Male–male relationships in chimpanzees and the evolution of human pair bonds

The evolution of monogamy has been a central question in biological anthropology. An important avenue of research has been comparisons across “socially monogamous” mammals, but such comparisons are inappropriate for understanding human behavior because humans are not “pair living” and are only sometimes “monogamous.” It is the “pair bond” between reproductive partners that is characteristic of humans and has been considered unique to our lineage. I argue that pair bonds have been overlooked in one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. These pair bonds are not between mates but between male “friends” who exhibit enduring and emotional social bonds. The presence of such bonds in male–male chimpanzees raises the possibility that pair bonds emerged earlier in our evolutionary history. I suggest pair bonds first arose as “friendships” and only later, in the human lineage, were present between mates. The mechanisms for these bonds were co-opted for male-female bonds in humans.     

Correlations between measures of thermal stress resistance within and between species

Resistance to an environmental stress such as elevated temperature can almost always be measured in several different ways. A number of recent studies in Drosophila show that lethal and non-lethal measures of resistance to heat stress are genetically independent. In contrast, data reported here suggest that there are interspecific correlations between measures of thermal stress resistance. Together, these results show that studies of intraspecific variation in stress resistance must demonstrate the ecological relevance of the measures of stress resistance chosen for study. In contrast, interspecific comparisons could be based on any of several measures of resistance. It would be interesting to determine if this pattern holds for resistance to other major environmental stresses.     

Random Mind: Towards an Appreciation of Openness in Individual,Society and Anthropology

Gregory Bateson laid stress on treating anthropology as a ‘non‐specialist’ subject which would draw upon, and hence illuminate the interdependence of, all the human sciences in its endeavour to tackle what he called the `vast intricacies' of socio‐cultural complexity. What was called for was an ‘abductive’ project which would qualitatively or aesthetically identify certain vital `patterns' which connected different arenas of human experience. By this means, anthropology could hope to disinter specific sociological and psychological laws. In the manner of Bateson, this paper sets out to describe and isolate one such law: the random workings of the individual human mind. These workings are considered abductively across a range of different but related discourses: ethnographic, aesthetic, political and moral. It is argued that to appreciate the randomness of the individual mind is to gain important insight not only into the diversity of human culture and society but also the singularity of human being. An appreciation of human randomness and its ramifications, it is concluded, may serve as the basis not only of explanation but also a sense of moral value and beauty in anthropological analysis.     

Reconciling “stress” and “health” in physical anthropology: What can bioarchaeologists learn from the other subdisciplines?

The concepts of “stress” and “health” are foundational in physical anthropology as guidelines for interpreting human behavior and biocultural adaptation in the past and present. Though related, stress and health are not coterminous, and while the term “health” encompasses some aspects of “stress,” health refers to a more holistic condition beyond just physiological disruption, and is of considerable significance in contributing to anthropologists' understanding of humanity's lived experiences. Bioarchaeological interpretations of human health generally are made from datasets consisting of skeletal markers of stress, markers that result from (chronic) physiological disruption (e.g., porotic hyperostosis; linear enamel hypoplasia). Non-specific indicators of stress may measure episodes of stress and indicate that infection, disease, or nutritional deficiencies were present in a population, but in assessing these markers, bioarchaeologists are not measuring “health” in the same way as are human biologists, medical anthropologists, or primatologists. Rather than continue to diverge on separate (albeit parallel) trajectories, bioarchaeologists are advised to pursue interlinkages with other subfields within physical anthropology toward bridging “stress” and “health.” The papers in this special symposium set include bioarchaeologists, human biologists, molecular anthropologists, and primatologists whose research develops this link between the concepts of “stress” and “health,” encouraging new avenues for bioarchaeologists to consider and reconsider health in past human populations. Am J Phys Anthropol 155:181–185, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Anthropology and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Discourse on the Definition and Ideals of a Threatened Discipline

The knowledge practices of social and cultural anthropology can be conceived as undergoing constant methodological reconsideration or reformulation as a consequence of internal critique and of institutional change effected in the larger educational and political environment. Neo‐liberal shifts affecting the institutional context may have influenced a deepening of the crisis in anthropology where the nature of its project has become less certain or has threatened a reconfiguration of such proportion that anthropology may be losing sight of its direction. This essay explores some of the Enlightenment roots of social and cultural anthropology. It is presented as very much an idea that embodies and reflects what Adorno and Horkheimer discussed as the dialectic of Enlightenment. The argument presented is less pessimistic claiming that the distinction of anthropology is in its pursuit of Enlightenment ideals that it has maintained and rehoned as a consequence of its own routine internal critique. The vital implication of the discussion is that anthropology is in a situation of serious threat in largely a post‐Enlightenment world. In such a context, the methodological ideals that emerged as integral to the spirit of anthropology are well worth maintaining rather than abandoning. The ideals that are addressed are conceived to be integral to the importance of anthropology as critique and as a knowledge practice capable of sustaining a profound contribution to the understanding of the potential that is human being.     

