Tag: Anthropology

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  • How men evolved to care for babies — before society got in the way

    How men evolved to care for babies — before society got in the way

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    Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Princeton Univ. Press (2024)

    Primatologist Sarah Hrdy never questioned the idea that hands-on childcare was mainly women’s work — until her first grandchild was born. Then, while watching her son-in-law willingly care for his baby, she began to wonder whether the trend of fathers getting more involved with their children was merely down to cultural change in the decades since she had kids, or whether it could be explained by biology.

    In Father Time, Hrdy takes us on a quest through vertebrate evolution and history to discover when and how men — unlike other male great apes — began to nurture their young. Ultimately, Hrdy finds that the idea of men caring for babies is not as evolutionarily unusual as she had initially surmised. She surprises herself by concluding that men can be every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother.

    Hrdy’s preconceptions of parenting stemmed from half a century studying the reproductive strategies of primates. Her graduate studies were steeped in Darwinian logic, which emphasized that male behaviour is driven by the need to outcompete rivals for mates — a way of being that requires little direct contact with infants. Her early fieldwork in India on Hanuman langur monkeys (Semnopithecus entellus) reinforced this view. Resident male langurs, she observed, paid little to no attention to the young in their group, but incoming males deliberately killed the babies of other males to hasten mating with resident females. Similarly, male apes generally shun infants, and are more likely to kill a newborn than nurture it.

    A rare mammal

    To explore what makes humans different, Hrdy begins her book by going back to our vertebrate origins. Parental care among fish and amphibians is just as likely to be done by males as by females. But in only 5% of mammalian species do males care for their young. Despite the differences in behaviours between fish and mammals, the hormonal and neurological mechanisms that promote parental care in the two groups are similar.

    In mammals, pregnancy and feeding babies trigger the release of hormones, such as prolactin and oxytocin, in the mother’s brain. In humans, these then encourage nurturing behaviours and produce a feeling of bonding towards the infant. But, as Hrdy notes, historically it did not occur to scientists to study how caring for babies might affect male biology.

    The author’s summary of the scant literature reinforces her argument that male nurturing is, like female care, a product of biology. In humans, men who care for infants experience profound biological changes. In the weeks before their baby is born, men experience a surge in prolactin. In the months after birth, their levels of testosterone levels drop and those of the bonding hormone oxytocin rise. Nurturing can also produce changes in the brain: scans of men who are the primary carer of an infant show that their brains light up in response to a crying baby, in much the same way as do the brains of mothers who are the main carers.

    Cultural changes

    Next, the author investigates the evolutionary events that set humans apart from other great apes. At the time of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) — around five million to six million years ago — most other ape species had gone extinct, owing to cooling global temperatures and shrinking forests. Yet our hominin ancestors persevered, despite the fact that their large-brained offspring were weaned off milk earlier than those of other great apes, and required more food than mothers alone could provide through foraging. Male hunters, evolutionary anthropologists reason, must have learnt to share resources with children.

    False clown anemonefish (Amphriprion ocellaris) tending its eggs

    Male clownfish are the main carers for their eggs.Credit: Scubazoo/SPL

    Some researchers have argued that this responsibility-sharing behaviour relied on males being sure of which children were theirs. But Hrdy points out that, among living hunter-gatherers, most of the meat is shared widely — it does not go directly to a hunter’s children. She posits that our ancestors became cooperative breeders, with groups of parents providing support, care and food for growing children together. And she argues that social selection — the subset of natural selection influenced by the behaviour of other individuals — had a central role in this change in parenting, with selection favouring men who had a reputation for cooperation and sharing food, making them more attractive as partners and group members.

    The final chapters of the book focus on the cultural context of human fatherhood, and the ways in which men’s relationships with children have changed over the past few millennia. Hrdy argues that men were more involved in childcare before the invention of agriculture, and the ethnographic data from contemporary hunter-gather populations support her conclusion. Once agriculture was adopted — bringing with it the need to protect resources such as land and livestock — men tended to remain near their kin, whereas women moved away from their families when they married.

    This led to patriarchal systems, increased segregation of men and women in domestic and social spheres, and thus fathers spending less time near their children. The trend continued in market economies, in which men adopted the role of breadwinner and worked outside the house. The most recent generation has seen some erosion of gender barriers, and men have actively been taking on childcare duties. But, as Hrdy discusses, those preferring more conventionally defined roles for mothers and fathers have been pushing back against these changes.

    As always, Hrdy’s writing is a joy to read. Her previous books have focused on female care of offspring and on the broader role of non-parental (typically female) caretakers in shaping human evolution, some of which is rehashed in Father Time. But the focus on fatherhood and men’s biological responses to babies is new. And her model for how male care evolved in humans is plausible (if necessarily speculative).

