The Caveman’s Corner

Yet again, I’m contemplating embarking forth on a research project. Who knows how far this one will go, as my last… several… have died after I got overwhelmed by the preliminary reading. I do think this project has some distinct advantages, however: A) I now have access to the UT database at home on my computer, B) I can do this project without getting approval ahead of time (like with a zoo study), C) I won’t need too much math, I hope, and D) The study might be one that is fully within my resources to carry out.

What I was thinking of is a genealogical study to test the ‘Grandmother Hypothesis.’ For those not familiar, the grandmother hypothesis holds that the long human female post-reproductive lifespan evolved because grandmothers would aid their offspring in raising their children and thus increase their own reproductive success. Was this process active in recent societies? Well, to answer that, my plan is to examine genealogical records from Sevier and surrounding counties where I live. Fortunately, Appalachian people have a taste for this sort of thing, so genealogies aren’t excessively hard to come by. There are a lot of families with very long histories here as well that can be tracked back centuries in a single county. As for the specific methodology of analysis… I’ve found one other study of this type down in a Japanese city, and I’m planning to see how much I can apply from it. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Oh, my poor blog… I have neglected thee so. And I’ve stopped reading them too. I don’t know why exactly. I still want to blog. The desire has not left me. I just seem to be in a rut. I still haven’t started the Meet a Contemporary I should be doing, not because I’ve been particularly to busy but just because it always seems like I should have started earlier. Ahhh. Oh well. At least this is a post. Yes! The spell is broken! Blog ho!

Ah, but I have that powerpoint to do… And its not due at a soon enough date for me to be procrastinating by working much harder on something else. But actually, I have something I could blog on now. So ha! Rise like a Phoenix, dear blog!

http://www.expelledexposed.com/

This is a site created by the National Center for Science Education to debunk and disembowel the various fantasies at the heart of Ben Stein’s new docuganda piece Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. And it does it quite nicely I must say. I rather recommend.

I got my UT account to work! Thus I now have access to all the wonderful journals and databases. I came across an interesting article searching Central Issues in Anthropology today, by a Robert B. Tincher and thought I would share.

Night Comes to the Chromosomes: Inbreeding and Population Genetics in Southern Appalachia

Good ol’ uncle brother first cousin Pappy

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This is a concept that reading Dennison’s Nash A Little Anthropology, 3rd ed has acquainted me with, and its extremely interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever specifically considered it before.

Such a stoic.

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I have a question I would like to ask the world:

?

What is this supposed to be? There is no monkey that looks like that. There is no animal on earth that looks like that. Why is this (basically) what everyone thinks of when they hear “monkey”?

As far as I can figure out, it looks sort of like a cartoony chimpanzee (Curious George maybe?) with a tail randomly stuck on. Not that chimpanzees are that color. There are some macaques that have vaguely that color of fur by they all have bright colorations on their exposed skin. There aren’t that many brown monkeys, honestly. Maybe a spider monkey except the proportions are all wrong.

I guess that’s what those are. Fracked up, brown spider monkeys. I want to get an ethnozoologist onto how on earth that’s come to be the number one public image of “primate.” *sigh*

I finished Amir Aczel’s The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man today, and I decided to write up a review/reflection sort of thing. I haven’t decided exactly which yet. I’ve thought about adding a feature like this before and I enjoyed doing it, so you might conceivably see more reviews.

From Amazon, obviously

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So the whole weekly thing is pretty much out the window. I’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties for a while and I’ve had other matters to attend to/lacked motivation. But, you may unbate your breath, we have Meet an Ancestor entry number two: Propliopithecus chirobates.

A reconstruction of Propliopithecus

Woohoo, we finally got our super-obscure species that Google hasn’t heard of (Did you mean: propliopithecus chorobates). It is, however, a member of a quite famous and extremely important lineage.

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We have a rant today.

I’ve been doing the research for my next “meet an ancestor” today, and I keep coming across one word, “Cebidae.” Apparently, the ecology of our ancestor’s genus was similar to that of the Cebidae. Well, that’s quite interesting, or at least it would be if I knew at all what the authors meant by Cebidae.

The debate we’re getting into here is over the macrotaxonomy of the New World Monkeys. Some authorities like to split it up into lots of little families, as many as seven, while some prefer to refer it in its entirety to one family, incidentally the Cebidae.

Thus, Walker’s Primates of the World, Stein and Rowe’s Physical Anthropology 8th ed., and the Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates give the Cebidae as 11 genera ranging from squirrel monkeys to spider monkeys; everything but marmosets and tarmarins. The Encyclopedia of Human Evolution prefers to exclude only the spider monkeys from the Cebidae and include the marmosets. Animal Diversity Web lumps in all the New World Monkeys. And finally, Wikipedia authoritatively states that the Cebidae is “one of the four families of New World monkeys now recognised,” and is a combination of marmosets, squirrel monkeys, and capuchins (the actual genus Cebus).

Cebus, about the only member of the Cebidae everyone agrees on

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Sorry I haven’t been being terribly faithful with these “Meet a …” things, but I’ve been otherwise engaged for the past week or so. Our very first Meet a Contemporary is at once easy and hard to compose a profile on: Easy because it’s an orangutan and you can find about anything you want on it, but hard because it’s an orangutan and anyone who’s ever watched a nature show knows all the basics already, so it might be a bit difficult to make this interesting.

Meet, the Sumatran orangutan (or orang-utan for our Commonwealth readers).

A P. abelii in the type of suspensory posture typical of the orangutans.

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