus, by comaprison, were taller and more slender than their peers, and ate easier to digest foods, like fruits and berries.

Ultimately, Paranthropus robustus and Homo erectus replaced Australopithecus. Part of what enabled Paranthropus robustus in particular to survive is the fact that these hominins were "specialists," Herries says. But ultimately, that same specialism may have caused their extinction.

ADAPTABILITY IS THE KEY

Unlike the other two hominins, Homo erectus' great advantage was their sheer adaptability. They could travel long distances, a crucial ability that enabled them to adjust to a rapidly changing environment.

In fact, their wandering nature is part of why Homo erectus proved to be the most successful species of ancient humans ever known, Susan Antón, an anthropologist at New York University who wasn’t involved in the study, asserts in a related commentary published in the journal Science.

The species endured for more than a million years, before going extinct half a million years ago. Their last- known residence was in present-day Java.

Homo erectus was also able to acclimatize to a changing Earth better than its fellow hominins. aranthropus and Australopithecus evolved in warm and humid climates but then the weather began to shift from warm and humid, to cool and dry. Homo erectus thrived in the cooler climate, while the other two hominins struggled to adapt.

As the climate cooled, tree-cover in the South African highlands declined, and grasses took their place. Eventually the forests were replaced with the African savannah grasslands of today.

HOMO ERECTUS WERE THE ONLY SPECIES AMONG THE THREE TO ENDURE THESE CHANGES.

Homo erectus may have lived some two million years ago, but these incredible ancient humans offer lessons for humans today.

After all, we too now find ourselves in a state of environmental and social flux.

“Our work is a reminder that once upon a time we shared this world with other human species and that we are now the last remaining one,” Herries says.

“We should not be so foolish as to think that we cannot suffer the same fate as our early humans cousins, who ultimately went extinct because they were unable to adapt and innovate to challenges in their changing world.”

Homo erectus invented novel technologies, adjusted to their changing landscape, and survived longer than other hominins — all important lessons modern-day Homo sapiens may draw from.

Ultimately, the pair of discoveries shed light on a critical period of time in the human story. These first steps are what has led to our globalized world today, Herries says.

“It is also a reminder in these unconnected times, with border closures and an increasing fear of other people and groups, that we are ultimately one family, all connected by a common origin in Africa," Herries says.

"We should be working together to fight the challenges of the future, both in terms of pandemics and climate change."

Source:Inverse

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: 1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following: Australopithecus

ANCIENT BONES TELL A SWINGING STORY ABOUT OUR TREE-CLIMBING ANCESTORS — STUDY

Humans may associate scaling branches with childish behavior — classic monkeying around — but in truth, climbing trees is a big part of our collective story.

Ancient bones unearthed in Africa go a long way in telling the tale.

Millions of years after hominins began walking on two legs, some early human species were still hanging out in trees, according to a new analysis of fossilized femur bones discovered in South Africa’s Sterkfontein Caves.

Scans of two leg bones, both of which seem to both be from bipedal hominins, show that one of the species actually spent much of its time climbing trees, not walking on the ground.

Evidence of early human species walking on two legs dates back 6 million years. At a glance, the bones in the new study — each about 2 million years old — seem to align with a primarily bipedal way of moving.

But using CT scans and comparing the femurs to modern human and great ape bones, researchers have peered below the surface for the first time, revealing that the bones, while similar, were used in very different ways.

The study was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

OLD BONES, NEW TALES — One of the femurs came from the hominin Australopithecus africanus, the same species as Lucy. This early human had a mix of human- and ape-like traits, but it seems they were quite happy on their feet. The CT scans reveal that the way the hip bone was used to carry weight aligns with two-legged walking, based on the density of the head of the femur.

The other bone tells a different story, however. Researchers are not sure which ancient human species it belonged to, but the likeliest culprits are either an individual in the Homo genus, or the hominin Paranthropus robustus.

Whatever early human relative the bone in question belonged to, they weren't doing too much walking on the ground, it seems. The scans show a different pattern in its bone density, indicating it was more frequently flexing the hip joint, rather than remaining upright.

That regular hip flexing suggests regular tree climbing, the study authors say.

The new analysis points to the difference between physiology and behavior, and complicates the story of how our ancestors learned to walk on two legs.

SIMILAR PRESSURES, DIFFERENT RESULTS — We know that, in the past, many different hominin species lived at the same time, sometimes encountering and possibly even mating with one another.

April 2020 . Curious Living in the same time and place means experiencing similar environmental pressures, feeding adaptations that evolved over time to produce us.

But the new research shows how evolutionary traits are far from clear-cut.

The two bones came from individuals that both lived in Sterkfontein Caves, which are situated within the aptly-named "Cradle of Humankind," a large area that's been the site of numerous ancient human discoveries. One of the most famous, and oldest, individuals found there is Little Foot, a nearly full skeleton from the Australopithecus genus. New research shows that Little Foot had a combination of human- and ape-like features — with a little of each just in its ear.

But though they lived in the same place, the two individuals in the new study existed hundreds of thousands of years apart. The Australopithecus africanus bone is between 2.8 and 2 million years old, while the (possibly) Paranthropus robustus femur is likely younger, about 2.2 million years old.

That timeline does not suggest a linear progression from tree-swinging to ground-walking. Rather, the unidentified hominin proves that having the ability to walk on two legs doesn't necessarily mean a species is spending most of its time on the ground.

April 2020 . Curious Plus, while that mystery hominin seems to have been a habitual climber, the bone density scans suggest it did not climb with the same frequency as nonhuman apes.

The discovery challenges the “prevailing view of a single transition to bipedalism."Even after humans began walking on two legs, they were still climbing trees regularly.

“It has been challenging to resolve debates regarding the degree to which climbing remained an important behavior in our past,” study co-author Matthew Skinner, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Kent, said in a statement accompanying the research.“Evidence has been sparse, controversial and not widely accepted, and as we have shown in this study, the external shape of bones can be misleading.”

WHAT'S NEXT — Skinner says that further analysis of these bones could upend more common beliefs of how different parts of human bodies worked — including “hands, feet, knees, shoulders and the spine.”The analyses could paint a brighter picture of how humans evolved, including important developments like being able to make and use tools from stone.

(Source: Inverse)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: 1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following:Neanderthals

Who Were the Denisovans?

At an unusual meeting at a Siberian cave, researchers ﬁ nd that these mysterious archaic humans lived in the same place as both modern humans and Neandertals—though not necessarily at the same time—and their range probably stretched into east Asia

DENISOVA CAVE, SIBERIA—Bence Viola ﬁ rst saw the ancient molar last summer, just after a piece of it was dug out of layers full of brown dirt, gray rock, animal bones, stone tools, and goat feces. He considered the tooth fragments too big and weirdly shaped to be human. “I thought it must belong to a cave bear,” he says.

