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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.

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.

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.

In this chapter, I provide an overview of ethnoprimatological approaches as a theoretical and methodological context with the potential to create an opening for One Health to more fully engage with anthropological and primatological complexities at the interface of humans and monkeys. I present overviews of the human–macaque interface at two sites, Padangtegal, Bali, Indonesia and Gibraltar, UK, where the contrasting local cultural contexts and ecological patterns of interaction between humans and macaques demonstrate the importance of an ethnoprimatological and niche-constructive perspective when attempting to assess pathogen risk and management for human–macaque interactions.

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.

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.

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...

Both evolutionary/scientific and constructivist or humanistic approaches have brought valuable understandings to anthropology and continue to do so today. Discussions of the split(s) and possibilities of reintegration across anthropology have been valuable; however, practical reintegration will only come from a serious and open intellectual engagement with a diverse range of theoretical contexts and a direct connection to data. This volume is an attempt to provide innovative contexts for, and examples of, anthropologists reporting on their data and/or conceptualizing approaches to the data in ways that cross or straddle boundaries. While we offer niche construction theory and the extended evolutionary synthesis as common framework, the articles are not all in agreement on explanatory means and priorities. And this is a good thing. To develop an effective reintegration requires anthropologists to move away from artificial dichotomies and standing grudges and toward collaborations and a respect for theoreti...

As a foray into the material connections between humans and other primates, we use this chapter to argue that human bodies can be understood as the product of material interactions between species rather than bounded entities constituted by their differences. Exploring primate bodies as research tools, as food and kin, and as memory, we draw from Haraway, Bateson, and Latour to demonstrate how bodies are less defined by the boundaries of the skin and more so through their material and social interactions and the sharing of corporeal substances and experiences. Ultimately, we contend that at stake in a consideration of these material and bodily interactions is our very humanness as we humans realize that we have never been just human.

Agustin Fuentes compares three books on the origins, trajectory and implications of our group behaviour. Agustin Fuentes compares three books on the origins, trajectory and implications of our group behaviour.

It is highly likely that there is a naturalness to a human imagination that facilitates engagement with, and being in, the world in ways that are distinct from those in other animals, even closely related hominins. A distinctively human imagination is part of the explanation for human evolutionary success. The combination of a niche-construction perspective with fossil and archeological evidence, highlighting the role of complexity in human evolution, adds to our understanding of a wholly human way of being. For humans, experiences in and perceptions of the world exist in a particular context wherein social relationships, landscapes, and biotic and abiotic elements are embedded in an experiential reality that is infused with a potential for symbolic meaning. Taking this approach provides a small, and hopefully fruitful, addition to the toolkit of inquiry for anthropologists, theologians, and others interested in reconstructing the path to humanity and the possible roles that imagination, belief, and religion have played and continue to play.

A niche is the structural, temporal, and social context in which a species exists. Over the last two million years, the human lineage underwent clear morphological changes alongside less easily measurable, but significant, behavioral and cognitive shifts as it forged, and was shaped by, new niches. During this time period, core human patterns emerged, including the following: hypercooperation; lengthy childhood and complex parenting; intricate and diverse foraging and hunting patterns; novel and dynamic material and symbolic cultures; and complex communication and information sharing, eventually resulting in language. Approaches to human evolution grounded in paleoanthropology and archaeology offer fundamental insights into our past, and traditional evolutionary theory offers a strong grounding for explaining them. However, given the centrality of distinctive physiological, social, semiotic, and cognitive processes in human evolutionary histories, a broader anthropological approach can facilitate additional understanding of the human story. An integrative anthropology, reaching across subfields and foci, combined with contemporary evolutionary theory is an approach that can enhance our abilities to model and understand human evolution. [integrative anthropology, niche construction, evolution, extended evolutionary synthesis, Homo, semiosis, Pleistocene]

Human nature is a contested concept and notions of it vary across disciplines. Despite this diversity, three basic notions of human nature emerge. One identifies human nature with properties that are innate, hardwired or products of some kind of necessary essence. Another understands it as consisting of properties that make human unique or distinct from non-human animals. Finally, some seek human nature by attempting to identify universal or near-universal properties of humans. While the sciences might not give us a robust form of innate or hardwired human nature, “human nature” as a concept might still serve other, non-scientific, goals.

