Most ancient Europeans had dark skin until 3,000 years ago, study finds

Dark skin was widespread across the continent for a considerably longer period of time than previously believed, according to a DNA study that has completely changed our perception of the appearance of ancient Europeans. In the study, 348 ancient human genomes from people who lived between 45,000 and 1,700 years ago were examined..

More information: https://archaeologymag.com/2025/03/most-ancient-europeans-had-dark-skin/

Follow @archaeology

#archaeology #anthropology

FREE community #fediscience, please BOOST!

TONIGHT
Everybody welcome, just turn up!
LIVE @UCLAnthropology and on ZOOM

🌔Tues Mar 11, 6:30pm (London UTC)🌕
Chris Knight on
'On women and jaguars: why perspectivism got it so wrong'

Across Amazonia, myths hold that in early times it was the jaguars, parrots, tapirs and other animals who first invented bows and arrows, cooking fire, ceremonial buildings, religious ceremonies and other complex cultural accomplishments. Then humans stole these things from the animals, elevating themselves above all other creatures – but at the cost of losing their former ability to engage in easy conversation with the animal world. This mythic view of our origins is the reverse of the Darwinian narrative which our own culture holds up as science.

In this talk, #ChrisKnight will introduce a recent trend in social anthropology – known as ‘perspectivism’ – and discuss whether such radically different ways of perceiving our origins and place in nature can be made to converge.

Chris will be speaking LIVE in the Daryll Forde, 2nd Floor of UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW. Come in good time by 6:30pm before doors close please. You can also join on ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak

#Amazon #perspectivism #anthropology #ritual #animism #alterity #femaleinitiation #gender

In the Central Peruvian Sierra, one ritual has been performed since the 16th century. The "Dance of the Conquest" mixes together masses, processions, banquets, dances through the community, at the intersection of religion and politics.

Combining ethnography and history, Isabel Yaya McKenzie offers, in this layered article, a fascinating reflection on #longuedurée, #memory, and lived temporalities.

➡️ Isabel YAYA McKENZIE, Dimensions of Time in a Ritual Drama: A Historical Anthropology of a “Conquest Dance” in the Central Peruvian Sierra from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century

👉 https://doi.org/10.1017/ahsse.2024.16

@histodons #histodons #AnnalesinEnglish #andes #peru #anthropo #anthropology #anthropodons #colonial #conquest #incas

Does our heart and circulatory #health necessarily decline with age? Not if we live like the #Tsimane

'Horus Group scientists who had found heart disease in mummies would join with the Tsimane Project and analyse CT scans of the hearts of the Tsimane, an Indigenous tribe of about 17,000 people living in the lowland Bolivian jungle. They would find almost no heart disease. What’s more, continuing research with the Tsimane shows rates of dementia among the lowest ever observed, and they have only minimal cognitive impairment with ageing.'

#anthropology #amazon #ageing #Bolivia #foragerfarmers

https://aeon.co/essays/what-amazonian-lives-tell-us-about-heart-health-and-longevity

Get a grip human. Get over your bad bad self. Here's your location in the "circle of life":

"Scientists have created an updated version of the circle of life — showing everything we understand about how Earth's 2.3 million known species are related to one another."

More: https://today.duke.edu/2015/09/treeoflife #anthropology #humanchauvinism

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TONIGHT!!
Our Spring Term of Radical #Anthropology starts
6:30pm London time.

Everybody welcome, just turn up! LIVE or ZOOM

🌕Tues Jan 14 gregorian🌖 18:30 (London)
with #ChrisKnight and #JeromeLewis
LIVE @UCLanthropology + on ZOOM

'When Eve Laughed: The origins of language'
"Why, out of 220 primate species, are we the only one which talks? Laughter, too, is unique to our species. Although different from language, collective, contagious laughter may have set the scene for words + grammar to evolve by establishing the necessary bonds of trust. In addition to the latest archaeological research, this talk will draw on hunter-gatherer studies to show how men learn to communicate with birds and beasts and how women use laughter as a levelling device."

#humanorigins #language #ritual #symbolicculture

LIVE in the Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor of the UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW

ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak

Amazonian society that kept Pet Ducks!💝

"It’s unwise to romanticize any past society or culture... But when you encounter tales of garden cities linked by vast causeways... populated by people and their pet ducks, it can be a little hard not to indulge in daydreams about life there... Casarabe culture, who lived in the Llanos de Mojos region of the Bolivian Amazon between 500 and 1400, before the arrival of Europeans."

