And while children evolved to bond with us, we may have evolved to want to care for them. Research suggests that simply witnessing motherhood primes us to act as caretakers, even to babies we didn’t birth. One study from 2000, for instance, found that prolactin, a hormone associated with nurturing, increased in men when they were living with a pregnant woman. Another study from 2010 showed that fathers experienced a bump in oxytocin, a hormone associated with social bonding, after spending time with their newborns.
Tag: anthropology
Faces of Our Ancestors
amazing reconstructions. No idea how credible those are but they are striking.
2019-02-27: 2 different projects to make emperor sculptures:
Césares de Roma is a project to make hyperrealist sculptures of Roman emperors using existing portraits and sculptures as references. The latest creation is a silicone bust of Nerón Claudio César Augusto Germanicus, aka Nero, who wreaked havoc from 54 to 68 AD.
Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder, Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors.
Working from remains discovered during archaeological excavations, sculptor and archaeologist Oscar Nilsson combines his 2 disciplines to reconstruct the faces of people who lived 100s, 1000s, and even 10Ks of years ago. This Neanderthal woman lived 50 ka ago:
Researchers have reconstructed the torso of a woman of the Únětice culture whose remains were unearthed in a Bronze Age cemetery in eastern Bohemia. She had been buried sometime between 3880 and 3750 BP with 5 bronze bracelets, 2 gold earrings, a 3-strand necklace made of beads of amber imported from the Baltic, and 3 bronze sewing needles.
Ötzi
The isotopic composition of strontium, oxygen and lead in Ötzi’s teeth show that his likely birthplace was near the modern town of Brixen, Italy – but that his adult life was spent in the neighboring Vinschgau or Schnals valleys.
The Secret of El Dorado
a large part of the amazon basin held a huge civilization in ancient times. millions of people transformed the poor soil under their feet into some of the best. european diseases killed them all in the 1600s.
7 Daughters of Eve
The 7 Daughters of Eve can be divided into 2 major parts. In the first, Sykes discusses some of his most fascinating work. He relives how he and his colleagues extracted ancient DNA from the 5000-year-old Ötzi the Iceman, examines his work on understanding the origins of the Polynesians, and tells how he and his team discovered the true fate of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanovs. With each story, Sykes easily manages to explain the scientific details behind his conclusions in a way that nearly any reader can comprehend.
mitochondrial dna
70 ka Human bottleneck
From one of my favorite projects, the Genographic Project.
Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70 ka BP. The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought. The number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2k before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.
2023-08-31: And an even more severe, earlier bottleneck
Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction 900 ka BP. It suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to 1280 and didn’t expand again for 117 ka. “98.7% of human ancestors were lost”. The fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950 ka and 650 ka BP is patchy and that “the discovery of this bottleneck may explain the chronological gap”. “Of greater surprise is the estimated length of time that this small group survived. If this is correct, then one imagines that it would require a stable environment with sufficient resources and few stresses to the system.”
The marathon is easy
diary of a massai in london. it sounds a bit ghostwritten to me.
English and Irish Ancestry
Say goodbye to foundation myths, and hello to Levenshtein distances of DNA strands to define the “other”.
Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for 1000s of years by a single people that has remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans.
2023-03-30: lol, this is completely wrong. 
Cultural Survival Nonsense
Most significant were indigenous peoples’ concerns that the results of the Genographic Project would contradict indigenous groups’ traditional understanding of their origins or history.
-1, stupid.
Ape altruism
altruism goes back as far as 6M years
the foundations for non-zero sum games were laid early, apparently
Gregor J. Rothfuss 