Several fossils were found that summer in this remote cave in the Altai Mountains. Some, including a toe bone, looked human and were to be sent for DNA analysis to paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthro-pology in Leipzig, Germany.

Viola, a post-doc at Max Planck, almost didn’t include the molar. But he and Pääbo decided to play it safe and test all the new fossils. The layer that held the molar in Denisova Cave was also the resting place of a girl’s ﬁ nger bone, which was so well preserved that Pääbo’s lab was able to sequence its nuclear genome and identify it as belonging to a previously unknown type of archaic human. The team called them the Denisovans. For the first time, researchers had a genome in search of a fossil record, so every possible new bone was signiﬁ cant.

Back in Leipzig, graduate student Susanna Sawyer was charged with extract-ing DNA from the animal bones. In June, she stopped Pääbo in the hall. “I think I found another Denisovan,” she said. Preliminary analysis suggested that the molar’s DNA was similar to that of the cave girl’s. Pääbo shook Sawyer’s hand —this was only the third fossil ever found of a Denisovan, the others being the bit of ﬁ nger bone and another molar, also from Denisova cave.

April 2020 . Curious Cave treasure.

Researchers have found the tooth of a Denisovan, plus a sophisticated stone bracelet and tools, in Denisova Cave.

What’s more, preliminary analysis of the mitochondrial DNA from the toe bone sug-gests that it belonged not to a Denisovan but to a Neandertal. That means both types of archaic humans lived in the same cave. And the large, three-room cave also holds sophisticated stone tools and bone artifacts that appear to have been crafted by our own species, Homo sapiens. “The one place where we are sure all three human forms have lived at one time or another is here in Denisova Cave,” Pääbo said.

Today the cave is off the beaten path, in southern Siberia, 350 kilometers north of the Russian border with both Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and closer to Beijing than Moscow. Now the Denisovan discoveries have shifted the spot-light from ancient humans in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe to those in this remote corner of Asia

As Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) archaeologist Derevianko puts it: “The world is looking eastward.”

To that end, Derevianko and his Russian colleagues invited Pääbo and a select group of human origins researchers from different disciplines and countries to a remarkable sym-posium at an archaeological camp near Denisova Cave in July. Their goal was to try to solve the mys-tery of the cave girl’s identity, to ﬁnd more of her people, and to explore how the discovery is challenging models of modern human origins. In lively discussions sometimes cat-alyzed by vodka toasts, they com-pared what archaeology, genetics, and fossils reveal about the world the Denisovans inhabited 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. Genomic data have already shown that our ancestors mingled with archaic humans, who may have given us valuable immune cell types (see sidebar, p. 1086). But it’s not clear when and where this happened. Invisible human

The gathering gave Derevianko, director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnogra-phy at the RAS in Novosibirsk, a chance to showcase some of the region’s impressive archaeological sites. Driving off dirt roads in troop movers and along rutted roads in inde-structible UAZ vans, the Russians took their visitors to a dozen digs. Some were caves at the edge of alpine forests of silver birch and Siberian larch; others were open- air sites in grassy mead-ows of bee balm, wild mint, and edelweiss.

The trail of ancient humans starts with H. erectus, which left prim-itive “pebble” tools in the Altai almost 800,000 years ago. After a hiatus when the climate was frigid, the descendants of H. erectus returned by 300,000 years ago, leaving more tools behind. Some kind of human has lived here ever since. Starting 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, archaic humans began to use more modern methods to make tools at sites called Kara Bom and Ust-Karakol, where 10% of the tools were blades or burins (a tool used to chisel wood); the Russians see this as the ﬁ rst stirrings of modern human behavior here.

From 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, the archaic people hunted bear, lynx, and wild boar in the Altai Mountains, where they set up seasonal camps in summer, said RAS archaeologist Mikhail Shunkov as he led the tours. They retreated to limestone caves such as Denisova in winter. “With a natural opening for a chimney, the cave was quite a cozy place,” Shunkov said, point- ing to an opening in the ceiling at Denisova. With a clear view of the Anui River—and any humans or animals passing below—Denisova must have been choice housing, said Pääbo, noting how sunlight streaming through the opening overhead lit the cave like a chapel. “It is kind of cool to imagine that the person whose genome was sequenced had seen these walls,” he said.

April 2020 . Curious At about this time, at least two different types or local cultures of artifacts appear, one at Kara Bom and one at Ust- Karakol. The Russians consider both to be sophisticated cultures traditionally associated with only H. sapiens. Similarly advanced artifacts appear at the same time in Denisova, with stone bladelets used on spears; pendants made of teeth of fox, bison, and deer; and even a bracelet made of a mineral found hundreds of kilometers away. Until recently, the archaeologists had “no doubts that people associated with this industry were anatomi-cally modern,” Derevianko says. But now, thanks to the Denisova cave, Siberia, Russia genomic results, it’s possible that some were Denisovans, Shunkov says.

To identify the toolmakers, researchers need fossils, but they are few and far between. As a result, “it remains unknown what the Denisovan looked like or how he behaved,” says biological anthropologist Maria Mednikova of the RAS in Moscow. So Viola’s talk at the meeting, describing the single new tooth, drew intense interest. Like the fi rst molar found, it is very large and lacks specialized features found in Neander-tals. Nor does the tooth resemble a modern human molar, as it has many unusual cusps, Viola says. The finger bone fragment that fi rst yielded Denisovan DNA was so small that it yielded little information other than it was a child’s because the growth plate was not fused.

In addition to the few Denisovan fossils, Neandertals also left fossils and characteris-tic Mousterian stone points and scrapers in Denisova and other caves. At the meeting, Russian researchers described new fi nds of Neandertal tools and fossils in caves just 100 and 150 kilometers away from Denisova Cave, dated to 45,000 years ago. Mednikova adds that the toe bone from Denisova looks most like a Neandertal toe from Iraq, fi tting well with the preliminary DNA fi nding. And yet Derevianko thinks Neandertals didn’t stay long here, because their bones and arti-facts disappear by 40,000 years ago. He views them as brief visitors, probably com-ing from the west in Kazakhstan. Neighbors, or successors?

It is now clear that Neandertals, Deniso-vans, and modern humans once occupied the Altai—but were they all there at the same time? This is hard to answer because there are questions about the dating of cru-cial layer 11 in Denisova Cave. This meter-thick layer held the Denisovan ﬁ nger and molars, the Neandertal toe, and the mod-ern human artifacts, although some were found in different galleries of the cave. The bones and teeth are too fragmentary to be dated directly. But radiocarbon dating of seven animal bones with cut marks from layer 11 provides dates of 50,000 years or older in both galleries. Yet the layer’s young-est sediments date to as late as 16,000 to 30,000 years ago, as reported in December in Nature. Thus layer 11 has artifacts from at least two different periods. And, in the south gallery near the spot where the ﬁ nger bone was found, an obvious wedge of disturbed sediment suggests some mixing. For now,

April 2020 . Curious Derevianko and colleagues pro-pose sequential occupations: The Deniso-vans were in the cave about 50,000 years ago, Neandertals came in briefly about 45,000 years ago, and modern humans fol-lowed. But the researchers agree that the microstratigraphy of the cave needs more analysis. They are redating layer 11 with radio-carbon on more cut-marked animal bones.

