Journal of Anthropological Sciences最新文献

{"title":"Form and function in the Lower Palaeolithic: history, progress, and continued relevance.","authors":"Alastair Key,&nbsp;Lycett Stephen","doi":"10.4436/JASS.95017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.95017","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Percussively flaked stone artefacts constitute a major source of evidence relating to hominin behavioural strategies and are, essentially, a product or byproduct of a past individual's decision to create a tool with respect to some broader goal. Moreover, it has long been noted that both differences and recurrent regularities exist within and between Palaeolithic stone artefact forms. Accordingly, archaeologists have frequently drawn links between form and functionality, with functional objectives and performance often being regarded consequential to a stone tool's morphological properties. Despite these factors, extensive reviews of the related concepts of form and function with respect to the Lower Palaeolithic remain surprisingly sparse. We attempt to redress this issue. First we stress the historical place of form-function concepts, and their role in establishing basic ideas that echo to this day. We then highlight methodological and conceptual progress in determining artefactual function in more recent years. Thereafter, we evaluate four specific issues that are of direct consequence for evaluating the ongoing relevance of form-function concepts, especially with respect to their relevance for understanding human evolution more generally. Our discussion highlights specifically how recent developments have been able to build on a long historical legacy, and demonstrate that direct, indirect, experimental, and evolutionary perspectives intersect in crucial ways, with each providing specific but essential insights for ongoing questions. We conclude by emphasising that our understanding of these issues and their interaction, has been, and will be, essential to accurately interpret the Lower Palaeolithic archaeological record, tool-form related behaviours of Lower Palaeolithic hominins, and their consequences for (and relationship to) wider questions of human evolution.</p>","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2017-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"35366699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tracking the evolution of causal cognition in humans.","authors":"Marlize Lombard,&nbsp;Peter Gärdenfors","doi":"10.4436/JASS.95006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.95006","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We suggest a seven-grade model for the evolution of causal cognition as a framework that can be used to gauge variation in the complexity of causal reasoning from the panin-hominin split until the appearance of cognitively modern hunter-gatherer communities. The intention is to put forward a cohesive model for the evolution of causal cognition in humans, which can be assessed against increasingly fine-grained empirical data from the palaeoanthropological and archaeological records. We propose that the tracking behaviour (i.e., the ability to interpret and follow external, inanimate, visual clues of hominins) provides a rich case study for tracing the evolution of causal cognition in our lineage. The grades of causal cognition are tentatively linked to aspects of the Stone Age/Palaeolithic archaeological record. Our model can also be applied to current work in evolutionary psychology and research on causal cognition, so that an inter-disciplinary understanding and correlation of processes becomes increasingly possible.</p>","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2017-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34982172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Race and racism in France.","authors":"Evelyne Heyer","doi":"10.4436/JASS.95009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.95009","url":null,"abstract":"The Musée de l’Homme in Paris, has chosen for his first big temporary exhibition after reopening in October 2015, to address the question of racism. The exhibition is entitled: Us and them – from prejudices to racism (http://nousetlesautres.museedelhomme.fr/en). I am the scientific commissioner with my colleague Carole Reynaud-Paligot, an historian. What is racism? Why does it exist? Are all humans racist? In recent years, social psychologists, geneticists and researchers in the humanities and social sciences have explored issues relating to alterity and racism. This exhibition draws on their research and more, from France and throughout the world to produce an original analysis of the phenomena of racialization, both in the past and today, which emphasizes not only the widely known facts but also how these phenomena were constructed. Before answering the questions raised by Alan Goodman, it is important to situate racism in France. French racism is not limited to biological-racism i.e. racism based on the idea of races defined by biological criteria. Indeed, biologicalracism is one of the different forms of racisms that exist. This goes back at least to XXth century history: after the second world war, Anglo-Saxon countries (primarily the UK and USA) focused on the question of discriminations in relation to skin color, while in France anti-racism was mostly taken care of by different associations who have been created to fight anti-Semitism (see the work of Bleich, 2003). So that when we talk about racism, it is not limited to biological-racism, but includes racisms based on culture or religion that are also “essentialized”. Therefore we have chosen the