Through her writings and the collaborative curatorial platform Feral Atlas, the anthropologist is offering new ways of imagining – and representing – our relationship to nature

Computer-generated imagery is supposed to be one of the success stories of computer science. Starting in the 1970s, the algorithms for realistically depicting digital worlds were developed in a monumental joint effort between academic, commercial and federal research labs.

In the 2010s, Hitler memes and “ironic” racism filled the internet. What if we had taken them seriously? Updated at 4:00 a.m. ET on Oct. 4, 2020.

Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed.

Nicola Davis speaks to Prof Jean-Jacques Hublin about new archaeological discoveries which reveal that modern humans co-existed with Neanderthals for several thousand years

https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2020/may/28/when-did-modern-humans-first-arrive-in-europe-podcast

When humans started to tame dogs, cats, sheep, and cattle, they may have continued a tradition that started with a completely different animal: us.

For David Reich, research can be a harrowing experience. The 44-year-old Harvard University geneticist says he now goes to bed terrified he will wake up to find his team’s recent, stunning discoveries about human ancestry have been proved wrong.

It is no scoop for anyone that many academic disciplines were born in Europe during the Age of Empires. It is certainly the case of Classics and other Antiquity-related specialities. It is, also, the case of Anthropology.

Researchers who studied the bones of Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, say their findings should end a popular theory that it evolved from an ancestor of modern humans.

Diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study published Monday that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.

Note Due to technical issues, Solon Barocas' presentation 'The Alterity of Algorithms' was not recorded.

.Presider Sara M. Watson .Hashmod Ava Kofman

Daniel Rourke: Synthetic Subjects Natalie Kane: Ghost Stories Nick Seaver: Traps: Algorithms and the Anthropology of Technology

Explorers happened upon the bones after squeezing through a fissure high up in the rear wall of the Rising Star cave, 50km from Johannesburg, before descending down a long, narrow chute to the chamber floor 40 metres beneath the surface.

Earlier this month, scientists working in South Africa made an exciting announcement: They had discovered a new species of human ancestor.

It was the 18th-century scientist Carolus Linnaeus that laid the foundations for modern biological taxonomy. It was also Linnaeus who argued for the existence of Homo troglodytes, a primitive people said to inhabit the caves of an Indonesian archipelago.

Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance.

Fossils and artefacts pulled from the Grotte du Renne cave in central France present anthropologists with a Pleistocene puzzle. Strewn among the remains of prehistoric mammals are the bones of Neanderthals, along with bladelets, bone points and body ornaments belonging to what archaeologists call the Châtelperronian culture. Such complex artefacts are often attributed to modern humans, but a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Neanderthals created the objects in imitation of their Homo sapiens neighbors1.

How the Grotte du Renne deposit formed has important implications for how we view our extinct sister species. If Neanderthals left the assemblage, then they were capable of a degree of symbolic behaviour thought to be unique to humans.

The remains and artefacts were found together during excavations between 1949 and 1963, but they were not necessarily deposited at the same time. In 2010, Thomas Higham, an archaeologist at the University of

team of archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and paleoartists has created a more accurate Neanderthal reconstruction, based on a nearly complete skeleton discovered in France more than 100 years ago. The La Ferrassie Neanderthal man was short but stocky. If a modern man came nose-to-nose with a Neanderthal, could he take him in a fight? Possibly. A Neanderthal would have a clear power advantage over his Homo sapiens opponent. Many of the Neanderthals archaeologists have recovered had Popeye forearms, possibly the result of a life spent stabbing wooly mammoths and straight-tusked elephants to death and dismantling their carcasses. Neanderthals also developed strong trapezius, deltoid, and tricep muscles by dragging 50 pounds of meat 30 miles home to their families. A Neanderthal had a wider pelvis and lower center of gravity than Homo sapiens, which would have made him a powerful grappler. That doesn’t mean, however, that we would be an easy kill for our extinct relative. Homo sapiens

To what extent do the material components (e.g. hardware, source code, network protocols) and properties (e.g. speed, malleability, erasability) of digital technology influence the methodologies one might employ to study it? Is there a specific “ethnographic toolkit” that is particularly well-suited for studying the digital form and related socio-cultural phenomena?

A chorus of smart, modern minds is rising over the hills of anthropology that the ancient Neanderthals of Europe weren't anywhere nearly as dumb, insufferable and unrecognizable as everyone thought all these years. At long last, these creatures who roamed the Continent for hundreds of thousands of years only to become extinct 30,000 years ago under the onslaught of modern humans from Africa are getting a major upgrade by the scientific community.

No more can we say that old Neanderthal -- prototype of shaggy man with absolutely zero smarts -- didn't know what he was doing. And no more can we deny it: They were not a little bit like us but a lot. As Professor David Frayer, Neanderthal expert at the University of Kansas, puts it, with not a little hint of told-you-so scientific glee, "Seemingly with every new journal issue, the gap between Neanderthal and modern human behavior closes."