Overall, Derevianko and his colleagues see a gradual, local evolution of H. erectus into H. sapiens in the Altai, with a brief intru-sion of Neandertals and Denisovans. This ﬁ ts a minority view of human origins, called multiregionalism, which posits that the descendants of H. erectus evolved into Neandertals and modern humans —and, apparently, Denisovans—in different regions. Then humans coming out of Africa mingled with the other groups and H. sapi-ens emerged worldwide. As Russian and Chinese archaeologists raised their glasses to toast regional conti-nuity, however, several geneticists shifted uncomfortably or even quietly demurred: That theory is in contrast to the long-prevailing view that H. sapiens was born in Africa and swept the globe, wiping out local archaic peoples.

And in light of the genomic data, most geneticists now hold a middle-of-the-road view that modern humans arose in and spread out of Africa, then interbred with local archaic peoples to a limited degree (Science, 28 January, p. 392). “If you write that I drank a toast to [regional] continuity, I’ll kill you,” one geneticist told a reporter.

But the geneticists do agree with the Russians that modern humans mingled with both Neandertals and Denisovans. Pääbo’s team found in 2010 that living Europe-ans and Asians have inherited about 2.5% of their DNA from Neandertals (Science, 7 May 2010, pp. 680 and 710) and that living Melanesians carry an additional 5% of Denisovan DNA.

If modern humans interbred with Neandertals, researchers speculated that fossils of each group, about the same age and found close to each other in Israeli caves, represented the groups who mixed sometime before 90,000 years ago. Those modern people carrying a small amount of Neandertal DNA then split into at least two groups —one that headed into Europe to replace the Neander-tals there, and a second group that headed into Asia to mix with the Denisovans, says population geneti-cist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston.

At the meeting, the DNA research-ers offered some new insights into this story. They found that the three Denisovans, all from one cave, had more variation in their mtDNA than did seven Neandertals from western Europe to Siberia, Sawyer reported. This and another report at the meeting—that Australian Aborigines, like Melanesians, have inherited 5% of their DNA from Denisovans—suggests that the Denisovan home range once stretched far beyond the Altai, into eastern Asia. “This tells us that the Denisovans had large population sizes,” despite their puny fossil record, Pääbo says. It also shows that Denisovans and the ancestors of Melanesians must have interbred before 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, when Aborigines first settled Australia.

As for the timing of the Nean-dertal-human mixing, the newest analyses tend to push that younger. Population geneticist Montgom-ery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley, said that his model runs gave him a wide range of preliminary results, from 65,000 years to 45,000 years ago, but he’s still working the numbers. Reich reported that his independent analyses also suggest a younger date. If the mixing happened more recently than 90,000 years ago, it rules out the Israeli fossils as repre-sentatives of the groups who mixed.

Others, such as Derevianko and paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Mad-ison, interpret the genetic data differently. They think that even small amounts of interbreeding conﬁ rm the regional conti-nuity model, and that there was more mixing in the past, but its traces were erased by later waves of immigrants who swamped out the archaic genes.

April 2020 . Curious To help decide among these models, sev-eral groups are searching for Denisovans beyond Denisova, as far east as China, where Pääbo is now analyzing fossil DNA. As Pääbo climbed down a ladder into a ﬂ oodlit pit at Denisova and bent his lanky frame low to get a good look at layer 11, a colleague shouted: “Grab a trowel, Svante.” Pääbo didn’t. But like the others, he is convinced that all types of data—genetic, archaeological, and fossil—will have to be integrated in order to tell the story of the Denisovans and so of our own species. “We’re beginning to clarify history in eastern Eurasia,” Pääbo said, “and I’m sure that in the next few years, there will be more discoveries.”

Source:Science.org

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: 1.5 Characteristics of Primates:Primate Behaviour.

Regular climbing behaviour in a human ancestor A new study led by the University of Kent has found evidence that human ancestors as recent as two million years ago may have regularly climbed trees.

Walking on two legs has long been a defining feature to differentiate modern humans, as well as extinct species on our lineage (aka hominins), from our closest living ape relatives: chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. This new research, based on analysis of fossil leg bones, provides evidence that a hominin species (believed to be either Paranthropus robustus or early Homo) regularly adopted highly flexed hip joints; a posture that in other non-human apes is associated with climbing trees.

These findings came from analysing and comparing the internal bone structures of two fossil leg bones from South Africa, discovered over 60 years ago and believed to have lived between 1 and 3 million years ago. For both fossils, the external shape of the bones were very similar showing a more human-like than ape-like hip joint, suggesting they were both walking on two legs. The researchers examined the internal bone structure because it remodels during life based on how individuals use their limbs. Unexpectedly, when the team analysed the inside of the spherical head of the femur, it showed that they were loading their hip joints in different ways.

The research project was led by Dr Leoni Georgiou, Dr Matthew Skinner and Professor Tracy Kivell at the University of Kent's School of Anthropology and Conservation, and included a large international team of biomechanical engineers and palaeontologists. These results demonstrate that novel information about human evolution can be hidden within fossil bones that can alter our understanding of when, where and how we became the humans we are today.

Dr Georgiou said: 'It is very exciting to be able to reconstruct the actual behaviour of these individuals who lived millions of years ago and every time we CT scan a new fossil it is a chance to learn something new about our evolutionary history.'

April 2020 . Curious Dr Skinner said: 'It has been challenging to resolve debates regarding the degree to which climbing remained an important behaviour in our past. Evidence has been sparse, controversial and not widely accepted, and as we have shown in this study the external shape of bones can be misleading. Further analysis of the internal structure of other bones of the skeleton may reveal exciting findings about the evolution of other key human behaviours such as stone tool making and tool use. Our research team is now expanding our work to look at hands, feet, knees, shoulders and the spine.’

(Source: Science daily)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following:

Will Asia Rewrite Human History?

Politics, geography and tradition have long focused archaeological attention on the evolution of Homo sapiens in Europe and Africa. Now, new research is challenging old ideas by showing that early human migrations unfolded across Asia earlier.

The Nefud Desert is a desolate area of orange and yellow sand dunes. It covers approximately 25,000 square miles of the Arabian Peninsula. But tens of thousands of years ago, this area was a lush land of lakes, with a climate that may have been kinder to human life.