Physical Anthropology: The Search for General Processes and Principles

Physical anthropology consists of two interdependent types of study: (1) the biological history of man and (2) general biological processes in man (such as mechanisms of evolution and growth). Popular interest may focus on the former, the fascinating story of the origin of man and of specific people, but the latter affords physical anthropology potential practical value in respect to medicine, dentistry, public health, and population policy. The study of general processes is the study of human beings in particular situations, not for what we can learn about these particular populations but for the sake of generalization about mankind anywhere in comparable situations. This is, of course, the purpose of experimental science in general, but in anthropology the method is usually comparative. Long ago the study of the growth of the two sexes and of children in different countries was started on a comparative basis as was the study of the so-called secular change in adult stature. By 1911 Franz Boas had compared the changes in stature and head form of children of several different immigrant groups in the United States. There have since been comparative studies of the amount and distribution of body fat (but not yet adequate comparative measurements of the relation of tissue components to diet and to diseases). Demographic patterns, inbreeding, outbreeding, and their effects are other general problems. The Human Adaptability Project of the International Biological Program promises studies of human response to heat, cold, altitude, and other conditions on a wide international basis. If supported, these could turn physical anthropology's search in a useful direction. The functional biology of people of even out-of-the-way communities will be compared with each other. These studies can yield general statements concerning human response to types of ecological situation including such sociocultural conditions as those of hunting-gathering tribes and urban slums.     

Anthropologies of art

This paper discusses how different conceptions of the idea of ‘anthropology’ entail different views of the ‘anthropology of art’. The prevailing notion of anthropology as the Western study of small-scale non-Western societies leads to a conception of the anthropology of art as dealing with the visual arts of these societies or cultures. Anthropology is sometimes also interpreted as referring to a particular approach that is applicable in examining sociocultural phenomena in whatever culture, including its art forms. Both conceptions of anthropology may be considered subsidiary to a more encompassing view of anthropology as the multidisciplinary study of humankind. Following this view, the anthropology of art becomes the comprehensive examination of art in human existence. As such it would coincide with World Art Studies, conceived as the global and multidisciplinary study of the visual arts.     

New thinking: the evolution of human cognition

Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation. Research on the evolution of human cognition asks what types of thinking make us such peculiar animals, and how they have been generated by evolutionary processes. New research in this field looks deeper into the evolutionary history of human cognition, and adopts a more multi-disciplinary approach than earlier 'Evolutionary Psychology'. It is informed by comparisons between humans and a range of primate and non-primate species, and integrates findings from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. Using these methods, recent research reveals profound commonalities, as well striking differences, between human and non-human minds, and suggests that the evolution of human cognition has been much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed. It accords crucial roles to cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene-culture co-evolution. These have produced domain-general developmental processes with extraordinary power-power that makes human cognition, and human lives, unique.     

Modernizing Evolutionary Anthropology

Evolutionary anthropology has traditionally focused on the study of small-scale, largely self-sufficient societies. The increasing rarity of these societies underscores the importance of such research yet also suggests the need to understand the processes by which such societies are being lost—what we call “modernization”—and the effects of these processes on human behavior and biology. In this article, we discuss recent efforts by evolutionary anthropologists to incorporate modernization into their research and the challenges and rewards that follow. Advantages include that these studies allow for explicit testing of hypotheses that explore how behavior and biology change in conjunction with changes in social, economic, and ecological factors. In addition, modernization often provides a source of “natural experiments” since it may proceed in a piecemeal fashion through a population. Challenges arise, however, in association with reduced variability in fitness proxies such as fertility, and with the increasing use of relatively novel methodologies in evolutionary anthropology, such as the analysis of secondary data. Confronting these challenges will require careful consideration but will lead to an improved understanding of humanity. We conclude that the study of modernization offers the prospect of developing a richer evolutionary anthropology, by encompassing ultimate and proximate explanations for behavior expressed across the full range of human societies.     

