Anthropologist. PI Human Systems and Behavior Lab. Co-Director of the Omo Valley Research Project @theOVRP
Nyangatom, Ethiopia
Joined August 2018
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If this is true, then it has big implications for how we should understand academic debates. I don't think the Academy can deal with this kind of external PR.
Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media.
Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy".
This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble.
This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this.
law360.com/articles/2542517/…
Fascinating: Mayan burial practice where teeth of elites were sometimes separated from the rest of the body and buried around another body over a period of centuries. I don't think i have encountered another similar practice anywhere. science.org/content/article/… @ScienceMagazine
Got to love those culture bound syndromes; in this case Canadian lumberjacks who jump and flail about when they are startled or surprised. Nice readable review below.
NEW ESSAY — “Men with Queer Nerves”: Ross Bullen on the odd phenomenon of “Jumping Frenchmen”, French-Canadian lumberjacks in 19th-c Maine who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out w/ their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak: publicdomainreview.org/essay…
I only keep books i may want to look at again or that made enough of an impact i would like to gift to the right person. Perfectly okay to donate them. Used books at second hand shops is how many people start their library.
New paper shows epidemics of plague among hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago, likely from eating marmot. Suggests that high population densities may not be as important for epidemics such as the Black Death.
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
I did an MA in philosophy, one of the best decisions of my life. Two years years honing my critical thinking and exploring big questions.
Everyone knows that hunting in chimpanzees is mostly by males. But in bonobos, much of the hunting is by females!! Large implications for thinking about the origins of hunting in humans. cell.com/current-biology/ful…
I am sure there are sites that have high frequencies but as a generalization 5-10% seems extraordinarily high.
Thanks Ed. "However, both this author and
a number of colleagues experienced in palaeopathology have found that none of them seem to present convincing evidence of skull surgery."
As far as I can tell, the claim that 5-10% of skulls are trepanated is wildly inflated and comes from a single non-empirical paper. Anyone have more reliable estimates?
"...why do 5-10% of skulls from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC, all over the world, have holes in them?"
"When did the Western world give up belief in the classical good-for-everything version of trepanation? I can’t tell for sure, but it seems to have been sometime between 2015 and 2020..."
astralcodexten.com/p/why-glo…
Luke Glowacki retweeted
For Halloween, article by @evornithology.... popsci.com/science/vampire-b…
Hard to believe there was a time when @amazon sent out book marks with their book orders. Found these in some books I was given, dated to 2001.
I'm excited about LLMs for peer reviews, seems like they can improve on some of the problems with the review pipeline.
Anyone else concerned that with LLMs it's going to be easy to out anonymous peer reviewers when their reviews are published online. More journals are moving to this with no options for reviewers to opt out. I see the upside but think anonymity is good for the review process.
A few years ago i stumbled on ethnographic films of people spear hunting elephants (metal spears). Terrifying but also looked effective.
I'm teaching intro to human evolution in the spring and both exhilarated and terrified given how much and how fast we are learning about our complex origins.
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Luke Glowacki retweeted
Honey bees inject venom with a two-stroke stinger.
Learn more: scim.ag/4yXrVF5 @NewsfromScience
Luke Glowacki retweeted
Big news! Our new book, "Making the Modern Laboratory," is now available for pre-order. It is a stunning, 504-page hardcover book that explains how the research laboratory, and everything in it, came to be.
Did you know that the modern micropipette was invented by a German postdoc so frustrated with mouth pipetting that he ditched his lab for two days until could return with a prototype?
Or that an 18th-century scientist sewed tiny taffeta pants for male frogs to determine whether or not semen was essential for fertilization?
These stories and hundreds more are told in the book, which has a hard cloth cover and is printed in full color on Arena Natural Rough, a textured, uncoated paper made by Fedrigoni. The book is also finished with colored endpapers, thread-sewn binding, and a squared spine. It is priced at $49 and worth every penny.
Learn more and order: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…
