Dating your Ancestors is Complicated: The Strange Case of Homo Naledi
Photo: John Hawks. Homo naledi has much in common with early forms of the genus Homo On this episode, Adam and Ryan dive into the complexities of our…
Tag: genetics
The Ethical Battle Over Ancient DNA
A new controversy has arisen over recent scientific analyses conducted on ancient Native American remains that were uncovered in the 1890s at Pueblo Bonito, an archaeological site located…
Editing Wikipedia > Writing Letters to the New York Times
Various bits of social media began vibrating rapidly recently when it was discovered that white supremacists had fooled Google into providing inaccurate information about Boas and cultural relativism…
#REVIEW: GENDER AND GENETICS: SOCIOLOGY OF THE PRENATAL
Within the past several years, prenatal testing has significantly advanced, developing numerous methods of non-invasive prenatal testing such as examining fetal cell-free DNA in maternal blood. These …
Rice Reveals African Slaves’ Agricultural Heritage
Clues about the history—and survival—of African slaves in the Americas can be found in certain plants, such as rice. David Williams When Tinde van Andel purchased a small…
New Articulations of Biological Difference in the 21st Century: A Conversation
This conversation is prompted by continued frustration about how race is discussed and understood by the public and by those researchers who remain determined to draw clean lines…
A World Famous African-American Scientist Puts the Presidential Election in Perspective: “I Am Not Surprised At All”
On Wednesday, the day after our 2017 presidential election, I dreaded having to put on my host face to go out to dinner with Dr. Joseph Graves, our…
Genetics, Race, and the Practice of Science, Part Two
On how human genetics is biopolitical. Earlier this year Jonathan Marks and I sat down at the University of Notre Dame for a conversation about his recent books,…
Genetics, Race, and the Practice of Science, Part One
On how the humanities help us think critically about science. Jonathan Marks and I have a lot in common (despite the fact that I am a Christian feminist…
The social role of anthropology’s racist uncle
There’s a certain trope that has been going around for years, and it has hit a peak these days as many people express their collective shock and surprise…
Climate Swings Drove Early Humans Out of Africa (and Back Again)
The textbook narrative of human history tells us that between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago our earliest modern human ancestors traveled out of Africa on a journey that…
The Man Who Was Mistaken for a Homo sapiens in a Hat
In 1939, anthropologist Carleton Coon used an artist’s reconstruction of the Neanderthal specimen La Chapelle aux Saints in a hat to argue that people’s impressions of differences between grou…
How Twin Culture Challenges Our Notions of Self
Sameness is often seen as the defining characteristic of identical twins, but this impression is a result of Western stereotypes about the meaning of selfhood. Lisa Wiltse/Getty Images…
Gathering the Genetic Testimony of Spain’s Civil War Dead
The remains of many soldiers and citizens who died during the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, have never been recovered. The development of genetic…
Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh … and Hominins?
Ligers, tigons, and pizzlies, oh my! What do these critters have in common? They are the offspring of animals that belong to distinct lineages, or populations that have…
The CRISPR Hack: Better, Faster, Stronger
Genetic testing technologies, which enable parents to create multiple embryos and then select the “best” for implantation, are already ubiquitous. Image by Jacopo Werther. Licensed under CC Attrib…
What Is an Animal?
What is an animal? Take a moment to think about it. Without doubt your dog and cat are animals, as are the birds singing out your window. What…
Past Imperfect
Let’s start with some old dirt. Who were the first people to arrive in North America more than 12,000 years ago? Did these intrepid explorers originate in Siberia…
Hartwick Anthropology 2016 Courses – Spring & J Term
Teaching Hartwick Anthropology courses is what launched and sustains Living Anthropologically. For more information, visit the Hartwick Anthropology webpage and sign up for some great Hartwick Anthrop…
We Are All Africans
An impressively interdisciplinary team of geneticists, biological anthropologists, archaeologists, and geologists has just published an article detailing the genetic makeup of a man who lived in Ethio…
Culture, Culture, Everywhere
Just as I was preparing to teach Cultural Anthropology, two posts about culture came out on powerhouse anthropology blogs. On Savage Minds, Alex Golub reviews The Asian American…
Book proves culture leads to Asian American success, headlines claim opposite
A strong media push by the Sage Foundation has put Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s book The Asian American Achievement Paradox into the public sphere in the past couple of days, garnering…
I Will Not Call Her Name: An Ethno-poem on Racial and Gendered Violence
[Savage Minds is pleased to publish this ethno-poem by L. Kaifa Roland who is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Kaifa is the author…
Thinking about race like a cataloger
In librarian parlance entities, whether books or journal articles or whatever, can be said to have an “aboutness.” And as a cataloger its my job to describe that…