Previous: The Path to Keatley Creek After studying stone tool fabrication and use with the aborigines in Australia, Brian Hayden returned to the University of Toronto to complete work on his doctorate. One summer he was given a contract for a dig where a new airport was planned. "There was basically an undisturbed village in the Pickering area in the way of the runway", he said. "I got the contract to do the excavation before they put in the runway. At that location I became very interested in long houses as social and economic phenomena. We called them corporate groups at the time, ... Read More
Charting Genomes: Old Hairs Create New Headaches
September 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Nearly a century ago in the outback of southwestern Australia, an eminent English anthropologist snipped off a dreadlock from an Aborigine at a fuel stop along the just-built transcontinental railroad. The 20 red to brown hairs in that clay-encrusted clump now have produced a genetic profile that researchers say defines how some of the first modern humans populated the world. The ancient DNA links Aborigines to one of the earliest groups of Homo sapiens, a group that had left Africa about 70,000 years ago, then lived in the Middle East before spreading east. A Danish-led team reports ... Read More
Law of the Jungle: Powerful Men Have More Children
August 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Two generations after the beginning of the feminist revolution, men still dominate positions of power in the United States. Why are men still over-represented in corporate board rooms, halls of government, and other places where decisions are made? One reason might be that men are evolutionarily programmed to seek positions of high status, as a means of upping their reproductive output. In the podcast, Christopher von Rueden, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, talks about his research into the connections between status and reproduction among the Tsimane, an ... Read More
Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth
May 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America’s first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced. But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the ... Read More
Forensics in Three Dimensions
August 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
On a clear, cool Monday morning in the fall of 1998, a worker mowing beneath a highway billboard in Orange County, N.C., spotted a pair of white sneakers. Hesitating, he moved closer. Then he saw the bones. It didn't take long for detectives to swarm the area, cordoning off the badly decomposed body. What they had found upset them all: The remains belonged to a child. An autopsy concluded the remains were from a boy between 10 and 12 years old, but there were no reports of a missing child of that age in the area. Twelve years later, the police still hadn't identified the boy, so Tim ... Read More
The Scrutable Asian
March 18, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Jack Bauer, after all, tortures past this difference. And so it was a little bit of a surprise when I saw a recent episode of a new Fox show called Lie to Me. In the show, Tim Roth stars as Dr. Cal Lightman, who spent years in various far-off tribal places and has returned with a deep knowledge of facial expressions. He is able to detect lies by matching up emotions such as anger, fear and disgust to corresponding facial movements. He uses this skill to help various crime-fighting agencies. An interesting premise. (A show based on a savant truth teller who helps the police is not new. ... Read More
