The artist's reconstruction of Lucy, a 3.1 million-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis discovered in 1974 in Hadar, Ethiopia. Because only fragments of Lucy's cranium were found, Daynès had to draw from the skull of another A. afarensis female (AL 417)

Sculpting Human Evolution - Elisabeth Daynès

Good: http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2014/07/03/nicholas-wade-determinist-genes/

Claude Lévi-Strauss In His Own Words

"...we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better."

http://anthropomics2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/nazis-love-nicholas-wade-shouldnt-that.html

Plenary debate: Humans have no nature, what they have is history. IUAES2013

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/agustin-fuentes/the-troublesome-ignorance-of-nicholas-wade_b_5344248.html

Labs komentārs. Un šī piebilde izgaismo debates kontekstu visnotaļ labi: "Wade's book misrepresents genetic and evolutionary data; his pronouncements about race and what it means are sweeping the Internet with glowing reviews from true believers. Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) wrote a glowing review in The Wall Street Journal championing Wade as the voice of reasons against a sea of left-leaning, lying academics. Jared Taylor of the hyper-conservative and openly racist magazine American Renaissance congratulated Wade on his blow to the supposedly fascist left that is academia."

Russell Tuttle on Human Evolution: A Distinct Species

http://anthropoliteia.wordpress.com/category/features/forums/whats-going-on-in-ukraine/

"Diamond is so intent on dispelling the Myth of the Peaceful Savage–the idea that before civilization all people were “peaceful and gentle”–that he has replaced it with an equally absurd idea, the Myth of the Savage Savage. According to this view, before the emergence of centralized governments backed up by professional armies, our ancestors were mired in a Hobbesian war of all against all [...] “Civilized” states have also waged wars against other states, erupted into civil wars and slaughtered their own citizens. Look at the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and all the great wars and genocides of the Twentieth Century, which killed hundreds of millions of people." - Horgan J, Jared Diamond, Please Stop Propagating Myth of the Savage Savage!

Laba recenzija: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/achingvoids.pdf

Afflictions: Culture & Mental Illness in Indonesia

"There is plenty of violence in the world of hunter-gatherers, though it is hardly illuminated by resorting to statistical comparisons between the mortality rates of a tiny tribal war in Kalimantan and the Battle of the Somme or the Holocaust. This violence, however, is almost entirely a state-effect. It simply cannot be understood historically from 4000 BC forward apart from the appetite of states for trade goods, slaves and precious ores, any more than the contemporary threat to remote indigenous groups can be understood apart from the appetite of capitalism and the modern state for rare minerals, hydroelectric sites, plantation crops and timber on the lands of these peoples." - Scott J.C., Crops, Towns, Government

Cultural Anthropology no 2014 būs open-access.

"Napoleon Chagnon is a Living World Treasure. Arguably our greatest anthropologist [...] Chagnon came along at just the right time for the Yanomamö and for scientific anthropology. Encroaching civilisation was about to close the last window on a tribal world that embodied vanishing clues to our own prehistory: a world of forest "gardens", of kin-groups fissioning into genetically salient sub-groups, of male combat over women and trans-generational revenge, complex alliances and enmities; webs of calculated obligation, debt, grudge and gratitude that might underlie much of our social psychology and even law, ethics and economics."
Tā Ričards Dokinss par Napoleonu Šanonu. Apbēdinoši, ka savos centienos popularizēt evolūcijas teoriju un zinātnisko metodi kopumā, nopelniem bagāti zinātnieki sāk slīgt nejēdzībās. Dokinsa gadījumā apbēdina ne vien neizprotams patoss (greatest anthropologist?), bet arī standarta eksotizēšana un etnocentrisms. Lai gan tas nav nekas neierasts, ka nespeciālisti, jaucot metodoloģisko relatīvismu ar radikālu kulturālo relatīvismu, lai pieņemtu apgaismotu pozīciju, atvedina ļoti problemātiskus secinājumus par, piemēram, civilizāciju. Bet Šanons, kā izrādās, ir zinātniskais moceklis. Šeit emocionālais fons mainās gandrīz no skumji uz smieklīgi. Lietojot reliģiozu retoriku, Dokinss spriež: "Chagnon committed the unforgivable sin, cardinal heresy in the eyes of a certain kind of social scientist: he took Darwin seriously." Nē, ko viņš darīja, nav savietojams ar pētniecības ētiku un etnogrāfisko metodi un, ārpus postmoderni apmātu skolāru prātiem, "Šanona problēma" nav saistāma ar viņa (mis)application of natural selection theory. Problēmu kopumā labi ekplicējis antropologs, ko var saukt par izcilu, Maršals Sālins.