On a January afternoon in 2016, an international team of archaeologists and paleontologists was studying the surface of one ancient lakebed at a site called Al Wusta in the Nefud’s landscape of sand and gravel. Their eyes were peeled for fossils, bits of stone tools, and any other signs that might remain from the region’s once-verdant past.

Suddenly, Iyad Zalmout, a paleontologist working for the Saudi Geological Survey, spotted what looked like a bone. With small picks and brushes, he and his colleagues removed the find from the ground.

“We knew it [was] important,” Zalmout recalled in an email. It was the first direct evidence of any large primate or hominid life in the area. In 2018, lab tests revealed that this specimen was a finger bone from an anatomically modern human who would have lived at least 86,000 years ago.

April 2020 . Curious Prior to this Al Wusta discovery, evidence in the form of stone tools had suggested some human presence in the Nefud between 55,000 and 125,000 years ago. To anthropologists, “human” and “hominin” can mean any of a number of species closely related to our own. The finger bone was the oldest Homo sapiens find in the region.

The bone’s dating contradicts a well-established narrative in the scientific community. Findings, particularly from the area of modern-day Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon, known as the Levant region, have led to the understanding that H. sapiens first made their way out of Africa no earlier than 120,000 years ago, likely migrating north along the Archaeologists found this Homo sapiens Mediterranean coast. These people settled in the Levant finger bone, dating back some 86,000 years, and their descendants — or those from a subsequent at a site called Al Wusta in Saudi Arabia. early human migration out of Africa — traveled into Europe tens of thousands of years later.

Only later, that story goes, did they journey into parts of Asia, such as Saudi Arabia. By some estimates, then, anatomically modern humans would not have been in what is now Al Wusta until about 50,000 years ago.

The finger bone, then, adds a twist to the tale of how and when our species left the African continent and, with many starts and stops, populated much of the rest of the earth. A new crop of discoveries, particularly from Asia, suggest that modern humans first left Africa some 200,000 years ago, taking multiple different routes. No longer is the Levant necessarily central — and points east could have had unforeseen importance to early human migrations. As anthropologist Michael Petraglia, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, puts it, “A new story is unfolding.”

These findings could shed light on big unanswered questions, such as why humans made these migrations, what past environmental conditions were like, and how H. sapiens interacted with other hominins. But the changing narrative also underscores how much of our knowledge comes from — and is limited by — where archaeologists and other researchers have worked. The geographic emphasis has long been influenced not by science but by access, funding, and tradition.

The first hint that the long-held story of human journeys out of Africa had missed something critical came from within the well-studied Levant region, in the Misliya Cave in Israel. In 2018, archaeologists revealed that they had found a human jawbone in this cave.

April 2020 . Curious The bone — dated with three different methods in the course of a decadelong investigation — is between 177,000 and 194,000 years old, pushing back the timeline of when humans first lived here by at least 50,000 years. And older stone tools found in layers beneath the jaw suggest that humans could have been present in this area even longer. It’s possible, then, that humans left Africa and journeyed into the Levant — and elsewhere — even earlier than the date of this jawbone. This line of thinking gained still more traction in July 2019, when a group of scholars published novel findings on a skull discovered in Greece in the 1970s. That fossil, the new work suggests, is human and more than 210,000 years old.

But in addition to this changing timeline, researchers are rethinking where humans traveled when they left Africa. The Al Wusta find is just one example.

In 2015, researchers in China published their finding of 47 human teeth, dating between 85,000 and 120,000 years old, in a cave in Hunan province. Until this discovery, the oldest modern human fossils found in southern Asia were only about 45,000 years old.

These new findings “oblige [us] to rethink when and the way we dispersed,” says forensic anthropologist María Martinón-Torres, director of the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, and a member of the team that discovered and studied the teeth. She adds: “There may be more than one ‘out of Africa’ dispersal … humans, like any other animal, may have expanded as far as there was not any barrier, ecological or geographic, that prevented them from doing so.”

In 2018, researchers in India published on the discovery of a collection of advanced stone tools. They say this find indicates a hominin presence stretching back at least 170,000 years — millennia earlier than previous research suggested. And some evidence suggests early humans may have headed directly toward Asia by crossing from Africa over the Arabian Peninsula, altogether bypassing the Levant, where so much of the earliest evidence of humans outside Africa has come from.

April 2020 . Curious Acombination of new discoveries, then, has shifted understandings of the timing, routes, and geographic range associated with H. sapiens’ dispersal out of Africa. But for archaeologists, the finds also flag a blind spot of sorts. As Martinón-Torres says, “These findings are also a big warning note regarding Asia.”

Indeed, there is growing awareness of the need to expand the geographic scope of paleontology and archaeology related to early human migrations and evolution. “For a long time,” Martinón-Torres adds, “Asia was considered like a dead end with a secondary role in the mainstream of human evolution.”

“There is a huge bias in archaeological fieldwork and where it’s occurring, and our theories on human evolution are built on these geographic biases,” says Petraglia, who with Zalmout and colleagues at the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage found the Al Wusta fingerbone. Several factors have contributed to this bias, explains archaeologist and writer Nadia Durrani, who co-authored Archaeology: A Brief Introduction with anthropologist Brian Fagan. Archaeology began more than a century ago “as a Western scientific discipline,” she says.

The first archaeologists, who were European and American, focused mainly on Mediterranean Europe and lands mentioned in the Bible, including modern-day Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Israel, and the West Bank. “People were interested in the Bible and classical issues,” including ancient Greece and Rome, Durrani says. As archaeologists made discoveries in those areas, the interest in those regions grew, and institutions sprouted up in those same places, which in turn fueled further research there.

“Countries where paleoanthropological research has been conducted for many decades are more likely to have important finds that are also well-known and valued by the people themselves,” says Katerina Harvati, director of paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen. “And therefore, [they] are likely to have more funding opportunities.”

The opposite is also true. It can be difficult to convince colleagues or prospective funders of a place’s potential when it has been little explored and lacks certain forms of infrastructure. Environmental and natural barriers can come into play. Petraglia points out that working in areas that haven’t been well-explored can require starting from the beginning with tasks like surveys and mapping, and there is often no previous work to draw on.

For that matter, political issues may help or hinder archaeologists. Durrani participated in fieldwork in Yemen in the 1990s, for example, and later led tours at archaeological sites there. This work came to a halt in 2008 due to political instability in the area. Violence and conflicts pose serious barriers for access, she says.

The new findings indicate that attitudes toward Asia are changing, with more and more attention turning to this region. The shift coincides with economic and political changes. In the past two decades, China has been inviting scholarship into previously unstudied regions. More recently, Saudi Arabia has been opening up certain sites for archaeology and tourism.

Over time, access and conditions will, scientists hope, further improve. In the interim, this research reveals that anatomically modern humans left Africa earlier than expected and traveled south, along the Arabian Peninsula, in addition to north.

