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The reconstruction and prioritization of masculinity in human evolution (and thus human nature) is often rooted in reference to other primates and the hominin fossil and archaeological record. And ...

An anthropological approach is needed to counter a rising chorus of biobabble about masculinities, maleness, and violence. Anthropological lenses enable us to examine what we know and what we do no...

Background: Leaving “home” to pursue fieldwork is a necessity but also a rite of passage for many biological anthropology/human biology scholars. Field-based scientists prepare for the potential changes to activity patterns, sleep schedules, social interactions, and more that come with going to the field. However, returning from extended fieldwork and the reverse-culture shock, discomforts, and mental shifts that are part of the return process can be jarring, sometimes traumatic experiences. A failure to acknowledge and address such experiences can compromise the health and wellbeing of those returning. Aims: We argue for an engaged awareness of the difficult nature of returning from the field and offer suggestions for individuals and programs to better train and prepare PhD students pursuing fieldwork. Materials & Methods: Here, we offer personal stories of "coming back" and give professional insights on how to best ready students and scholars for returning from fieldwork. Discussion/Conclusion: By bringing forward and normalizing the difficulty of the fieldwork-return process, we hope that this reflection acts as a tool for future scholars to prepare to come home as successfully and consciously as possible.

We are addressing this letter to the editors of Philosophical Psychology after reading an article they decided to publish in the recent Volume 33, Issue 1. The article is by Nathan Cofnas and is en...

Over the past 20 years, GPS collars have emerged as powerful tools for the study of nonhuman primate (hereafter, "primate") movement ecology. As the size and cost of GPS collars have decreased and performance has improved, it is timely to review the use and success of GPS collar deployments on primates to date. Here we compile data on deployments and performance of GPS collars by brand and examine how these relate to characteristics of the primate species and field contexts in which they were deployed. The compiled results of 179 GPS collar deployments across 17 species by 16 research teams show these technologies can provide advantages, particularly in adding to the quality, quantity, and temporal span of data collection. However, aspects of this technology still require substantial improvement in order to make deployment on many primate species pragmatic economically. In particular, current limitations regarding battery lifespan relative to collar weight, the efficacy of remote drop-off mechanisms, and the ability to remotely retrieve data need to be addressed before the technology is likely to be widely adopted. Moreover, despite the increasing utility of GPS collars in the field, they remain substantially more expensive than VHF collars and tracking via handheld GPS units, and cost considerations of GPS collars may limit sample sizes and thereby the strength of inferences. Still, the overall high quality and quantity of data obtained, combined with the reduced need for on-the-ground tracking by field personnel, may help defray the high equipment cost. We argue that primatologists armed with the information in this review have much to gain from the recent, substantial improvements in GPS collar technology.

Medical anthropology, given its diversity of practical and historical entanglements with (and outside of) numerous threads of anthropology, is a key site for productive theoretical and methodological confluences in the Anthropocene. Multispecies approaches, ethnographically, theoretically and methodologically, are developing as central locations for the hybridization and mingling of diverse and innovative research questions, particularly those engaging the processes, patterns, and constructs of health.

Previous research demonstrates that low-income countries face higher risks than high-income countries from toxic pollution and climate change. However, the relationship between these two risks is little explored or tested, and efforts to address the risks are often independent and uncoordinated. We argue that the global risks from toxic pollution and climate change are highly correlated and should be jointly analyzed in order to inform and better target efforts to reduce or mitigate both risks. We provide such analysis for 176 countries and found a strong (rs = -0.798;95%CI -0.852, -0.727) and significant (pTarget assessment to decide where best to address toxic and non-toxic pollution simultaneously, based on the need to minimize human suffering and maximize return on effort.

Biological anthropology can, and should, matter in the Anthropocene. Biological anthropologists are interested in human biology and the human experience in a broader ecological, evolutionary, and phylogenetic context. We are interested in the material of the body, the history of the body, and interactions of diverse bodies, communities, ecologies, and evolutionary processes. However, the cultural realities of bodies, histories, communities, livelihoods, perceptions, and experiences are as central to the endeavor and inquiry of biological anthropology as are their material aspects. Biological anthropology is a constant dialectic between the cultural and the biological. In this essay, I argue that Biological Anthropology has much to offer, a history to contend with, and a future that matters. To illustrate this, I highlight theoretical and methodological issues in genomics, evolutionary theory and connect them to the study of Race and Racism to emphasize specific arenas where Biological Anthropology has a great capacity, and a strong obligation, to play a central role. However, Biological Anthropology also has substantive internal issues that hinder our ability to do the best possible science. If we are to live up to our potential and make a difference in the 21st century we need to ameliorate our structural shortcomings and expand our voice, and impact, in academic and public discourse. The goal of this perspective is to offer suggestions for moving us toward this goal.