"When one flies over vast territories of South Asia, from Karachi to Saigon, and once the desert of Thar has been crossed, this land divided up into the smallest plots and cultivated up to the last acre, at first sight seems somewhat familiar to the European. When it is looked at more closely, however, a difference emerges. These faded, washed out shades of pink and green, this irregular formation of fields and rice-paddies constantly appearing in different designs, these boundaries blurred as if in a patchwork – the whole carpet, so to speak, is the same; but because form and colour are less clear, less well-defined than in the landscapes of Europe, one has the impression of looking at it “wrong side up”. This is, of course, merely an image. But it reflects rather well the different positions of Europe and Asia in regard to their common civilization. From the material point of view, at least one seems to be the “reverse side” of the other; one has always been the winner, the other the loser, as if in a given enterprise (begun, as we have said, jointly) one had secured all the advantages and the other all the embarrassments [...]

Comparing itself with America, Europe acknowledges its own less favourable position as regards natural wealth, population pressure, individual output and the average level of consumption; rightly or wrongly, on the other hand, it takes pride in the greater attention it pays to spiritual values. It must be admitted, mutatis mutandis, that Asia could reason similarly in regard to Europe, whose modest prosperity represents, for her, the most unwarranted luxury. In a sense, Europe is Asia’s “America”. And this “Asia” with less riches and more population, lacking the necessary capital and technicians for its industrialization, and seeing its soil and its livestock deteriorating daily while its population increases at an unprecedented rate, is constantly inclined to remind Europe of the two continents’ common origin and of their unequal situation in regard of their exploitation of a common heritage. Europe must reconcile herself to the fact that Asia has the same material and moral claims upon her that Europe often asserts she herself has upon the United States. If Europe considers she has rights vis-à-vis the New World whose civilization comes from hers, she should never forget that those rights can only be based on historical and moral foundations which create for her, in return, very heavy duties towards a world from which she herself was born."

- Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar

"[Scott Atran] firmly positions himself within a neo-Darwinian framework, but equally firmly distances himself from the militant atheists associated with that intellectual tendency. Religion bonds groups together and this, he says, provides crucial adaptive advantage in the long history of human evolution. The first part of this claim will be familiar to anyone with nodding acquaintance of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. The second part would be more striking if we could think of examples of human societies without either religion, or religion-like structures of ritual and value, and having identified a suitable example then found ways to trace its evolutionarily ordained decline and fall. In the absence of such examples the appeal to natural selection begins to look somewhat tautological. “Islamic terrorism” is not the product of a tightly-knit, hierarchically structured organization with a master-plan for world domination. Rather we are confronted with local clusters of enthusiasts, usually in tightly bound networks of kinship and friendship."

Talking to the Enemy

"My body is in Cuba, but my soul is in Africa. It's the African soul that nurtures my body here in Cuba."

They Are We

Kopš 2011. gada politiskajiem nemieriem Ēģiptē masveidā tiek izlaupītas kapenes.

The tomb raiding threatens some of Egypt's — and the world's — most revered and valuable heritage sites, many of which have never been properly studied or catalogued, experts say. A few experts privately accuse the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of President Mohamed Morsy of ignoring the threat.

Some Islamist religious leaders have contributed to the frenzy by ordering “pagan” antiquities to be destroyed, or issuing directives on the “correct” Islamic way to loot them [...]

Looted objects are sold in dirt-poor villages near sites such as Abu Sir al Malaq; others go to wealthy collectors, particularly in the United States, Europe, Japan and the Middle East, experts say.

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