However, some of these finds have drawn skepticism. Jeffrey Schwartz, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, cautions against drawing dramatic conclusions from the findings. “I think we are calling too many things H. sapiens,” he says.

April 2020 . Curious By contrast, Mina Weinstein-Evron, an archaeologist at Haifa University who co-discovered the Misliya Cave jawbone suspects that the recent findings are H. sapiens but agrees that the story of anatomically modern human dispersal is still far from clear. “We know nothing. We have a dot of evidence here and a dot of evidence there,” she says. “And then we use these big words like ‘migration’ and ‘dispersal.’ We talk as if they bought a ticket. But they didn’t know where they were going. For them it was probably not even a movement, maybe it was 10 kilometers per generation.”

What’s more, some genetic findings hint that even if humans traveled out of Africa and into Asia earlier than previously thought, it’s possible these early human migrations were ultimately unsuccessful from an evolutionary perspective. According to conclusions from three different groups of scientists who published in Nature in 2016, the DNA of Eurasians diverged from that of Africans 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. In other words, all humans alive today are descendants of H. sapiens who migrated out of Africa within that window— as well as other hominins, such as Neanderthals.

Nonetheless, the earlier migrations are intriguing, says Luca Pagani, a biological anthropologist who authored one of the Nature articles. “Although it’s not going to change our idea of which migrations were a success, it does show a richer variety of attempts at dispersal,” he says, and that is an essential part of the story of early modern humans.

Indeed, the reasons certain early human migrations failed could illuminate major questions in archaeology. Martinón-Torres and her colleagues working in China, for example, have posited that early modern humans may have been in competition with Neanderthals or other hominins, which could have influenced their movements.

Petraglia, meanwhile, suspects early modern humans may have thrived in the Arabian site until water disappeared as the desert expanded. “If you want to know how climate change may affect us one day, well, we’ve got a whole story here about the effects of climate change on human populations,” he says. In short, the descendants of these intrepid humans may not have survived, but their stories could still guide us into the future.

(Source:Discover)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: 1.1 Scope of Anthropology

In a pandemic, science and humanities work side by side As an anthropologist, the Covid-19 pandemic is a Janus-faced muse. On the one hand, the humanitarian crisis is so extreme that no one has quite yet got a handle on the short- or long-term social consequences of all this. On the other, it presents a plethora of research avenues.

For “hard” sciences, this is less of an issue. Finding direct solutions, such as a vaccine, has a direct and immediate effect. For social sciences, such as anthropology, the situation is not so clear-cut.

Yet, now, possibly more than ever, is the time for anthropological questions to be asked, and insights to be offered. Anthropologists have a long history of trying to make sense of the ways in which societies respond to medical emergencies. From Ebola, HIV, cancer and SARS, anthropologists have been at the forefront of asking the difficult questions and, more importantly, offering difficult answers.For example, Paul Richard’s work on Ebola in West Africa demonstrated how biomedical interventions were ineffective, and argued that a “‘people’s science” helped to end the epidemic more effectively than internationally sponsored projects. My own work on HIV/AIDS in the Vhembe region of South Africa demonstrated that behavioural interventions were often counter-productive, leading many people on the ground to suspect that condoms might actually cause HIV, as opposed to helping reduce infections.

This raises a series of anthropological questions which speak directly to the contemporary crisis we find ourselves in. There are logical reasons why people think biomedical experts hold the keys to a cure in any epidemic. Far from promoting “conspiracy theories”, anthropological approaches to this would look at the complex relationships between knowledge and experience which are central to understanding why some people think what they think.

The idea that condoms cause AIDS, or that Covid-19 tests are infected with the virus have clear parallels. Yet responses have thus far been blind to the historical anthropological record on societal responses to medical emergencies. Behavioural interventions can only be implemented in an effective manner, in any pandemic scenario, by taking the relevant anthropological research seriously.

The need for “anthropologising” is an essential component in the global response to Covid-19. We must ask the difficult questions, and try to articulate the difficult answers in ways that policy makers can implement effectively.“Hard” science is charged with the responsibility of finding a biological way out of this pandemic. But let’s not assume that knowledge changes behaviour. Indeed, if anthropology has taught us anything, it is that humans can be fickle beasts. Risk can become alluring. As a recent master’s student in our department (who graduated with distinction) wrote about a workers’ hostel in Mamelodi: “Germs make us stronger”. (Source: Mail Guardian)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: 1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following: Neanderthal Man- La-Chapelle-aux-saints (Classical type), Mt. Carmel (Progressive type).

Neandertals had older mothers and younger fathers

Researchers analyzed the genomes of more than 27.000 Icelanders to find out which parts of our genomes contain Neandertal DNA

When the ancestors of modern humans left Africa 50,000 years ago they met the Neandertals. In this encounter, the Neandertal population contributed around two percent of the genome to present day non- African populations. A collaboration of scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark, deCODE Genetics in Iceland, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have conducted the most comprehensive study to date using data obtained from 27,566 Icelanders, to figure out which parts of our genomes contain Neandertal DNA and what role it plays in modern humans.

Every person of non-African decent shares around two percent of their DNA with the Neandertals. However, different people carry different pieces of Neandertal DNA so when the authors added them up they could reconstruct at least 38 percent of the Neandertal genome using 14 million Neandertal DNA fragments.

Comparing this Neandertal DNA with the Neandertal and Denisovan genomes, which were sequenced at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the researchers found that the Neandertal population that mixed with modern Icelanders was more similar to a Neandertal found in Croatia than to Neandertals found in Russia. Unexpectedly, they also found that Icelanders carry traces of Denisovan DNA, which was previously only thought to be present in East Asians and populations from Papua New Guinea. One possibility is that ancestors of the Neandertal population who mixed with modern humans had earlier also mixed with Denisovans.

Differences in mutation patterns

In each generation, parents pass their DNA on to their children, and the age of each parent is known to greatly affect the types of mutations that they pass on. “By comparing the genetic mutations on the Neandertal DNA fragments to the corresponding modern human DNA fragments we found that, on average, Neandertal children had older mothers and younger fathers compared to modern humans”, says first author Laurits Skov, a researcher from Aarhus University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Finally, the authors show that Neandertal DNA has a relatively minor effect on human health and appearance today. The few cases where Neandertal DNA has an effect among Icelanders leads to a slightly reduced risk of prostate cancer, slightly shorter height and a slightly faster blood clotting time.

(Source:Science)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Paper 1 1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following: Neanderthal Man- La-Chapelle-aux-saints (Classical type), Mt. Carmel (Progressive type).

Oldest ever human genetic evidence clarifies dispute over our ancestors Genetic information from an 800,000-year-old human fossil has been retrieved for the first time.

The results from the University of Copenhagen shed light on one of the branching points in the human family tree, reaching much further back in time than previously possible.