Any study of the world, including that of the human, is a move toward and into complexity not away from it. Human action and perception are as evolutionarily relevant as are human genes, bones, and...

Contemporary understandings of paleoanthropological data illustrate that the search for a line defining, or a specific point designating, "modern human" is problematic. Here we lend support to the argument for the need to look for patterns in the paleoanthropological record that indicate how multiple evolutionary processes intersected to form the human niche, a concept critical to assessing the development and processes involved in the emergence of a contemporary human phenotype. We suggest that incorporating key elements of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) into our endeavors offers a better and more integrative toolkit for modeling and assessing the evolution of the genus Homo. To illustrate our points, we highlight how aspects of the genetic exchanges, morphology, and material culture of the later Pleistocene complicate the concept of "modern" human behavior and suggest that multiple evolutionary patterns, processes, and pathways intersected to form the human niche.

Biological Anthropology studies the variation and evolution of living humans, non-human primates, and extinct ancestors and for this reason the field should be in an ideal position to attract scientists from a variety of backgrounds who have different views and experiences. However, the origin and history of the discipline, anecdotal observations, self-reports, and recent surveys suggest the field has significant barriers to attracting scholars of color. For a variety of reasons, including quantitative research that demonstrates that diverse groups do better science, the discipline should strive to achieve a more diverse composition. Here we discuss the background and underpinnings of the current and historical dearth of diversity in Biological Anthropology in the U.S. specifically as it relates to representation of minority and underrepresented minority (URM) (or racialized minority) scholars. We trace this lack of diversity to underlying issues of recruitment and retention in the STEM sciences generally, to the history of Anthropology particularly around questions of race-science, and to the absence of Anthropology at many minority-serving institutions, especially HBCUs, a situation that forestalls pathways to the discipline for many minority students. The AAPA Committee on Diversity (COD) was conceived as a means of assessing and improving diversity within the discipline, and we detail the history of the COD since its inception in 2006. Prior to the COD there were no systematic AAPA efforts to consider ethnoracial diversity in our ranks and no programming around questions of diversity and inclusion. Departmental survey data collected by the COD indicate that undergraduate majors in Biological Anthropology are remarkably diverse, but that the discipline loses these scholars between undergraduate and graduate school and systematically up rank. Our analysis of recent membership demographic survey data (2014 and 2017) shows Biological Anthropology to have less ethnoracial diversity than even the affiliated STEM disciplines of Biology and Anatomy; nearly 87% of AAPA members in the United States identify as white and just 7% as URM scholars. These data also suggest that the intersection of race and gender significantly influence scholarly representation. In response to these data, we describe a substantial body of programs that have been developed by the COD to improve diversity in our ranks. Through these programs we identify principal concerns that contribute to the loss of scholars of color from the discipline at different stages in their careers, propose other directions that programming for recruitment should take, and discuss the beginnings of how to develop a more inclusive discipline at all career stages.

