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On September 25, 2023, I received an email notifying me that a previously accepted abstract, and the panel in which it was to be presented, were now being cancelled. The email came from the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA). The reason given for the cancellation, which made news around the world and was even covered in the New York Times, was that talks discussing the importance of binary biological sex as a research variable in anthropology would supposedly “cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community...

Anthropologists from the largest associations of anthropologists in the world canceled an event discussing the importance of biological sex in the context of studying the human skeleton while citing "transphobia" as the reason for the panel being cut. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) and The Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) were skewered for walking back their approval for a panel event at its 2023 conference discussing biological sex. The AAA and CASCA said that it was now tightening its review process to ensure such an event wouldn't recur in the future. The event in question discussed "Sex identification whether an individual...

This spring, athlete and women's rights advocate Riley Gaines spoke at the University of Pittsburgh. When Gaines asked an anthropology professor, the “expert” in the room, if you could dig up a skeleton and tell if the person had been male or female from the bone structure, Professor Gabby Yearwood said no, of course not. Yearwood, whose research focuses on "the social constructions of race and racism, masculinity, gender, sex, Black Feminist and Black Queer theory, anthropology of sport and Black Diaspora," was laughed at by the rest of the audience. Colin Wright is now reporting that the American Anthropological...

Recreating the musculature of the leg and pelvis, the imagery supports the supposition that this part-time tree-dwelling hominin walked completely erect, like humans, but more than three million years earlier.Starting with human MRI and CT scans to map muscle pathways, Wiseman next focused on virtual reconstructions of Lucy's bones and joints, and then married up cues from muscle "scarring" on the bones.The resulting model shows how Lucy was capable of upright, erect locomotion but also possessed powerful leg muscles that facilitated her species' half-land, half-arboreal lifestyle. Researchers believe the extra muscle power in the legs – 74% of the total...

If the claims are true, the behavior by Homo naledi—a baffling, small-brained member of the human family tree—would pre-date the earliest known burials by at least 100,000 years. An extinct human species that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago may have deliberately buried its dead and carved meaningful symbols deep in a South African cave—advanced behaviors generally deemed unique to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. If confirmed, the burials would be the earliest yet known by at least 100,000 years. The claims, made today in two research papers uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv, were also announced by paleoanthropologist...

There is an interesting controversy that has erupted at the University of Pittsburgh after Dr. Gabby Yearwood, who teaches in both the anthropology and law schools, was asked by swimmer Riley Gaines if he could tell the gender of persons from skeletal remains. He denied that that was possible despite the widely accepted ability to do so in his field. The answer may reflect the ongoing push in anthropology, discussed in an earlier blog column, to put an end to gender identifications. Some insist that anthropologists need to know how an ancient human may have chosen to identify themselves.Yearwood reportedly...

The face of an eight-year-old Neanderthal boy who died more than 30,000 years ago has been reconstructed by scientists who used a skull initially found in the Teshik-Tash cave in Uzbekistan in 1938. The portrait is the first three-dimensional restoration of a Neanderthal skull fossil, which reveals the young boy had a small, turned-up nose that sunk into his face. The fossil is the first Neanderthal fossil discovered in Asia and the only complete Asian Neanderthal skull fossil preserved so far....

...There are many like Yoo in South Korea who have chosen either not to have children or not to marry. Other advanced countries have similar trends, but South Korea’s demographic crisis is much worse. South Korea’s statistics agency announced in September that the total fertility rate — the average number of babies born to each woman in their reproductive years — was 0.81 last year. That’s the world’s lowest for the third consecutive year.... ...Lee Sung-jai, a 75-year-old Seoul resident, said...“These days, I see some (unmarried) young women walking with dogs in strollers and saying they are their moms. Did...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A West Virginia soldier killed during World War II has been accounted for, the military said. Army Cpl. Joseph H. Gunnoe, 21, of Charleston, was reported missing in action in November 1944 in Germany. He was declared killed in action after the war, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Tuesday. Gunnoe was assigned to Company G, 112th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division. His unit captured the town of Vossenack, Germany, in the Hürtgen Forest, on Nov. 2 but was forced to withdraw four days later. Scientists used DNA, anthropological evidence and circumstantial evidence to identify the...