DNA illustration

An important advancement in human evolution studies has been achieved after scientists retrieved the oldest human genetic data set from an 800,000-year-old tooth belonging to the hominin species Homo antecessor. The findings by scientists from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), in collaboration with colleagues from the CENIEH (National Research Center on Human Evolution) in Burgos, Spain, and other institutions, are published April 1st in Nature.

"Ancient protein analysis provides evidence for a close relationship between Homo antecessor, us (Homo sapiens), Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Our results support the idea that Homo antecessor was a sister group to the group containing Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans," says Frido Welker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, and first author on the paper. Reconstructing the human family tree

By using a technique called mass spectrometry, researchers sequenced ancient proteins from dental enamel, and confidently determined the position of Homo antecessor in the human family tree. The new molecular method, palaeoproteomics, developed by researchers at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, enables scientists to retrieve molecular evidence to accurately reconstruct human evolution from further back in time than ever before.

The human and the chimpanzee lineages split from each other about 9-7 million years ago. Scientists have relentlessly aimed to better understand the evolutionary relations between our species and the others, all now extinct, in the human lineage.

April 2020 . Curious "Much of what we know so far is based either on the results of ancient DNA analysis, or on observations of the shape and the physical structure of fossils. Because of the chemical degradation of DNA over time, the oldest human DNA retrieved so far is dated at no more than approximately 400,000 years," says Enrico Cappellini, Associate Professor at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, and leading author on the paper.

"Now, the analysis of ancient proteins with mass spectrometry, an approach commonly known as palaeoproteomics, allow us to overcome these limits," he adds.

Theories on human evolution The fossils analyzed by the researchers were found by palaeoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro and his team in 1994 in stratigraphic level TD6 from the Gran Dolina cave site, one of the archaeological and paleontological sites of the Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain.

Initial observations led to conclude that Homo antecessor was the last common ancestor to modern humans and Neanderthals, a conclusion based on the physical shape and appearance of the fossils. In the following years, the exact relation between Homo antecessor and other human groups, like ourselves and Neanderthals, has been discussed intensely among anthropologists.

Although the hypothesis that Homo antecessor could be the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans is very difficult to fit into the evolutionary scenario of the genus Homo, new findings in TD6 and subsequent studies revealed several characters shared among the human species found in Atapuerca and the Neanderthals. In addition, new studies confirmed that the facial features of Homo antecessor are very similar to those of Homo sapiens and very different from those of the

Neanderthals and their more recent ancestors. "I am happy that the protein study provides evidence that the Homo antecessor species may be closely related to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. The features shared by Homo antecessor with these hominins clearly appeared much earlier than previously thought. Homo antecessor would therefore be a basal species of the emerging humanity formed by Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans," adds José María Bermúdez de Castro, Scientific Co-director of the excavations in Atapuerca and co-corresponding author on the paper. World class-expertise

Findings like these are made possible through an extensive collaboration between different research fields: from paleoanthropology to biochemistry, proteomics and population genomics. Retrieval of ancient genetic material from the rarest fossil specimens requires top quality expertise and equipment. This is the reason behind the now ten-years-long strategic collaboration between Enrico Cappellini and Jesper Velgaard Olsen, Professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen and co-author on the paper.

"This study is an exciting milestone in palaeoproteomics. Using state of the art mass spectrometry, we determine the sequence of amino acids within protein remains from Homo antecessor dental enamel. We can then compare the ancient protein sequences we 'read' to those of other hominins, for example Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, to determine how they are genetically related," says Jesper Velgaard Olsen.

(Source: Science)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Paper 1 Topic 12: Forensic Anthropology

Forensic Anthropology in a Changing Climate In 2018, a wildfire swept through Northern California. Forensic anthropologists were called in to identify skeletal remains in a devastated recovery scene. The devastating effects of this fire are inextricably tied to both climate change and behavior. The western United States has experienced warmer temperatures and prolonged dry seasons with interspersed winter rain that serves to increase the fuel load through plant growth. These climatic variables coupled with increased development in once rural areas set the stage for wildfires to have a As climate change continues to impact cultures and environments, devastating impact, with anthropology as a holistic discipline, and the skills and knowledge of catastrophic results in California. anthropologists, will become increasingly important. For example, anthropologists can study the prehistory and history of Based on lessons learned from climate and fire management through archaeological and the logistical challenges paleoenvironmental work. associated with recoveries from these fires, we and other They can also explore the global impacts of climate change on human anthropologists are also helping migration and conflict. Through our combined efforts, anthropologists are to develop legislation to shape in an excellent position to assist in the immediate mitigation of challenges future responses to similar mass as well as speak to past climate change, biological impacts, and the disasters, including writing cultural consequences of this devastating global crisis. guidelines for wildfire scene recovery, mass fatality Forensic anthropologists are increasingly being called on for their skills to management for wildfire-related assist in mass fatality incidents. With escalating devastation related to fatalities, and laboratory climate change and human behavior, demand will only continue to grow. identification procedures. Large wildfires like those seen in California and in Australia over the last several years, are only one component of these disasters. There are also likely to be extreme weather events, droughts, floods, and landslides related to climate change. While forensic anthropologists are prepared to offer their skills in these trying times, the hope is that we will not have to.

April 2020 . Curious During recovery operations, anthropologists were deployed as a means of triage to quickly identify human remains from nonhuman remains or other construction debris, and thus identify areas for concentrated recovery efforts. For example, in some cases animal remains such as pets or other wildlife were found in the same area as cow bones from a kitchen refrigerator or deer antlers used as home decoration. It was important for recovery teams to quickly identify material as nonhuman remains and be able to move to the next area of interest.

Once human remains were identified, anthropologists were embedded with coroner, sheriff, or search and rescue units to assist in the recovery. As forensic anthropologists, we are also trained to systematically process, recover, and document the remains and other relevant material to aid in an identification. This material could include surgical implants (a knee or hip replacement) or other personal items on the individual (documentation or jewelry). Each of these skills supports efficient recovery efforts as well as providing necessary documentation to assist in subsequent osteological analyses. Forensic anthropologists were also involved in overall planning and logistics to support recovery efforts, including helping to manage individual teams from the incident command center.

(Source:anthropologynews.org).

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Paper 1: Human Evolution

Scientists have discovered an earlier origin to the human language pathway in the brain, pushing back its evolutionary origin by at least 20 million years.

Previously, a precursor of the language pathway was thought by many scientists to have emerged more recently, about 5 million years ago, with a common ancestor of both apes and humans. For neuroscientists, this is comparable to finding a fossil that illuminates evolutionary history.