Emotion (or Life,the Universe,Everything)

Emotions are fundamental to human life; they define its quality and motivate action. In the past, social scientists who have studied emotions have treated them as biological, cultural or social phenomena. These approaches have tended to fall on either side of the culturally recognised division between nature and culture, and so have failed to recognise that emotions bridge this division, that they are thought of as both biological and cultural, as consisting of both physical feeling and cultural meaning. In this article, an alternative approach is presented in which emotions are treated as ecological mechanisms that operate in the relationship between an individual human being and their environment. In this approach, which draws on models of emotion proposed by William James and Antonio Damasio, emotions connect individual human beings to their surroundings and play an important role in learning. A focus on the individual as the centre of analytical attention—often referred to as ‘methodological individualism’—is a logical consequence of the ecological approach to emotion, which also has significant implications for the relationships between ecological anthropology and other branches of the discipline, and between anthropology and other disciplines. In the face of an ecological understanding of emotion, all relations, including social relations, become ecological and social anthropology melts into and is subsumed by ecological anthropology. At the same time, anthropology tends to lose its distinctiveness from biology, psychology and other disciplines by focusing on a phenomenon that is of common interest to all the human sciences.     

The Contribution of Medical Anthropology to a Comparative Study of Culture: Susto and Tuberculosis

Results of studies of the popular illness susto and the biomedical entity pulmonary tuberculosis are offered to illustrate how comparisons of sick and well people can elucidate societal processes in cultural anthropology.     

Nonparametric tests for two-group comparisons of dependent observations obtained at varying time points

We propose new tests for two-group comparisons of repeated measures of a response where the repeated measures might be obtained at arbitrary time points that differ over individuals. The tests are almost U-statistics in that the kernel contains some unknown parameters that need to be estimated from the data. Our methods are designed for settings in which response means of one group are strictly greater than the response means of the other group. The tests do not make any assumptions regarding the distribution of the repeated measures except that one of the tests assumes that the repeated measures can be grouped into distinct periods of observations (e.g., around fixed follow-up time points) such that the covariance between scores only depends on the periods the observations belong to and that the covariance matrices are the same in the two groups. The tests are valid even if the probability that a response is observed depends on the level of response provided that the missing data mechanism is the same in both groups. Inference can conveniently be based on resampling. We provide asymptotic results for the test statistics. We investigate size and power of the tests and use them to assess differences in viral load decline for drug-resistant and drug-sensitive human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 infected patients.     

Evidence for turnover of functional noncoding DNA in mammalian genome evolution

The vast majority of the mammalian genome does not code for proteins, and a fundamental question in genomics is: What proportion of the noncoding mammalian genome is functional? Most attempts to address this issue use sequence comparisons between highly diverged mammals such as human and mouse to identify conservation due to negative selection. But such comparisons will underestimate the true proportion of functional noncoding DNA if there is turnover, if patterns of negative selection change over time. Here we test whether the inferred level of negative selection differs between different pairwise species comparisons. Using a multiple alignment of more than a megabase of contiguous sequence from eight mammalian species, we find a strong negative relationship between inferred levels of negative selection and pairwise divergence using 21 pairwise comparisons. This result suggests that there is a high rate of turnover of functional noncoding elements in the mammalian genome, so measures of functional constraint based on human-mouse comparisons may seriously underestimate the true value.     

Physical anthropology,peace and justice: Some observations

Human biological well being is a concern of physical anthropology. Genetic determinants and also sociocultural factors, which operate through biological bases, affect human biological quality. Several populations from different parts of the globe have been identified where varieties of detrimental genes occur in considerable numbers influencing health and some other related biological aspects of human life. Injustice will be done to those populations if necessary measures are not undertaken to improve their biological qualities. Peace cannot prevail in an atmosphere where people are deprived of the basic amenities for survival and maintenance of good health.     

Trait variability and stress: canalization, developmental stability and the need for a broad approach

Trait variability (particularly fluctuating asymmetry) may provide a general measure of environmental stress applicable across taxa but consistent empirical support is lacking. Historically, stress effects were considered to act independently on trait canalization, developmental noise and trait size. However, in trait comparisons these processes are often assumed to be associated. Here we reconsider this issue and implications for detecting stress effects using trait variability. Published studies that consider multiple environments report little association between the effects of environmental variation on trait canalization and on developmental noise measured as fluctuating asymmetry, sug-gesting that environmental effects often act independently on these processes. To further test the usefulness of trait variability as an indicator of stress, comparisons across environ-ments should take a broad approach and report on several measures of trait variability, rather than focusing on only one index of fluctuating asymmetry as is commonly done.     

