Archive for Anthropology
Native Americans were cannibals
Of course, just about all people in the world were cannibals at some point. The Hawaiians did it, the Tahitians did it, the Scottish and Germans did it. I’m guessing that the Native Americans did too…
Here is an interesting tidbit though that the people who lived in the Mississippi region (Mound builders) were actually not the peaceful agrarians that everyone once thought they were…
COLLINSVILLE, Ill. _ Human sacrifice! Victims buried alive! Read all about it in “Cahokia _ Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi.”
According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders weren’t always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville.
Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren’t always careful to bury only the dead.
Based on years of study of artifacts including many from the extensive excavation of the site’s Mound 72 during 1967-71, Pauketat’s book is getting national attention. The Washington Post described it as “undeniably hot.” A national online review service used the headline, “Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi.”
The “virgins” angle may be a bit of an overstatement, said Pauketat, but not by much.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Oddities of Human Nature
As I look at the world, sometimes the things we humans do absolutely stun me. A lifetime of study and a degree in anthropology haven’t made things any less shocking. Here are four examples of bizarre human behavior pulled from the news today.
1)A Connecticut woman who authorities say spent more than $2,000 to stage a dinner honoring her as “Nurse of the Year” has been charged with pretending to be a nurse at a doctor’s office. Betty Lichtenstein, 56, of Norwalk was charged Thursday.Prosecutors say Dr. Gerald Weiss believed Lichtenstein was a registered nurse, especially after she was named the Connecticut Nursing Association’s “Nurse of the Year” in 2008.According to the arrest warrant, that association does not exist.
2)Like most restaurants, the Burger King in this St. Louis suburb has a no shoes, no shirt, no service policy. And baby, do they enforce it. Too much so, the company admitted, after apologizing for restaurant workers who asked a mother to leave because her 6-month-old wasn’t wearing shoes.
3)Some of the world’s most serious chocolate shopping takes place in Brussels, Belgium. There are elegant showrooms with specially trained salespeople handling little squares of chocolate with white gloves. Despite the economic downturn, tourists are still bringing home treats for their friends and family.
4)Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs has been formally released from prison after being granted freedom on compassionate grounds. Biggs is severely ill with pneumonia and Justice Secretary Jack Straw approved his release on Thursday after being told he is unlikely to recover. The odd thing with this story is that Biggs managed to escape, went to Brazil, was living the good life, and then he returned and spent the rest of his life in jail.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Cave Man caught in Portugal
This story for some reason really has an effect on me. Have a look at it, read it, and then at the bottom, I will makes a few comments…
LISBON, Portugal — A fugitive murderer spent 16 years hiding in caves around his home village in northern Portugal before he was recaptured looking “like Robinson Crusoe,” police said Thursday.
Manuel Cruz, 54, had a deep tan and a long beard when he was arrested in the forested hills where he once had been a shepherd, Inspector Carlos Gomes told The Associated Press.
“He wasn’t very strong but he wasn’t in very bad shape,” said Gomes, who, along with 11 other officers, arrested Cruz in what police dubbed “Operation Cro-Magnon” Wednesday.
He “looked like Robinson Crusoe,” Gomes said. “He was dirty and smelly.”
Cruz had a guard dog and a gun with him but he didn’t fire on police who approached on foot, according to Gomes.
“His initial reaction was very aggressive but he came peacefully once we had him,” Gomes said.
Cruz was serving a 10-year sentence for murder when he fled during a weekend furlough in the village in 1993.
He was convicted after an argument over goats with a local woman during which Cruz pushed her and she hit her head on the ground, later dying, Ramalho Cruz said.
Cruz had been hiding in caves and hollowed-out banks of earth in “very hilly, very hostile terrain” surrounding Anisso, about 240 miles (400 kilometers) north of Lisbon, Gomes said by telephone. The village has a population of 312, according to the local council’s Web site.
Manuel Ramalho Cruz, the president of the Anisso parish council and no relation to the arrested man, said locals had tipped off police several years ago that the fugitive was hiding in the area.
On at least one occasion he escaped a police operation to catch him, Ramalho Cruz said. Police did not immediately comment on that claim.
Family members and local people provided the fugitive with food and he had a dog that alerted him when people approached, Ramalho Cruz said in a telephone interview.
“He was a quiet person, he wouldn’t hurt anyone. People liked him,” he said. “He told people he was afraid of prison and wouldn’t go back there.”
Daily paper Publico reported that, apart from his dog, Cruz had only a battery-powered radio for company. Jornal de Noticias said he cut long grass to make his bed.
Police said Cruz was taken back to a prison in the nearby city of Braga to serve the remaining 7 1/2 years of his sentence.
Okay, there are a couple of things here that get me. First of all, the fact that life is so incredibly temporary. When he was arguing with that woman, I’m sure both of them thought it was the most important thing in the world and neither had an idea that death was lingering so close. Imagine for a moment, Cruz and this woman probably knew each other, maybe they were lovers, maybe they were neighbors. In any event, they knew each other well enough to have an argument. Maybe she slapped him, then he shoved her. She fell, hit her head, and whammo, both lives were changed. In an instant. Her life was over and to a certain extent, so was his. She died. He became a fugitive.
The people in the town helped him. Maybe they knew. Maybe they saw the life these two people have just disappear in an instant as they argued over a lost goat or a broken vase or a drunken kiss. Would they have argued if they knew that a few seconds or minutes later, their lives would be so completely altered?
And yet, Cruz may have found something through it all. In essence, he was able to escape from our society. Sleeping in caves, having a dog, making beds of grass, and when he was really missing our world, visiting a neighbor or turning on the radio in his cave.
I can’t help but wonder if he found something. Was he a wise man, or a crazy man?
And, I can’t help but smile at the name the police came up with for the capture “Operation Cro Magnon.” They’ve definitely caught a cave man. But what does the cave man know?
Popularity: 1% [?]
How Cooking Makes You a Man
Fun article on the anthropology of cooking from Salon.com
Animals of the genus Homo are defined by their little mouths, large guts, big brains — and appetite for bratwurst. This, at least, is the provocative theory of evolution put forth by Dr. Richard Wrangham in his fascinating new book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.”
Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, began his career studying chimpanzees alongside Jane Goodall, and rose to academic acclaim as a primatologist specializing in the roots of male aggression. Naturally, he tends to think of most scientific questions in relation to chimps. And so it was that a few years ago, while sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, he wondered, “What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?” The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.
For years, accepted wisdom has held that it was a transition to meat eating that prompted human evolution — which makes Wrangham’s hypothesis a radical departure. Yet, the more he tested his theory, the more he found the science to back it up: Cooked food is universally easier to process and more nutritionally dense than raw food, which means adopting a cooked diet would have given man a biological advantage. The energy he once spent consuming and digesting raw food could be diverted to other physiological functions, leading to the development of bigger bodies and brains. And Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis” not only explains the physical changes that humans underwent but also the social ones: Cooking created a sexual division of labor that informs our ideas of gender, love, family and marriage even to this day. “Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood,” Wrangham concludes. “And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”
Full interview at Salon.com
Popularity: 1% [?]
Is this where I'm headed?
Thanks to the Rev for sending me this article and the advice that it is what I can do with my Anthropology degree…actually, it’s not far from what I am doing already.
COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?
MEET THE GUY WHO DOES
http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9817&mbid=yhp&npu=1
Popularity: 1% [?]