However, unlike bones, brains did not fossilize. Instead neuroscientists need to infer what the brains of common ancestors They discovered a segment of this language pathway in the human brain may have been like by studying that interconnects the auditory cortex with frontal lobe regions, important brain scans of living primates and for processing speech and language. Although speech and language are comparing them to humans. unique to humans, the link via the auditory pathway in other primates suggests an evolutionary basis in auditory cognition and vocal Professor Chris Petkov from the communication. Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University, UK the study lead said: "It is like finding Professor Petkov added: "We predicted but could not know for sure a new fossil of a long lost whether the human language pathway may have had an evolutionary ancestor. It is also exciting that basis in the auditory system of nonhuman primates. I admit we were there may be an older origin yet astounded to see a similar pathway hiding in plain sight within the to be discovered still." auditory system of nonhuman primates." distantly related to humans. The international teams of European and US scientists carried out the brain imaging study and analysis of auditory regions and brain pathways in humans, apes and monkeys which is published in Nature Neuroscience.

April 2020 . Curious Remarkable transformation

The study also illuminates the remarkable transformation of the human language pathway. A key human unique difference was found: the human left side of this brain pathway was stronger and the right side appears to have diverged from the auditory evolutionary prototype to involve non-auditory parts of the brain.

The study relied on brain scans from openly shared resources by the global scientific community. It also generated original new brain scans that are globally shared to inspire further discovery.

Also since the authors predict that the auditory precursor to the human language pathway may be even older, the work inspires the neurobiological search for its earliest evolutionary origin -- the next brain 'fossil' -- to be found in animals more Professor Timothy Griffiths, consultant neurologist at Newcastle University, UK and joint senior author on the study notes: "This discovery has tremendous potential for understanding which aspects of human auditory cognition and language can be studied with animal models in ways not possible with humans and apes. The study has already inspired new research underway including with neurology patients.”

(Source:Sciencedaily)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Paper 2 - Tribal India

‘White as Milk and Rice: Stories of India’s Isolated Tribes’ review: At home in the world of the Halakkis, Konyaks, Marias

A rich, in-depth study of tribal life is felt from within and not viewed from the outside, making the margins a place of reality

Think ‘isolated tribes’ of India and the images that will present themselves will probably be of labour-hardened men and women protesting with bows and arrows; JCBs throwing up the red earth of their homes; video clips of scantily-clad Jarawa women dancing for the delectation of tourists — in short, stereotypical images that frame them as ‘museum pieces’ (as one Letting women speak Andamans’ MP memorably described Kundalia achieves this by employing that oldest of methods — the Jarawas) and present their storytelling, which tunnels into the mind of the subject and sees problems in a suitably picturesque the world through her eyes. Of course, it’s not a foolproof way to get a sympathetic but safely method for objectivity — nothing is. One can guess Kundalia’s distanced ‘tch tch’ from the leanings — she lets the woman speak most of the time; the mainstream. narrations overturn the notion of the tribes as less civilised, To go behind the scenes and see the recording how robustly avant-garde some of their social customs tribals as animated figures withs joys are (the Marias of Bastar, for instance, ‘believe in the primordial and problems that are universal but authenticity of lust’); there are seemingly innocuous vignettes of also particular to their circumstances people in positions of power, like the havaldar who ‘nods along, and history, one must read Nidhi never looking up from the potato-stuffed kachoris’ when the Dugar Kundalia’s White as Milk and sarpanch comes to lodge a complaint of robbery in his village. Rice. Her ‘humble attempt to not But there are counter-checks: the narrators are women and men; bring this margin to the centre, but to some tribal customs, like that of head-hunting among the make the margin a place of reality’ is Konyaks of Nagaland, are anachronistic and impermissible; if a richly in-depth study of tribal life, the havaladar is not too attentive towards the sarpanch’s plea, the not viewed from the outside, but felt sarpanch’s claim to meek powerlessness has the havaldar from within. recalling a sower who was whipped by this sarpanch.

April 2020 . Curious This jangle of perspectives makes for a 360-degree view. The only side that gets no sympathy is the state, which has always harmed the tribes, either by being paternalistic or by pushing them out of their lands for development’s sake. Forest dwellers

Kundalia’s stories are of the Halakkis of north Karnataka; the Kanjars of Chambal; the Kurumbas of the Nilgiris; the Marias of Bastar; the Khasis of Shillong; the Konyaks of Nagaland.

A member of each tribe lets us into their lives: the narratives, however, are not representative of the views of the entire tribe. The sketches, even of the Kanjars, the forest vagabonds infamous as the dacoits of yore, are so skilfully executed that you start thinking like them, with them. Unsentimental portraits

And yet the portraits are unsentimental: when a Kanjar bride is thought to have failed the virginity test, they burn her alive; animals are getting sparse in the forests around the Konyak villages — ‘most of them already hanging as skulls on the walls’ of the tribal homes.

That said, some of the portraits (like those of the Kanjars and Marias) are more convincing than the others. This disparity is a result of the narrative technique: who are the protagonists — are they real individuals, stand-ins for the author or fictive beings? Kundalia doesn’t specify. When the protagonists are powerfully imagined, the stories acquire authenticity and when they are not (as with the Khasis and Konyaks), a vagueness takes over, making the portraits tilt more on the side of fiction than non-fiction.

Cavils notwithstanding, White as Milk and Rice drew me in like that seminal work of anthropology, Lévi- Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. Not the least because of its language, which is as effortlessly lyrical: ‘In the Gondi language of the Marias, there is no future tense because their lives function around the availability of the natural resources around them: land, forests and water.’

(Source:The Hindu)

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Paper 2 - Tribal issues

Reverse migration of peoples due to lockdown may destroy India’s tribal communities

Reverse migration of indigenous peoples in the post lockdown period could destroy India’s tribal communities largely concentrated in ten states and in the North-Eastern region, says a joint study by Denmark-based International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and the Indigenous Lawyers Association of India. As per the study, as COVID-19 destroys economies and absence of jobs, homes and food loom large; these indigenous migrant workers are all set to return to their traditional areas without access to testing facilities to detect the virus. “Reverse migration, possibly carrying the virus, can have devastating impact on indigenous communities,” it said adding that it can wipe out endangered indigenous peoples of India and further, permanently damage the survival of many communities. Citing the report of the expert committee on tribal health, it said almost 55% of India 104 million tribal population live outside the 809 tribal majority blocks. The study highlighted various problems being faced by indigenous peoples under COVID- 19 such as racial discrimination and attacks on Northeast people, loss of jobs and reverse migration to native places, indigenous migrantworkers stranded by the lockdown without adequate food, and impact on traditional livelihood of indigenous peoples. “About 45.3% of the tribals in the rural areas are below poverty line. During the lockdown, they are not being reached by the state programmes and effectively left to fend for themselves. It is a stark choice between disease and death by hunger,” it concluded.