following definition for racism: “being racist is to regard the differences between individuals, be they physical, cultural or moral, as hereditary, immutable and “natural”. Racism establishes a hierarchy of categories of human beings, and this can lead to practices ranging from discrimination through to extermination.” This definition encompasses different form of racisms either based on a biological or a cultural criterion. Our definition is based on three key components: categorization, hierarchization and essentialization. Categorization is a mental operation that simplifies the world. People classify individuals based on their appearance, their religion, their geographical origin, etc. The criteria used to differentiate people vary according to the particular society and period. Such “categories” are neither natural nor fixed. Hierarchization involves a value judgment based on regarding one group or category of individuals as being superior or inferior to another. Essentialization is a process by which individuals are reduced to moral characteristics, intellectual faculties or psychological traits alleged to be an immutable and inherited feature of that particular group. Having presented the stage for France, the following directly address the questions posed by Alan Goodman.","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2017-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"35158268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The absence of race in Norway?","authors":"Jon Røyne Kyllingstad","doi":"10.4436/JASS.95012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.95012","url":null,"abstract":"During the last four to five decades, Norway has received immigrants from all over the world. About 16% of the Norwegian population are now immigrants or Norwegian-born children of immigrant. About half of these have African, Asian or Latin American backgrounds (SSB, 2017). Norway is becoming an increasingly multiethnic society. This causes social tensions and political controversy. Immigration policy is presently among the most heated and polarized topics in Norwegian public and political debates. The Norwegian public sphere is permeated by discussions about racism, discrimination, ethnicity, national identity, social integration, cultural pluralism, and how to deal with cultural and religious differences. However, these issues are rarely construed as “racial” issues. It is not common to use the term “race” in political or public discussions or in social scientific research about Norwegian society, and racial categories are never used in statistics. It has not always been like this. In the early decades of the 20th century, notions about a hierarchy of races was unproblematized and commonplace within public, political and academic discourses in Norway, as in the rest of the western world. In the decades after the Second World War, however, such ideas became increasingly marginalized and delegitimized in science, legislation, politics and public discourse. Scientific racism and the notion of race as a meaningful biological concept suffered a loss of legitimacy, but in contrast to for example the USA, this was not paralleled by the rise of an academic and political discourse about race as a social construction. Instead, politicians, bureaucrats and academics who have been studying, discussing, and managing the Norwegian society during the last decades seem, in general, to have ignored or dismissed any conceptualization of “race”. By looking at some historical examples, this article shows how “race” was once intertwined with notions of Norwegian nationhood and attitudes towards minorities, it discuss how the retreat of “race” has affected these notions and attitudes, and, finally presents some views on the absence or presence of “race” in contemporary Norwegian discourses on immigration and the multicultural society. Do racial perceptions and racial discrimination play an insignificant role in Norwegian society, as compared to for example the USA, or do the relative absence of research and discussions on “race” mean that Norwegian academics, and the Norwegian public, are avoiding to talk about an important societal issue, namely that “race” actually matters, even in Norway?","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2017-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"35168483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What made us human? Biological and cultural evolution of Homo sapiens.","authors":"Stefano Parmigiani,&nbsp;Telmo Pievani,&nbsp;Ian Tattersall","doi":"10.4436/JASS.94036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.94036","url":null,"abstract":"The science of human evolution has recently been changing rapidly, and we know that Homo sapiens is the last surviving branch of a once-luxuriant tree of hominid species. Until very recent times, our lineage shared the planet with several other human species, such as those containing Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. Following its biological and anatomical birth in Africa around 200,000 years ago Homo sapiens spread around the world, following multiple paths of expansion that we can now track using the techniques of molecular biology, ancient DNA studies and paleoanthropology. In this global, ecological and demographic scenario, at one point our species began to express cognitively modern behaviors: a “symbolic intelligence” so peculiar that scientists view it as the hallmark of human creativity and uniqueness itself. Was there a gap between our biological birth and our intellectual birth? Was the process a gradual or a punctuational one? What triggered the so-called Paleolithic