In The News: Department of Anthropology
Modern humans and Neanderthals not only share pieces of DNA, the composition of the microbiome in our gut is also very similar. "These bacteria were already present in the gut flora of our last common ancestor, at least 700,000 years ago."
The famous paleo diet has been around for many years, as a major current in weight loss trends. The truth is that today there are many alternative dietary guidelines, which make it overwhelming to make the best decisions. The good news is that science does not lie and is present, to help us make the best decisions.
THE MOUNTAIN OF EVIDENCE THAT MICROBES INSIDE OUR GUTS can reveal hidden details of our physical and mental health has grown a little more thanks to a new study published this month in the journal Current Biology.
Last year Anthropology News invited sections to help us highlight some of the outstanding people in our discipline and the exciting, impactful work that they do, whether in scholarly, mentoring, business, public, teaching, or activist contexts. The features first published in the November/December issue of the magazine. Thank you to section contributing editors Cathy Amanti, Dori Beeler, Steven Black, Joseph Feldman, Susan Kenyon, Sheina Lew-Levy, Walter E. Little, Patricia D. López, Melissa Maceyko, Laura Meek, Chandra L. Middleton, Catherine Rhodes, Mallika Sarma, and Thea R. Strand.
According to UPI, a box of donated papers from the late Australian poet and journalist A.B. “Banjo” Paterson also contained a tin of chocolates originally commissioned by Queen Victoria about 120 years ago. “The chocolate was still in its straw packaging and silver foil wrapping,” the article said. “The tins were commissioned by Britain’s Queen Victoria and sent to soldiers in South Africa during the Boer War around 1900 as a gift to the troops.
Even when enslaved or despised, captives brought novel ideas and technologies to the societies of their captors
A study entitled The Impact of Fathers on Children by Peter B. Gray, PhD. and Kermyt G. Anderson, PhD., found that there are many positive impacts that can be seen from the involvement of fathers as parents on their children, such as building social behavior, ethics, and self-awareness.
Stephanie won a 3-year Post-Doc fellowship from the REinforcing Women In REsearch (REWIRE) COFUND Programme, a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions COFUND project funded by the European Commission.
ACCORDING TO PIERS MITCHELL, A paleopathologist from the University of Cambridge, scientists have been extracting data from ancient human poop for over a century. “In the past, we’ve been able to look at a single coprolite from a single person”—that is to say, a preserved turd—”and study the microbiome of that one individual.” (The microbiome is the complex collection of microbes living in every animal’s digestive tract.) Now, in a newly released paper in Philosophical Transactions B, Mitchell and co-authors Susanna Sabin and Kirsten I. Bos have blown the lid off of single-turd analysis: by analyzing two medieval latrines’ worth of number two.
A group of social scientists who conduct cross-cultural research are casting a critical lens on their own practices.
A group of social scientists who conduct cross-cultural research are casting a critical lens on their own practices.
A life without bees is no life at all. Literally. Not only are they essential for pollination of plants but they are intricately entwined with the evolution of our species. University of Nevada paleoanthropologist Alyssa Crittenden argues that honey and bee larvae consumption are what “made it possible for early Homo to nutritionally out-compete other species of hominid and may have provided critical energy to fuel their enlarging and evolving brains”.