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Paper 2 - Tribal issues

An anthropological approach to lockdown Anthropology has always been interested in knowing different cultural aspects of different societies. The approach of cultural relativism has advocated the field workers to collect data out of field by preceding local people’s view point. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic the whole country has been in lockdown since 24th of March, 2020 for at least 21 days or it might even extend more than that. Surprisingly the Galo tribal community of Arunachal Pradesh follows an equivalent system of lockdown among them when an epidemic strikes.

This Galo community resides in the West Siang district, being one of the 26 major tribes of Arunachal Pradesh. The distinctive ritual practiced by them is known as ‘Arr-Rinam’, followed by ‘Ali Ternam’. Where Ali means epdemic and Ternam means forestall or prevent, so it’s a ritual to protect the whole community against the epidemic or in other words to prevent the epidemic to occur. This Arr- Rinam is imposed for 48 hours whenever an epidemic strikes by following a consensus of the community head. The Galo community lastly practiced this Arr-Rinam almost four decades ago when a water-borne disease occurring in their community and affected few individuals. The ritual creates a line of demarcation by sealing five entry points to their village done by some village headman. Even this ritual is also followed periodically for their livestock, primarily foe their semi-wild mithuns, which are prone to contagious disease. At present the situation of COVID-19 pandemic has imposed lockdown throughout the country, and definitely this community is also following.

Apart from the Galo tribe, another North-eastern tribal group follows this kind of ritual. It’s Adi tribe which perform a pattern of customary laws of self-restriction as well as prevention of entry of outsiders to their village. They share a system of belief that within this period of restriction the Shamans (religious priest) derived a legendary power to locate wild herbs and prepare medicines out of it which could help them to overcome the epidemic. Here’s the importance of ethno-medicine has been raised, which is an integral part of the discipline of anthropology.

Science has a greater impact on us since ages, but the importance of traditional knowledge cannot be ignored. Societies and different communities have always shown instances of traditional practices which carry an important scientific background. (

April 2020 . Curious Syllabus: Paper 2: TRIBAL ISSUES

Andhra Pradesh: SC Scraps 100% Reservation in Scheduled Areas, Fueling Debate

The Supreme Court’s judgement against 100% reservation of teachers of the Scheduled Tribes (ST) in primary schools located in the Scheduled Areas brings to the fore a debate over the prospects of the interests of Adivasis protected under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution coming in conflict with that of the other categories within the quota system.

A five-judge constitution bench led by Justice Arun Mishra on April 22 struck down a government order issued by Andhra Pradesh governor Biswabushan Harichandan which had provided absolute reservation for members of the STs for teaching jobs in the scheduled areas. The apex court has also reiterated the Indra Sawhney vs Union of India judgement, which capped reservations at 50%. The issue has reached the Supreme Court after an appeal was filed against the Andhra Pradesh high court ruling which had upheld the government order providing for 100% reservations for tribal teachers in the Scheduled Areas. The five-judge constitution bench has also interpreted its judgement prospectively not “retrospectively” and held that the existing appointments made in excess of 50% reservation shall survive but shall cease to be effective in the future, providing relief to the tribal teachers who have already been appointed. One Chebrolu L. Prasad had filed an appeal against the high court order contending that the governor’s order was discriminatory since it affected not only the open category candidates but also the other reserved categories’ candidates and reservation under Article 16 (4) of the Constitution shall not exceed the 50% cap.

The bench, also comprising Justices Indira Banerjee. Vineet Saran, M.R. Shah and Ravindra Bhat, observed: “100% reservation would amount to unreasonable and unfair and cannot be termed except as unfair and unreasonable. Thus we are of the considered opinion that providing 100 % reservation to the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes were not permissible. The Governor in the exercise of the power conferred by para 5(1) of the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution cannot provide 100% reservation.”

The bench further ruled, “By providing 100 percent reservation to the Scheduled Tribes has deprived the Scheduled Castes and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) also of their due representation. It also impinges upon the right of open category and scheduled tribes who have settled in the Scheduled Areas after January 26, 1950. The rights of the Scheduled Tribes who are not residents of the scheduled areas shall also be adversely affected if the impugned order is allowed to become operational.”

April 2020 . Curious Ravindra Reddy, president of the EBC (Economically Backward Classes) Association, welcomed the judgement, highlighting the need to keep the quota well below the 50% ceiling. The CPI(M) state unit requested the state government to file a review petition in the Supreme Court.

Call for safeguarding tribals’ interests Tribal advocacy groups, however, contend that social justice cannot be delivered if tribals in the scheduled areas and the other marginalised sections living elsewhere are seen as being on the same page. Lawyer and tribal activist Palla Trinadha Rao told The Wire that the quashing of the government order will run counter to the principal objective of the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution.

The schedule is framed to give protection to the tribals living in the scheduled areas from alienation of their lands and natural resources to non-tribals, he said. Midiyam Babu Rao, a tribal leader of the CPI (M) and a former MP representing the Bhadhrachalam constituency currently in Telangana, said tribals in both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have already been subjected to alienation of their lands and jobs. This, he said, has happened through flouting of the Land Transfer Regulation Act and producing fake caste and nativity certificates. Other governments also faced challenges

In an unrelated development, the division bench of the AP high court on March 2 had dismissed a government order to take the limit of quota in elections for urban and rural bodies for Backward Classes, SCs and STs up to 59.85%. The division bench, headed by Chief Justice Jitendra Kumar Maheswari, and judge Naina Jayasurya, struck down the GO on the same ground as the Supreme Court, that reservations cannot extend beyond the 50% cap.

The former chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, was forced to reduce the quota for Muslims from 5% to 4, following a direction from the high court not to exceed the limit of 50%. Telangana chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao passed a couple of bills in the state assembly—one seeking to increase reservations for Muslims from 4% to 12% and the other to take the quota for STs from 6% to 10%, taking the total quota well above 50%. These bills were passed before the state elections in 2018, but have remained pending with the Central government. Similarly, the previous TDP government’s 5% quota move for the Kapu caste failed to see the day of light yet, for want of the Central government’s approval.

(Source:The Wire)

April 2020 . Curious Mails to Team Vijetha: www.vijethaiasacademy.com

I am UPSC aspirant, preparing for anthropology optional on my own. Firstly, I want to express my gratitude to the entire Team Vijetha for coming up with such a magazine. The “Humans are still evolving” article in March 2020 month issue was really informative. I would appreciate if you can bring up more issues related to Indian anthropology in the forthcoming issue.

—- Preetham Banglore, Karnataka.

Your doing a great job in providing us plenty of information in a structured manner. I want to suggest that please cover ‘Genetics’ in your upcoming issue this is because lot of recent developments are taking place in their field in recent times. — Nikhil Gupta [email protected] CURIOUS MAGAZINE is a NOT FOR SALE compiled from authentic sources regarding the recent developments in the field of anthropology.

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