anthropology
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DNA in dirt can reveal where human ancestors lived
When you want to know where humans have lived, you typically look for direct signs like bones or buildings. But that's not always easy, especially with hominid ancestors who didn't exactly leave an abundance of remains. Thanks to a new genetic research technique, however, those obvious clues won't be necessary -- you'll just need some dirt. Scientists have discovered that they can obtain ancient DNA from soil by effectively luring it out and creating matches.
Police could soon identify you by your hair proteins
Police and archaeologists regularly depend on DNA evidence for identification, but it has a serious flaw. DNA degrades under environmental conditions like heat and light, so it may be useless even if you have a ton of samples. However, Lawrence Livermore researchers have a better way: they've established a method of identifying humans based on hair protein markers. The markers are much more resilient than DNA (scientists found markers in remains about 250 years old) while remaining unique, with no one person sharing the same marker count and patterns. You only need a few hairs to get a result, too, and the ultimate goal is to pinpoint someone using a single strand of hair.
The next wave of AI is rooted in human culture and history
Understanding humans is essential to the design and experience of a technology. For decades, major corporations have turned to social scientists for insight into human behavior, culture and history. At Intel, Genevieve Bell, a prominent Australian anthropologist with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, has been tracking societal trends across the world to help build technologies that are fine-tuned to the needs of the people who will interact with them.
Anthropologist delves into World of Warcraft as a parallel to religion in China
Ryan Hornbeck is a cognitive anthropologist who has recently completed an enormous dissertation on the subject of moral cognition and spiritual experiences in World of Warcraft in China. And according to Hornbeck, World of Warcraft's popularity combined with its communal structure and the way it creates opportunities unavailable to some in Chinese society makes the game similar in many ways to traditional religion and the experiences religion provides. Hornbeck explains that opportunities for moral expression are "largely restricted to the affordances of the education system" but World of Warcraft offers an opportunity to "experience strong upwellings of moral sentiment." Additionally, he offers numerous quotes from Chinese WoW players that express how the game has transcended gameplay and turned into something entirely different -- something with deep personal value. Here's one such quote: In the end, the most important thing I want to say is what we are playing is not merely a game. In this world we find a feeling of existence we cannot find in the real world. This does not mean we are escaping, nor that we can only play games. People who say this are not real players. Do not think playing games is a waste of time, because the game made up for something we lost. The full post is well worth a read.
Max Planck Institute sequences genome of Siberian girl from 80,000 years ago, smashes DNA barriers
We've known little of the genetic sequences of our precursors, despite having found many examples of their remains: the requirement for two strands in traditional DNA sequencing isn't much help when we're usually thankful to get just one. The Max Planck Institute has devised a new, single-strand technique that may very well fill in the complete picture. Binding specific molecules to a strand, so enzymes can copy the sequence, has let researchers make at least one pass over 99.9 percent of the genome of a Siberian girl from roughly 80,000 years ago -- giving science the most complete genetic picture of any human ancestor to date, all from the one bone you see above. The gene map tells us that the brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl was part of a splinter population known as the Denisovans that sat in between Neanderthals and ourselves, having forked the family tree hundreds of thousands of years before today. It also shows that there's a small trace of Denisovans and their Neanderthal roots in modern East Asia, which we would never have known just by staring at fossils. Future discoveries could take years to leave an impact, but MPI may have just opened the floodgates of knowledge for our collective history.
15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi on WoW culture and art
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. We've written before at WoW.com and even here in 15 Minutes of Fame about attempts to study World of Warcraft culture from a sociological, psychological or anthropological point of view. In all of these cases, the researchers in question have logged time playing WoW as part of their research, albeit some with greater degrees of immersive success than others. So I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Bonnie Nardi, a University of California-Irvine expert in the social implications of digital technologies and author of the rather blithely titled My Life as a Night Elf Priest, not only rolled the token raiding character in order to observe the curious behavior of the raiding animal -- she actually enjoys WoW in its own right. Rather than cautiously sniffing WoW culture only to generate another wide-eyed, ZOMG-look-at-this-funny-lingo report from the digital field, Nardi dove deep enough to play in four different guilds: a casual raiding guild; a raiding guild composed of fellow academics; a small, casual guild; and her own friends-and-family guild. Our two-part interview with Nardi, packed with opinion and cultural analysis, reveals a witty approach to WoW culture that successfully combines academic insight with the familiarity of a seasoned player.
15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist digs into WoW
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.While we've written before about academics who are researching WoW from within, we're not sure that we've seen anyone whose primary fieldwork is the PvE raiding experience. Meet Alex Golub, Ph.D., an anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii. Golub plays a Resto Shaman in a Wrath-era raiding guild who's researching what he calls the culture of raiding -- "why people do something as crazy as run 25-mans four days a week." "There is a lot of research on WoW, actually, but most of is based either on crunching Armory data to produce statistical analysis of game play, or it is more 'cultural studies' where people play the game a little and then write something beautiful about it," he explains to 15 Minutes of Fame. "My unique angle is that I am doing anthropological fieldwork in WoW, living and playing with a raiding guild and putting in 20+ hours a week keeping them healed and decursed." The main themes of Golub's research (ahem): "American cultures of self-control, efficiency, masculinity and success amongst players of WoW." We asked him to boil that down for us. "I study how guys behave badly in Vent, and how/why people become emo and/or talk about why other people are emo," he explains. "I'm interested in how you get a group of 25 people to keep calm and collected as they try to do something really emotionally important to them, which requires relying on other people when its difficult to see them face to face."
15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist digs into WoW Part 2
"I never thought of playing WoW like that!" neither did we, until we talked with these players. Check out a whole year's worth of player profiles in our "15 Minutes of Fame: Where are they now?"