5,500-Year-Old Forest in Yellowstone
https://www.404media.co/an-5-500-year-old-forest-in-yellowstone-melted-out-of-the-ice/ #Anthropology

Anthropologists call for tracking and preservation of human artifacts on Mars—University of Kansas, Phys.org

#SpaceExploration #Anthropology
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-anthropologists-tracking-human-artifacts-mars.html

Indigenous tribes engineered British Columbia’s modern hazelnut forests 7000+ years ago
https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-tribes-engineered-british-columbia-s-modern-hazelnut-forests-more-7000-years

* genetic analysis
* could help First Nations secure land rights in Cdn courts
* actively cultivated crop
* transported hazelnuts 800 km
* cultivate nutritious/reliable food source in new regions

Genetic differentiation/precolonial Indigenous cultivation of hazelnut
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2402304121

#Canada #Indigenous #BC #BritishColumbia #cultivation #anthropology #LandRights

FREE community #fediscience, please BOOST!

This evening in London 🩸⬇️🩸⬇️
Everybody welcome, just turn up!
LIVE or ZOOM

🌔Tues Nov 12 18:30 🌕 (London UK)
with #DeniseArnold
LIVE @UCLanthropology
And on ZOOM

'Sea shells, women's blood and an Andean bioclimatology of water'

LIVE in the Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor of the UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW

ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak

Denise Arnold explores the mutual rearing practices between Andean populations and water, in its different manifestations, as a key life-giving element in their mountainous habitat. Andean animist ontologies recognise how humans and water flow are constituted mutually, through a dynamic relationality, which extends to other aquatic phenomena, including the sea-shell Spondylus princeps. This knowledge is learned and transmitted between the generations in the rites of passage of adolescent girls and boys, when they learn an interdependence with water, establish relations with water beings, and practice equivalences between their own blood flow and water flow.

Examined in this context are Inka rites of passage, a school ritual focused on learning about water flow, a female rite of passage when women learn to use particular designs and colours in their weavings, and a ritual offering of Spondylus to high mountain shrines. These practices are situated in the emerging discipline of bioclimatology.

Denise, an Anglo-Bolivian anthropologist, directs the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, in La Paz, Bolivia. She will be LIVE in the Daryll Forde, 2nd Floor, UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, WC1H 0BW. Please arrive by 6:30pm before doors close. Or join on ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak

#Andes #animism #ontology #morethanhuman #Aymara #Inka #anthropology

#Anthropology in a Time of Genocide: On #Nakba and Return

"As the essays in this series go to press, a genocidal war in #Gaza continues to escalate throughout Palestine and around the region. [..] In the face of this ongoing catastrophe, this Hot Spots series contributes to continued efforts to amplify and produce multi-dimensional and layered scholarship on #Palestine in regional perspective."

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/anthropology-in-a-time-of-genocide

#PalestineQuestion #oPt #ColonialViolence #MiddleEast

@palestine

"There’s a certain kind of person who likes to talk about Chesterton’s Fence, and who will tell you that you should obey tradition because, being the distillation of centuries of human experience, it encodes tacit knowledge and gives you truths you couldn’t possibly reach on your own. This person, whom we may call the utilitrad, is rarely from a society that burns its widows."

#JanePsmith

Touché.

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b

#traditionalism #anthropology #maladaptation #GKChesterton
#ThePsmiths

Next was a fascinating (and troubling) talk by Jason Porter on economic strategies and slavery in classical Athens at the School of Advanced Study, University of London https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD-ASfLDUwE (4/12) #history #Greece #anthropology #economics

Sometimes.
W.E.I.R.D.-ly.

"Even the highly cited examples of 150-people networks have been criticised as overwhelmingly skewed towards rich, educated, and industrialised societies, with non-western cultures rarely mentioned. Confirmation bias may well be a factor in the popularity and acceptance of Dunbar’s number."

https://oxsci.org/end-of-dunbars-number/

#sociology #psychology #anthropology #ecology #PopularScience #SocialNeworks #correlation #nuance #context #friendship #PopCulture #WEIRD