Revolution? How did our cultural evolution interact with our biological evolution? What might have been the role of other human species? Is articulate language our “secret weapon”? This Special Issue addresses these questions, gathering the contributions presented in the meeting held in the beautiful context of the Erice International School of Ethology1 from October 14th – 19th, 2014. Very importantly, the versions published here have been updated with the latest findings and the most recent literature. The workshop was the second in a program of meetings dedicated to human evolution and human uniqueness, and followed the first workshop held in June 2012, titled Evolved Morality. The biology and philosophy of human conscience2. The meeting involved prominent experts in primatology, paleoanthropology, genetics, anthropology, ethology and philosophy, and originated in discussions between paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, philosopher of science Telmo Pievani and ethologist Stefano Parmigiani, on how best to shed light on deep questions that necessarily require a cross-disciplinary effort.","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2016-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34526750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Faces in the mirror, from the neuroscience of mimicry to the emergence of mentalizing.","authors":"Antonella Tramacere,&nbsp;Pier Francesco Ferrari","doi":"10.4436/JASS.94037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.94037","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the current opinion paper, we provide a comparative perspective on specific aspects of primate empathic abilities, with particular emphasis on the mirror neuron system associated with mouth/face actions and expression. Mouth and faces can be very salient communicative classes of stimuli that allow an observer access to the emotional and physiological content of other individuals. We thus describe patterns of activations of neural populations related to observation and execution of specific mouth actions and emotional facial expressions in some species of monkeys and in humans. Particular attention is given to dynamics of face-to-face interactions in the early phases of development and to the differences in the anatomy of facial muscles among different species of primates. We hypothesize that increased complexity in social environments and patterns of social development have promoted specializations of facial musculature, behavioral repertoires related to production and recognition of facial emotional expression, and their neural correlates. In several primates, mirror circuits involving parietal-frontal regions, insular regions, cingulate cortices, and amygdala seem to support automatic forms of embodied empathy, which probably contribute to facial mimicry and behavioural synchrony. In humans these circuits interact with specific prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortical regions, which facilitates higher order cognitive functions such as cognitive empathy and mental state attribution. Our analysis thus suggests that the evolution of higher forms of empathy, such as mentalizing, is also linked to the coupling between the perceptual and motor system related to face processing, which may have undergone a process of exaptation during primate phylogeny. </p>","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2016-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34545633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Oldowan hominin behavior and ecology at Kanjera South,Kenya.","authors":"Thomas Plummer,&nbsp;Laura Bishop","doi":"10.4436/JASS.94033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.94033","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Early Stone Age archaeological record does not become persistent and widespread until approximately 2.0-1.7 million years ago, when Oldowan sites spread across Africa and ultimately into Eurasia. However, good records of hominin behavior from this important time interval are uncommon. Here we describe recent findings from the two million year old Oldowan site of Kanjera South, on the Homa Peninsula of southwestern Kenya. Kanjera South is the oldest Oldowan site with large assemblages of stone artifacts and well-preserved archaeological fauna. Our research indicates that hominin activities were situated in an open habitat within a grassland dominated ecosystem, the first documentation of an archaeological site in such an open setting. Hominins selectively collected and transported stone materials (30% of the lithic assemblage) over longer distances (at least 10 km) than is typical for the Oldowan, reflecting their preference for hard, easily-flaked lithologies unavailable on the northern half of the Homa Peninsula. They deployed different technological strategies to more intensively utilize these hard, non-local raw materials. Artifacts were used for a variety of tasks, including butchering small antelopes probably obtained by hunting, working wood, working soft plant material, and processing underground storage organs. These data suggest that the Kanjera hominins utilized a technological system that allowed them to extract nutrient dense animal and plant foods from their environment. This shift towards the acquisition of nutritious, hard-to-acquire foods in packets large enough to be shared may have facilitated brain and body size expansion in the genus Homo. </p>","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2016-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34753605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Formal linguistics as a cue