In 1871, Charles Darwin tackled “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist…the descent of man.” Challenging the status quo, Darwin deployed natural and sexual selection, and his recently adopted “survival of the fittest,” producing scenarios for the emergence of humankind. He explored evolutionary histories, anatomy, mental abilities, cultural capacities, race, and sex differences. Some conclusions were innovative and insightful. His recognition that differences between humans and other animals were of degree, not of kind, was trailblazing. His focus on cooperation, social learning, and cumulative culture remains core to human evolutionary studies. However, some of Darwin's other assertions were dismally, and dangerously, wrong. “Descent” is a text from which to learn, but not to venerate. Darwin saw humans as part of the natural world, animals that evolved (descended) from ancestral primates according to processes and patterns similar for all life. For Darwin, to know the human body and mind, we must know other animals and their (and our) descent with modification across lineages and time. But despite these ideal frames and some innovative inferences, “Descent” is often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious. Darwin thought he was relying on data, objectivity, and scientific thinking in describing human evolutionary outcomes. But for much of the book, he was not. “Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin's day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity. Darwin portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less than Europeans in capacity and behavior. Peoples of the African continent were consistently referred to as cognitively depauperate, less capable, and of a lower rank than other races. These assertions are confounding because in “Descent” Darwin offered refutation of natural selection as the process differentiating races, noting that traits used to characterize them appeared nonfunctional relative to capacity for success. As a scientist this should have given him pause, yet he still, baselessly, asserted evolutionary differences between races. He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.” This too is confounding given Darwin's robust stance against slavery. In “Descent,” Darwin identified women as less capable than (White) men, often akin to the “lower races.” He described man as more courageous, energetic, inventive, and intelligent, invoking natural and sexual selection as justification, despite the lack of concrete data and biological assessment. His adamant assertions about the centrality of male agency and the passivity of the female in evolutionary processes, for humans and across the animal world, resonate with both Victorian and contemporary misogyny. In Darwin's own life he learned from an African-descendant South American naturalist, John Edmonstone in Edinburgh, and experienced substantive relations with the Fuegians aboard the HMS Beagle. His daughter Henrietta was a key editor of “Descent.” Darwin was a perceptive scientist whose views on race and sex should have been more influenced by data and his own lived experience. But Darwin's racist and sexist beliefs, echoing the views of scientific colleagues and his society, were powerful mediators of his perception of reality. Today, students are taught Darwin as the “father of evolutionary theory,” a genius scientist. They should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience. Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements “validated” by their presence in “Descent” as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically. “The Descent of Man” is one of the most influential books in the history of human evolutionary science. We can acknowledge Darwin for key insights but must push against his unfounded and harmful assertions. Reflecting on “Descent” today one can look to data demonstrating unequivocally that race is not a valid description of human biological variation, that there is no biological coherence to “male” and “female” brains or any simplicity in biological patterns related to gender and sex, and that “survival of the fittest” does not accurately represent the dynamics of evolutionary processes. The scientific community can reject the legacy of bias and harm in the evolutionary sciences by recognizing, and acting on, the need for diverse voices and making inclusive practices central to evolutionary inquiry. In the end, learning from “Descent” illuminates the highest and most interesting problem for human evolutionary studies today: moving toward an evolutionary science of humans instead of “man.”

The social media milieu in which we are enmeshed has substantive impacts on our beliefs and perceptions. Recent work has established that this can play a role in influencing understanding of, and reactions to, public health information. Twitter, in particular, appears to play a substantive role in the public health information ecosystem. From July 25th, 2020 to November 15th, 2020, we collected weekly tweets related to COVID19 keywords and assessed their networks, patterns and properties. Our analyses revealed the dominance of a handful of individual accounts as central structuring agents in the networks of tens of thousands of tweets and retweets, and thus millions of views, related to specific COVID19 keywords. These few individual accounts and the content of their tweets, mentions, and retweets are substantially overrepresented in terms of public exposure to, and thus interaction with, critical elements of public health information in the pandemic. Here we report on one particularly striking aspect of our dataset: the prominent position of @realdonaldtrump in Twitter networks related to four key terms of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020.

A distinctive aspect of human behaviour is the ability to think symbolically. However, tracking the origin of this capability is controversial. From a Peircean perspective, to know if something truly is a symbol we need to know the cultural context in which it was created. Rather than initially asking if materials are symbols/symbolic, we offer that it is more salient to ask how they functioned as signs. Specifically we argue that using the Peircean distinction between qualisigns, sinsigns and legisigns provides support for this endeavour. The ‘flickering’ of early symbolic behaviour (the sporadic occurrences of objects with embedded social meanings in the Pleistocene archaeological record) can best be seen as sinsigns, whereas sites that show long-term presence of such materials are demonstrating the presence of legisigns: the codification of ideas. To illustrate this approach, we apply these ideas to three classes of artefacts, demonstrating how this system can address issues of relevance to palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists who often fetishize the symbolic as the one ability that makes us human.

This conversation is prompted by continued frustration about how race is discussed and understood by the public and by those researchers who remain determined to draw clean lines around people who ...

Seeing bodies and evolutionary histories as quantifiable features that can be measured separately from the human cultural experience is an erroneous approach. Seeing cultural perceptions and the human experience as disentangled from biological form and function and evolutionary history is equally misguided. An integrative anthropology moves past dichotomous perspectives and seeks to entangle the “inside” and “outside,” methodologically and theoretically, to move beyond isolationist trends in understanding the human. In this paper I illustrate the underlying rationale for some anthropological lack of engagement with neo-Darwinian approaches and review contemporary evolutionary theory discussing how, in combination with a dynamic approach to human culture, it can facilitate integration in anthropology. Finally, I offer an overview of the human niche concept and propose a heuristic framework as a set of shared assumptions about human systems to help frame a sincerely anthropological and emphatically evolutio...