Humanity at the Edge: The Moral Laboratory of Feeding Precarious Lives

At the heart of anthropology and the social sciences lies a notion of human existence according to which humans and animals share the basic need for food, but only humans have the capacity for morality. Based on fieldwork in a pig laboratory, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and a dementia nursing home, we follow practices of feeding precarious lives lacking most markers of human personhood, including the exercise of moral judgment. Despite the absence of such markers, laboratory researchers and caregivers in these three sites do not abstain from engaging in questions about the moral status of the piglets, infants, and people with dementia in their care. They continually negotiate how their charges belong to the human collectivity and thereby challenge the notion of ‘the human’ that is foundational to anthropology. Combining analytical approaches that do not operate with a fixed boundary between human and animal value and agency with approaches that focus on human experience and virtue ethics, we argue that ‘the human’ at stake in the moral laboratory of feeding precarious lives puts ‘the human’ in anthropology at disposal for moral experimentation.     

In Memoriam

A key element of the self‐critique in contemporary anthropology centres on the idea that categories such as culture and society have exaggerated human differences. This paper argues that the work of Anthony Cohen, which has attempted to frame “localities” as a new anthropological object, can be criticized on similar grounds. A close reading of Cohen's theoretical and ethnographic writings shows that the “anthropology of locality”, while claiming to be a critique of nationalhomogenization, in fact replicates ata lower level of scale features of the national units. Consideration of this particular example of the exaggeration of (local) difference, moreover, occasions reflection on the wider critique of generalization within anthropology.     

Deconstructing the Animal Image: Toward an Anthropology of Animals

Abstract

Natural science tends to reduce animals to parts, ignoring such characteristics as “inwardness,” ideas, and culture. The social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology, generally confine themselves to human subjects. Even those who study human-animal interactions tend to view animals as passive objects that are acted upon or thought and felt about. Scholars in the humanities assume that sociality and culture do not exist outside the human realm. The author calls for the development of a true anthropology of animals that studies and elucidates, to the extent possible, the animal Other.     

生物人类学和人体组成学的渊源关系

随着人体组成学中文版的发行和人体组成测量培训班在中国的举行, 中国生物人类学家对人体组成测量方法在科研中的运用有了更大的兴趣。该文对人类学家,如Jindr?ich Matiegka和Stanley MarionGarn在人体组成学发展中的历史贡献做了基本的介绍。此外, 作者还以Garn博士的工作为例, 去激励中国生物人类学家开展人体组成学的研究工作。文章讨论了人体组成成分的测量方法在生物人类学中的用途, 并介绍了人体组成学的基本理论和概念及近年来人体组成学的变化: 如影像技术的发展, 影像技术作为"金标准"对评估其他人体组成测量方法的用途, 双能量x线吸收法的优势, 生物电阻分析法的广泛运用, 和多种人体组成测量方法相辅相成的现象。作者对常用的人体组成测量方法的优缺点做了比较, 并指出人体组成成分测量是人体测量方法的自然延续, 人体组成学和生物人类学的关系渊源已久; 因此中国人类学家应当更多地利用人体组成测量方法对人体差异做更深入的研究, 并注重人体差异同健康疾病和生物医学的关系, 以便让生物人类学更好地为当今社会服务。     

Genes, Tribes, and African History

Over the past 40 years, traditional perspectives on the constitution of human groups have been subjected to stringent critique within anthropology. This began with the dismantling of accepted "race" divisions after World War II and continued with analyses of the meaning and reality of African "tribal" distinctions from the 1960s until the present. Archaeologists, ethnographers, linguists, and historians of Africa now work within a research milieu where social interactions, cultural exchange, and the dynamic nature of group identifications are accepted as a normal part of the human experience. At the same time, new techniques have been developed for the examination of human history, techniques based upon an expanding repertoire of tools for the analysis of genetic variability in human populations. Perhaps the most striking result of this research has been Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza's The History and Geography of Human Genes. Rather less attention has been paid, however, to the conceptual relationships between the human groups defined through such analyses, in Africa and elsewhere, and those defined through other kinds of research. This paper is a preliminary examination of the fit between genetic, archaeological, and ethnographic data on the African past.