Scientists believe they have made a fascinating discovery which reveals some hidden detail about the diet of Neanderthals around 70,000 years ago. They have unearthed remains of what is believed to be the world's oldest flatbread made by Neanderthals in the foothills of Iraq. The charred remnants were recovered from the Shanidar Cave site - a Neanderthal dwelling around 500 miles north of Baghdad. The archaeologists said the findings, published in the journal Antiquity, show for the first time that bread was part of the diet among these hominid species....

activists within the field of archaeology are pushing for anthropologists to be prevented from identifying human remains as male or female because it is not known how ancients would have self-identified. No, this isn’t the Babylon Bee. Criminal forensic psychologists, archaeologists and anthropologists have long had the skills to identify whether a body is male or female based on a number of traits, including the size and shape of bones. However, far-left activists are now insisting that this is transphobic because experts don’t know if ancient people identified as a specific gender. “You might know the argument that the archaeologists...

LGBT activists are pushing to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as “male” or “female,” arguing that scientists cannot know how an ancient individuals identified themselves. Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino took to Twitter earlier this month to point out that transgender individuals “can’t escape” their sex, not because it’s physically impossible to change one’s sex, but because archaeologists who find their bones one day “will assign you the same gender as you had at birth.”

As soon as ancient human remains are excavated, archaeologists begin the work of determining a number of traits about the individual, including age, race and gender. But a new school of thought within archaeology is pushing scientists to think twice about assigning gender to ancient human remains. It is possible to determine whether a skeleton is from a biological male or female using objective observations based on the size and shape of the bones. Criminal forensic detectives, for example, do it frequently in their line of work. But gender activists argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves....

....In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world....

Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is unfolding more rapidly than previously imagined, many policymakers around the world are rolling back environmental protections. Anthropologist Jennifer Carlson will give a talk, “Denial’s Authority: Anti-Environmentalism and the Aesthetics of Negativity in Contemporary Climate Politics". Carlson is the Cornell Society for the Humanities 2018-19 sustainability fellow. Carlson will discuss how embracing anti-environmentalism provides a kind of social affirmation. “If we’re going to reach out to people, we have to understand that we’re not being asked to educate or optimize, but to improvise with and learn from how their vernacular theories of power and...

... “Direct violence cannot happen and does not happen because of a genetic disposition. It is the exact opposite,” Perez said. “We look into culture and we look into society to help us explain why violence is tolerated and used so effectively by so many different groups as a mechanism for maintaining social control and order.” Perez spoke at great lengths on the forms that violence may take and how it often manifests itself in society without being entirely recognized. He found direct violence, the physical or verbal abuse of individuals, may lead to structural violence, in which a sociopolitical...

People sometimes tell me they would never send their children to a public university because the campuses are overrun with liberal feminists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of these campuses are overrun with leftists posing as liberal feminists, not true liberal feminists. There’s a huge difference. A recent evaluation I found on Rate My Professors illustrates the distinction: "I took Mike Adams' class because I read his articles and heard about how horrific he was. And the truth is that he is by far the best professor I've ever had. He is hysterically funny and ridiculously smart....

...In recent years, dental calculus has emerged as an unexpected, but valuable, long-term reservoir of ancient DNA from dietary and microbial sources... Very little dental calculus was required for analysis--fewer than 25 milligrams per individual. This makes it possible to obtain high quality genetic ancestry information from very little starting material, an important consideration for archaeological remains... Although dental calculus preserves alongside skeletal remains, it is not actually a human tissue. Dental calculus, also known as tartar, is a calcified form of dental plaque that acquires human DNA and proteins passively, primarily through the saliva and other host secretions. Once...

By using an innovative non-invasive photographic technique, European researchers have managed to locate and map the extensive set of tattoos on the exquisitely preserved remains of Ötzi the Iceman. Remarkably, they even found a previously unknown tattoo on his ribcage. Ötzi's frozen remains were discovered by two German tourists in the Ötzal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy in 1991. He lived around 3,300 BCE and represents Europe's oldest natural human mummy. Because he was so well preserved in ice, he has provided anthropologists with a slew of information about Copper Age (or Chalcolithic) humans. ... It's worth...

ATLANTA, Dec. 18 (UPI) -- A new survey by anthropologists calls into question the scientific and historical justification for the paleo diet. Early man, they say, was an opportunist, not a nutritionist or dieter. By now, most people have heard of the paleo diet. The popular diet is named for the Paleolithic Age, the expansive period of prehistory characterized by so-called cavemen and primitive stone tools. Its followers forgo grains and processed foods in favor of meat, fish and vegetables. Its emphasis on protein and whole foods isn't without merit, but its genesis is based on the idea that humans...