The quest for understanding the human propensity for religious imagination can be aided by investigating more fully the core role of the evolutionary transition between becoming and being human. A distinctively human imagination is part of the explanation for human evolutionary success. Significant factors can be found in the evolutionary patterns and processes in the genus Homo during the Pleistocene, especially the later part of that epoch approximately 400–100,000 years ago. The combination of a niche construction perspective with fossil and archeological evidence, highlighting the role of cooperation in human evolution, adds to our understanding of a wholly human way of being, our socio-cognitive niche. This is a niche wherein experiences in, and perceptions of, of the world exist in a particular semiotic context: social relationships, landscapes, and biotic and abiotic elements are embedded in an experiential reality that is infused with a potential for symbolic meaning derived from more than the mat...

Today, in the Anthropocene, humans are changing global and local ecologies as fast as, or faster than, we can study them (eg. Rose 2009, Palmer et al. 2004). For primates this has a dire impact; nearly half of all primate taxa are under serious threat of population reduction/fragmentation, substantive landscape/ecology alteration and for many even extinction. In the practice of primatology this fact is at the forefront of any project and every analysis. It has become a necessity to employ a revised primatological practice, one that places humans and other primates in integrated and shared ecological and social spaces. This approach is epitomized by the current practice of ethnoprimatology. In ethnoprimatology the “ethno” prefix represents the inclusion of anthropogenic aspects, including the social, economic, and political histories and contexts as core components in the ecologies, and lives, of other primates (Sponsel 1997; Fuentes 2012; Malone et al. 2014). It is at the interface of human and other primate lives that much of the challenge to primatology exists, and at that boundary conservation, sustainability and management come to the forefront (Fuentes 2012; Fuentes & Hockings 2010; Fuentes & Wolfe 2002; Riley 2007). Ethnoprimatological approaches “affirm the role of humans as primates, of other primates as co-participants in shaping social and ecological space, recognizing mutual roles in both ecological and cultural interconnections” (Fuentes 2012: 102). Here we draw on a range of recent work in ethnoprimatology and allied areas to demonstrate how such approaches create a fruitful venue for integrating primatological inquiry and conservation and management practice via assessing the mutual ecologies, evolutionary histories, and social lives at the interface of humans and other primates (e.g., Fuentes & Wolfe 2002; Paterson & Wallis 2005; Fuentes & Hockings 2010; Riley et al. 2011; Malone et al. 2014).

Humans are literal and figurative kin to other primates, with whom many of us coexist in diverse social, ecological, symbolic, conflictual, and even hopeful contexts. Anthropogenic action is changing global and local ecologies as fast as, or faster than, we can study them. Ethnoprimatology, the combining of primatological and anthropological practice and the viewing of humans and other primates as living in integrated and shared ecological and social spaces, is becoming an increasingly popular approach to primate studies in the twenty-first century. This approach plays a core linking role between anthropology and primate studies and may enable us to more effectively assess, and better understand, the complex ecologies and potential for sustainability in human–other primate communities. Here I review the basic theoretical underpinnings, historical contexts, and a selection of current research outcomes for the ethnoprimatological endeavor and indicate what this approach can tell us about human–other primate relations in the Anthropocene.

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.

Most anthropologists would agree that humans are simultaneously historical, biological, behavioral, and social. However, many researchers retain a relatively dualistic paradigm dividing anthropological questions into biological and/or social aspects. Many practitioners of Neo-Darwinian perspectives prioritize natural selection in all explanations of human evolution. Many other anthropologists refuse to acknowledge a significant role for biological features and biological histories in human action, sensation, and engagement. Both perspectives are misplaced. Incorporating emerging perspectives in evolutionary theory into the broader anthropological discourse may help discard simplistic dualisms and resituate our assessments of the evolution of human behavior. In this essay I review three major emergent themes in evolutionary theory; Multi-Inheritance Systems Theory, Developmental Systems Theory, and Niche Construction. I suggest, with one brief example, that placing these elements in transaction with other perspectives in anthropology might enhance the possibilities of assessing human evolution and behavior.

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.