Beaver Island, Michigan was a unique settlement location for Irish America in the late nineteenth century. Families of Irish descent migrated to northern Lake Michigan and reproduced many aspects of the rural, fishing and farming lifeways of Ireland. They had to negotiate the cultural landscape and material conditions that had previously been established on the island, notably by a Mormon sect that occupied the island between 1848 and 1856. The inheritance of landscapes by one community from another can be understood through the concept of niche construction theory. This can be used as a lens to understand how the Mormons shaped their cultural landscape and what this meant for the socio-ecological legacy taken over by their Irish replacements. We also notice the Irish influence on the Beaver Island Lumber Company who came after them. Utilising archaeological and historical data, we undertake a macro-analysis to investigate the shaping of structures and landscapes as interactive influences of one c...

For all its virtues in binding strangers together, religious cooperation is born out of competition and conflict between groups… Big God religions are both the fire department and the arsonist. (No...

When choosing their sleeping sites, primates make adaptive trade-offs between various biotic and abiotic constraints. In human-modified environments, anthropic factors may play a role. We assessed the influence of ecological (predation), social (intergroup competition), and anthropic (proximity to human settlements) factors in sleeping site choice by long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) occupying a habitat at the interface of natural forests and human-modified zones in Bali Barat National Park, Indonesia. Over the course of 56 nights, we collected data relating to physical features of sleeping trees, patterns of the use of sleeping sites within the home range, pre-sleep behavior, diurnal ranging patterns and availability of natural and human food. Overall, the macaques used 17 sleeping sites with 37 sleeping trees. When the monkeys slept in forest zones, they selected sleeping trees that had larger trunks but were not significantly taller than surrounding trees. Though the macaques rarely re-used sleeping sites on consecutive nights, they frequently re-used four sites over the study period. The group favored sleeping within the core area of its home range, despite the occurrence of frequent agonistic intergroup encounters there. Macaques preferentially selected sleeping trees located within or near human-modified zones, especially when human food was abundant and natural food was scarce. These results partially support the hypothesis that long-tailed macaques choose their sleeping sites to avoid predation; proximity to human settlements appears to be the primary factor influencing sleeping site choice in this primate species. Our results reflect the strong influence that anthropic factors have on primates, which subsist in increasingly human-dominated landscapes.

The risks of harm to nonhuman primates, and the absence of benefits for them, are critically important to decisions about nonhuman primate research. Current guidelines for review and practice tend to be permissive for nonhuman primate research as long as minimal welfare requirements are fulfilled and human medical advances are anticipated. This situation is substantially different from human research, in which risks of harms to the individual subject are typically reduced to the extent feasible. A risk threshold is needed for the justification of research on nonhuman primates, comparable to the way risk thresholds are set for vulnerable human subjects who cannot provide informed consent. Much of the laboratory research conducted today has inadequate standards, leading to common physical, psychological, and social harms.

Our primate kin are routinely displaced from their habitats, hunted for meat, captured for trade, housed in zoos, made to perform for our entertainment, and used as subjects in biomedical testing. They are also the subjects of research inquiries by field primatologists. In this article, we place primate field studies on a continuum of human and alloprimate relationships as a heuristic device to explore the unifying ethical implications of such inter-relationships, as well as address specific ethical challenges arising from common research protocols "in the field" (e.g. risks associated with habituation, disease transmission, invasive collection of biological samples, etc.). Additionally, we question the widespread deployment of conservation- and/or local economic development-based justifications for field-based primatological pursuits. Informed by decades of combined fieldwork experience in Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we demonstrate the process by which the adherence to a particular ethical calculus can lead to unregulated and ethically problematic research agendas. In conclusion, we offer several suggestions to consider in the establishment of a formalized code of ethics for field primatology.

Humans and long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) interface in several locations in Singapore. We investigated six of these interface zones to assess the level of conflict between the two species. We observed macaque-to-human interactions and distributed questionnaires to residents and visitors of nature reserves. We observed an average of two macaque-to-human interactions per hour at the sites, which included affiliative or submissive behaviors (46.9%), aggression (19.1%), taking food and other items (18.5%) searching bins, cars, and houses (13.4%), and nonaggressive contact (2.1%). Two-thirds of interactions occurred when a human was carrying food or food cues, and one-quarter occurred when a human provoked macaques. Only 8% of interactions occurred without a clear human-triggered context. Our interview showed one-third of respondents experienced nuisance problems from macaques. They had items taken from them (50.5%) and received threats (31.9%). Residents reported more nuisance problems than visitors, and their perceptions toward macaques differed. Residents were more aware of the consequences of food provisioning and that there were regulations against feeding. Residents fed macaques less and held more negative sentiments toward macaques. Nearly half of the interviewed people held neutral attitudes toward macaques and only 26.2% of respondents thought conflict with macaques warranted urgent action. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents supported education programs to ameliorate human-macaque conflict, and less than 15% supported removing or eradicating macaques. 87.6% felt that it is importance to conserve and protect macaques. Our results show that human-macaque conflict exists in Singapore, but that it may not be severe. Human behavior is largely responsible for macaque-to-human interactions, and thus could be lessened with management of human behavior in interface zones (i.e. restrict food carrying and provocation). Moreover, our interviews shows people living in Singapore value macaques, do not wish them entirely removed, prefer education-based solutions, and consider conservation and protection of them important.