to demographic history.","authors":"Giuseppe Longobardi,&nbsp;Andrea Ceolin,&nbsp;Aaron Ecay,&nbsp;Silvia Ghirotto,&nbsp;Cristina Guardiano,&nbsp;Monica-Alexandrina Irimia,&nbsp;Dimitris Michelioudakis,&nbsp;Nina Radkevich,&nbsp;Davide Pettener,&nbsp;Donata Luiselli,&nbsp;Guido Barbujani","doi":"10.4436/JASS.94031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.94031","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Beyond its theoretical success, the development of molecular genetics has brought about the possibility of extraordinary progress in the study of classification and in the inference of the evolutionary history of many species and populations. A major step forward was represented by the availability of extremely large sets of molecular data suited to quantitative and computational treatments. In this paper, we argue that even in cognitive sciences, purely theoretical progress in a discipline such as linguistics may have analogous impact. Thus, exactly on the model of molecular biology, we propose to unify two traditionally unrelated lines of linguistic investigation: 1) the formal study of syntactic variation (parameter theory) in the biolinguistic program; 2) the reconstruction of relatedness among languages (phylogenetic taxonomy). The results of our linguistic analysis have thus been plotted against data from population genetics and the correlations have turned out to be largely significant: given a non-trivial set of languages/populations, the description of their variation provided by the comparison of systematic parametric analysis and molecular anthropology informatively recapitulates their history and relationships. As a result, we can claim that the reality of some parametric model of the language faculty and language acquisition/transmission (more broadly of generative grammar) receives strong and original support from its historical heuristic power. Then, on these grounds, we can begin testing Darwin's prediction that, when properly generated, the trees of human populations and of their languages should eventually turn out to be significantly parallel. </p>","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2016-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34404969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What do our genes tell us about our past?","authors":"Rob DeSalle","doi":"10.4436/JASS.94032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.94032","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The use of DNA sequences to elucidate the history of relationships of organisms is widespread, and focus on our species has been intense. This paper examines some simple aspects of using genetic information to analyze relationships within and amongst humans. Clonal markers (mtDNA and Y chromosomal DNA) have always shown a high degree of structure and robustness when analyzed for hierarchical structure. Results from genome wide phylogenetic structure in many organismal systems suggests instead that recombining genetic elements like the X chromosome and the autosomes will give conflicting information from genome region to genome region. In addition, the evolutionary signal from the different chromosomal regions will show a high degree of incongruence with each other, as do adjacent regions of chromosomes. This incongruence and lack of hierarchical structure is discussed in the context of what we know about human populations and the theoretical underpinnings of tree building based analysis of human populations. </p>","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2016-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34753604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why human evolution should be a basic science for medicine and psychology students.","authors":"Paola Palanza,&nbsp;Stefano Parmigiani","doi":"10.4436/JASS.94034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.94034","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on our teaching experience in medicine and psychology degree programs, we examine different aspects of human evolution that can help students to understand how the human body and mind work and why they are vulnerable to certain diseases. Three main issues are discussed: 1) the necessity to consider not only the mechanisms, i.e. the \"proximate causations\", implicated in biological processes but also why these mechanisms have evolved, i.e. the \"ultimate causations\" or \"adaptive significance\", to understand the functioning and malfunctioning of human body and mind; 2) examples of how human vulnerabilities to disease are caused by phylogenetic constraints, evolutionary tradeoffs reflecting the combined actions of natural and sexual selection, and/or mismatch between past and present environment (i.e., evolution of the eye, teeth and diets, erect posture and their consequences); 3) human pair-bonding and parent-offspring relationships as the result of socio-sexual selection and evolutionary compromises between cooperation and conflict. These psychobiological mechanisms are interwoven with our brain developmental plasticity and the effects of culture in shaping our behavior and mind, and allow a better understanding of functional (normal) and dysfunctional (pathological) behaviors. Thus, because the study of human evolution offers a powerful framework for clinical practice and research, the curriculum studiorum of medical and psychology students should include evolutionary biology and human phylogeny. </p>","PeriodicalId":48668,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2016-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34420958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}