Social scientists, especially anthropologists, have long endeavored to understand the evolution of “human nature.” This investigation frequently focuses on the relative importance of competition versus cooperation in human evolutionary trajectories and usually results in a primary emphasis on competition, aggression, and even war in attempting to understand humanity. This perspective conflicts with long-standing perspectives in anthropology and some emerging trends and theory in evolutionary biology and ecology. Cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive in an evolutionary context. As anthropologists, we have demonstrated that humans can–and usually do–get along. Evolution is complex with multiple processes and patterns, not all of which involve competition and conflict. In this article, I summarize elements of modern ecological and evolutionary theory in the context of human cooperative patterns in an attempt to illustrate the valuable role of evolutionary theory and cooperative patterns in integrative anthropological approaches to the human condition.

Social organization involving pair bonding and two-adult groups is rare in mammals. Current sociobiological theory suggests that this grouping and behavior pattern is somewhat anomalous. The gibbons (genus Hylobates) are the only hominoids to exhibit pair bonds and two-adult groups. In this article I present an overview of the current issues in monogamy and pair-bond theory, and review traditional conceptualizations and the accumulated data relevant to gibbon social organization. The significance of hominoid behavioral phylogeny and population-wide studies is also considered. Recent findings indicate that pair-bonding and two-adult groups are not ubiquitous among the hylobatids. Many aspects of gibbon behavior and ecology do not conform to expectations of the conditions under which two-adult groups and/or pair-bonding patterns should evolve. A review of the information available from long-term and short-term studies of gibbons suggests an alternative way of viewing their socioecology. I propose that gibbons currently exist in variable communities that have arisen via ecological pressures and specific behavioral patterns from an ancestral multimale/multi-female grouping pattern. This social organization is not best characterized as "monogamous." This review also suggests that hominoid grouping patterns can be viewed as occurring along a continuum rather than as being discretely different units.

The emerging manifesto, center of the essay collection this commentary is part of, points out that primatology is a primate's science and field of endeavor. It is about primates, and constructed and carried out by primates. But the relationships between different primates involved in primatology cannot be described merely as scientific, zoological, or conservatory. A main point emerging from this perspective is that the relationships amongst primates (as scientists and as subjects) are affected by primatologists' experiences outside of academic science and within the cultural schema that we acquire as members of human societies. My contribution focuses on the primatologists and their sometimes discussed, but too often ignored, cultural and ethnic contexts as influences on how they study, think about, and interact with other primates. In our views and bonds with other primates, do national, class, and ethnic factors count?

Nearly 60 years ago, Sherwood Washburn issued a call for a "New Physical Anthropology," a transition from measurement and classification toward a focus on the processes and mechanisms of evolutionary change. He advocated multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the understanding of human behavior, biology, and history. Many interpret this as a call for a practice that is both biological and anthropological. Is this what we do? Are we biological anthropologists yet? In this essay, I explore what we, Physical Anthropologists, as a discipline are doing in the context of a New Physical Anthropology, where we might be headed, and why this discussion is crucial to our relevance.

In many ways, this book is about the social expansion of primate kinship in the human lineage: an evolution of imagined communities (a la Benedict Anderson) of human kinships emerging from the social webs common in our primate kin. Read argues that it is humans’ abilities to self-modify, to ratchet up new and multiple forms of envisioning social relations, that separates human societies from those of other primates. He invokes Levi-Strauss’s notion of “the advent of a new order” to identify the unique nature of the extent of human social processes: the cultural definition of kin and society. Read centers the role of shared cultural systems, cognitive complexity, and the “culturally constituted universe,” in narrating a broad understanding of how humans are in the world and how this differs from the “world-beings” of other primates. In making his case, Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/ social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us. He states, “Our societies are not based on genetically prescribed behaviors, but on our ability to build creatively on our genetic endowment in ways that are not predictable in simply by knowing what constitutes that endowment” (p. 12), and this is correct. However, it is worth noting that this can also be true of other organisms (and not just other primates), more so than Read gives them credit for. It is Read’s holding to a relatively simple model of evolutionary patterns and processes for other organisms and to

Examining homology in biological and cultural evolution is of great importance in investigations of humanity. The proposal presented in the target article retains substantial methodological weaknesses in the identification and use of “cultural traits.” However, with refined toolkits and the incorporation of recent advances in evolutionary theory, this overall endeavor can result in substantial payoffs for biological and social scientists.