“These are icons designed by Liu Yang, a Chinese born but educated in her teen through adult life in Germany.  Her work shows how East meets West.  Her work fits so well with globalization of culture, people and places.

See whether you agree with her.”

badethnography:

When I teach qualitative research methods the first assignment involves a participant-observation exercise in public spaces and I encourage students to disrupt those settings, at the very least by asking questions, but even better by participating in ways that provoke a response in others. For the very brave these may become what Garfinkel calls “breaching experiments” where behavior is strategically designed to go beyond the realm of acceptable or predictable. The idea is that one can reveal some of the inner-workings of social interaction in the way those subject to such behavior try to resolve and make sense of what is, essentially, senseless. I like to show this flash mob – Frozen in Grand Central – in my class to illustrate the point. (Read More)

(Source: a-small-lab)

“Although meat is said to be the most highly prized category of food in the majority of human cultures, it is also, according to a recent ethnographic survey, “vastly more likely to be the target of food taboos,” than any other type of edible substance.[1] People throughout the world display strong aversions to killing and consuming particular animals, and the choice of which animals to proscribe varies unpredictably from culture to culture, and from place to place.

Professor James Serpell

The origin of these taboos has been one of the central preoccupations of anthropologists for more than a century, and the debate has gradually polarized into two opposing factions. On one side it is argued that restrictions on eating certain animals exist because there are (or there were in the not too distant past) sound practical, health-related or ecological reasons for such restrictions.[2] In the other camp, it is proposed that particular animals are not eaten because they have acquired various symbolic connotations that render their consumption unacceptable: For example, an animal might be tabooed because it combines anomalous or non-prototypical features—such as the pig’s cloven hooves combined with its failure to chew the cud—that somehow make it unpalatable.[3] Or the animal may symbolize the social group itself, and not eating it thus becomes a kind of gastronomic metaphor for exogamy,[4] or simply an expression of the structural workings of the ‘the savage mind’.[5] Rather than attempting to critique these various ideas, the purpose of this essay is merely to propose an alternative theory: That cultural proscriptions against eating particular animals represent a form of psychological coping mechanism that serves to dilute and displace individual moral responsibility for the killing and consumption of animals in general. Allow me to explain.

…”

Abstract:

“The dominant view in today’s evolutionary psychology is that our instincts were stamped into our DNA during the infamous EEA, “The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.” This is generally reckoned as a roughly two and a half million-year hunter-gatherer phase that ended before the climax of the last Ice Age. Since then, our genetically preprogrammed heritage has supposedly been locked in stone (or better yet, in an amino acid code). We are, so says the current argument, tribal hunter-gatherers decked out in modern clothes.

However a strong case can be made for the possibility that human biology has continued to evolve during the ten thousand years since Jericho’s builders erected the first city walls. Genes change far more speedily than most evolutionary psychologists realize. Natural selection has had 400 generations to rework our bodies and our brains since the days when Catal Huyuk, Suberde, and Tepe Yahya joined Jericho’s mesh of intercity trade. Four thousand years before the rise of the Sumerian cities of Ur, Uruk, and Kish, Stone Age metropolises from Anatolia to the edges of India were already rich in challenges and opportunities. These urban traps and niches may well have been selectors forming much of what we are today. Homo urbanis has not only arrived, he has long since elbowed Homo tribalis far off to the side.”

shychemist:

Based on a hominid molar, scientists from Germany, Bulgaria and France have documented that great apes survived in Europe in savannah-like landscapes until seven million years ago.

A seven million year old pre-molar of a hominid discovered near the Bulgarian town of Chirpan documents that great apes survived longer in Europe than previously believed. An international team of scientists from the Bulgarian Academy of Science, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen was involved in the project. The new discovery may cause a revision in our understanding of some major steps in hominid evolution.

To date scientists have assumed that great apes went extinct in Europe at least 9 million years ago because of changing climatic and environmental conditions. Under the direction of Nikolai Spassov from the National Museum of Natural Science in Sofia, Bulgaria, the molar was discovered in Upper Miocene fluvial sediments near Chirpan. The morphology and the great thickness of the tooth enamel point to a hominid fossil. The age of the fossiliferous sands at 7 million years reveals the fossil to be most recent known great ape from continental Europe.

Until now, the most recent fossil was that of a 9.2 million year old specimen of Ouranopithecus macedonensis from Greece. Hominids therefore were thought to have disappeared from Europe prior to 9 million years ago. At this time, European terrestrial ecosystems had been changed from mostly evergreen and lush forests to savannah-like landscapes with a seasonal climate. It had been thought that great apes, which typically consume fruits, were unable to survive this change due to a seasonal deficiency of fruits.

The scientists found animals typical of a savannah in the fossil-bearing layer: several species of elephants, giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, rhinos, and saber-toothed cats. This discovery suggests that European hominids were able to adapt to the seasonal climate of a savannah-like ecosystem. This conclusion is further corroborated by electron microscope analysis of the tooth’s masticatory surface, which reveals that the Bulgarian hominid had consumed hard and abrasive objects like grass, seeds, and nuts. In this respect, the feeding behavior of this animal resembles that of later African hominids from about 4 million years ago (e.g. australopithecids like ‘Lucy’).

“We now also need to rethink where the origin of humans took place,” says Professor Madelaine Böhme of the University of Tübingen. So far, most scientists believe that human evolution happened exclusively in Africa and that humans migrated from Africa to other continents. “There is increasing evidence, however, that a significant part of human evolution happened outside Africa, in Europe and western Asia.”

That migration plays a major role in early hominid evolution was documented by paleontologists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment in June 2011, when they presented an early Eurasian hominid. A further piece to the puzzle had furthermore been an isolated molar tooth excavated southwest of Sigmaringen, Germany, and dated to 17 million years ago. The Tübingen group of paleoclimatologists led by Böhme reconstructed the climate at this time and demonstrated that great apes dispersed at this time under a tropical-subtropical and humid climate from Africa into Europe. Together, both investigations document an at least 10 million year lasting population of great apes in Europe and a significant evolution from fruit-eaters to harder object feeders.

ohsoanthropological:

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The Neanderthal DNA that Svante Pääbo analyzed came from these three bones.

The…