Crab-eating, or long-tailed, macaques [Macaca fascicularis (Raffles, 1821)] have been studied extensively throughout their distribution in South and South-east Asia. Despite this extensive body of research, the island population of long-tailed macaques from Singapore remains virtually undescribed. In the present study, we compare the morphometric variability and patterns of growth observed in a population sample from Singapore with a composite sample from Thailand, north of the Isthmus of Kra. The results of our analyses indicate that there are statistically significant differences between the two populations in adult size and shape. For both males and females, the Singapore population is smaller than the Thai population. Relative to body length, the Singapore macaques exhibit significantly longer tails, and, relative to cranial length, they exhibit significantly more narrow faces than the Thai macaques. Although levels of sexual dimorphism for most morphometric traits are very similar, indicating similar levels of male–male competition for females, the Singapore males exhibit a significantly larger testicular volume relative to body weight, suggestive of an alternative male reproductive strategy. In addition to adult somatometric size and shape, comparisons of growth patterns relative to age and body size reveal significant differences between the two population samples. Combined, these results suggest either that statistically significant differences in adult morphology and patterns of growth can occur in presumably reproductively cohesive subspecies, or the Singapore macaques may be taxonomically distinct. © 2007 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2007, 92, 675–694.

In an evolutionary context neither religion nor religiosity can appear full-blown, and thus it is valuable to search for the kinds of structures, behaviors, and cognitive processes that might facilitate the appearance of such patterns in human beings. The quest for understanding the human propensity for religious behavior is aided by investigating the core role of the evolutionary processes related to the emergence of humanity. However, the majority of approaches in the field of the evolution of religious behavior, and religions themselves, rely heavily on overly reductionistic neo-Darwinian models. They seek to explain faith, religious institutions, and ritual practice primarily in terms of their relation to natural selection and their potential roles as adaptations. The niche construction approach to religious evolution provides an alternative to the primarily functionalist and reductive approach. This way of approaching the human niche, and human evolution, lays a groundwork for modeling the development of the structures (cognitive and behavioral) that can facilitate a more comprehensive, and less reductive, understanding of the human propensity for imagination, faith, and ritual. This approach suggests that a distinctively human imagination, and a uniquely human metaphysics, is a core part of being human and thus part of the explanation for human evolutionary success.

Chimpanzee research plays a central role in the discussions of conflict negotiation. Reconciliation, or the attraction and affiliation of former opponents following conflict, has been proposed as a central element of conflict negotiation in chimpanzees and various other taxa. In an attempt to expand the database of chimpanzee conflict resolution, conflict and post-conflict behavior were recorded for a small group of socially housed chimpanzees at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, at Central Washington University. Data were collected over six 6-week periods between 1997 and 2000, for a total of 840 hours of observation, resulting in a substantial post-conflict (PC) and matched control (MC) data set. The data demonstrate this group's tendencies to maintain visual contact and closer proximity after conflicts. Dyadic corrected conciliatory tendencies ranged between 0 - 37.5% and averaged 17.25% across all dyads. Individual corrected conciliatory tendencies ranged between 5.8 and 32%. The results of this study combined with recent publications on captive and free-ranging chimpanzee post-conflict behavior suggest that variation in post-conflict behavior may be important to our understanding of chimpanzee conflict negotiation, and may also have implications for the design and management of captive chimpanzee enclosures and social groups, respectively.

In this guest editorial the authors look at the association of four blood types with four Hippocratic personality types in Japan and in matching lovers through dating services in the West.

The explication of altruistic behavior in primates remains complex. Gregarious, socially complex primates are characterized by a diverse array of social behavior patterns with seemingly altruistic behavior being relatively commonplace. Human societies are a form of primate society but with much higher levels of social complexity and extremely high levels of cooperative and apparently altruistic behavior. It is likely that there are elements of primate (at least anthropoid) sociality that act as baseline for subsequent expansion and elaboration during human evolution. Can understanding patterns and contexts of primate social complexity and cooperation help us understand human altruism? In this chapter we have two primary objectives: to examine three nonhuman primate genera to show how social cooperation, social bonding, and niche construction can affect our understandings of altruism and to illustrate where we think that such nonhuman primate information is a good model for humans and where it is not.