    Father Time will be valued by anyone interested in male care of infants and children. Hrdy’s broad, accessible writing will appeal to non-scientists, but her peers will appreciate her summary of current research on the hormonal and neurobiological aspects of male care. As a biological anthropologist focused on fatherhood and men’s investments in children, I certainly learnt a great deal.

    Competing Interests

    The author declares no competing interests.

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  • Ancient Maya burned their dead rulers to mark a new dynasty

    Ancient Maya burned their dead rulers to mark a new dynasty

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    Maya ornament

    An ornament found with the burned remains of royal people at a Maya temple

    Dr Christina T. Halperin

    Around 1200 years ago in a Maya city, the bones of several royal people were burned and unceremoniously discarded within the foundations of a new temple. These recently discovered remains may have marked a fiery political transition at a time of upheaval in the Maya world.

    “When we first started excavating, we had no idea what this was,” says Christina Halperin at the University of Montreal. She and her colleagues made the discovery in 2022 at the archaeological site of Ucanal, located in present-day Guatemala.

    The researchers found the deposit mixed in with rocks beneath a pyramid temple structure. The deposit contained the bones of at least four people, along with thousands of ornamental fragments and beads. The bones of two individuals and many of the ornaments showed evidence of burning at high temperature.

    It was clear this wasn’t a normal set of remains, says Halperin. But it was the nosepiece and obsidian eye discs of a burial mask that made clear they were royal individuals. She says sifting these clues from the ash “took forever”.

    Despite their apparent highborn origins, the royals’ burned remains were not carefully buried but were instead “dumped there”, says Halperin. Radiocarbon dating of the bones and ash also indicated at least one individual had died up to a century before the remains were burned between AD 773 and 881. This suggests the bones were exhumed from a previous burial and then burned.

    This timing corresponds with the rise of a new leader at Ucanal named Papmalil, an outsider who came to power amid a wider unravelling of Maya society. Within that context, the researchers think the deposit may be the product of what is known as the “fire-entering rite”, a Maya ritual that dramatically marked the destruction and end of the previous dynasty and the preeminence of the next. “This rite seems to be both an act of veneration, but also an act of destruction,” says Halperin.

    Simon Martin at the University of Pennsylvania says the discovery provides vivid physical evidence for the theory that influence from outside cultures contributed to radical shifts in Maya society during this period. “These are the ancestors. These are the forebears,” he says. “To do this kind of thing is really tearing all of that up.”

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  • Indigenous Australian fire-stick farming began at least 11,000 years ago

    Indigenous Australian fire-stick farming began at least 11,000 years ago

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    Aboriginal elder George Milpurrurr shows his children how to make a controlled fire to burn off dangerous dry grass.

    Northern Australian elder George Milpurrurr shows the next generation how to do a cultural burn.Credit: Penny Tweedie/Alamy

    Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for at least 11,000 years, according to charcoal preserved in the sediment of a sinkhole. The study was published on 11 March in Nature Geoscience1.

    The practice of cultural burning, also known as ‘fire-stick farming’, is integral to Indigenous Australian culture and history, and is understood to have profoundly altered landscapes across the country.

    Fire-stick farming involves introducing frequent, low-intensity fires in small areas of the landscape in a patchy, ‘mosaic’ pattern, and is done early in the dry season. The practice is important culturally and environmentally; in particular, it reduces the amount of fuel available for burning and therefore decreases the intensity of wildfires that might spark late in the dry season because of lightning strikes or other triggers.

    Archaeological evidence indicates that humans have continuously occupied the Australian continent for at least 65,000 years2, but little is known about when the practice of fire-stick farming began.

    “You need a really long record that goes back before people were here so you can see what the natural world — the definitively unimpacted world, if you’d like — looks like and then you’ve got enough of a record to be able to see if anything changed,” says study co-author Michael Bird, a geologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

    The researchers found that record in the sediment of Girraween Lagoon, a permanent water body formed in a collapsed sinkhole near Darwin in the Northern Territory. The lagoon is an important site for the traditional owners of the land, the Larrakia Nation, and was made famous by the crocodile attack scene in the 1986 film Crocodile Dundee.

    Because the lagoon has remained full, its sediments offer a continuous record of deposition that has not been disturbed by drying out and cracking. Bird and his colleagues were able to extract a core from the bottom of the lagoon that provided a 150,000-year-long record of changes in the type and geochemistry of the deposited charcoal, and in the accumulation of pollen.

    Change in the charcoal

    The team notes that, around 11,000 years ago, the changes in the charcoal deposits point to alterations in the intensity of fires in the area.

    Without human influence, fires are less frequent but have enough intensity to burn trees and leave behind charcoal, says Bird.

    “A less-intense fire doesn’t get into the crown — it’s burning what’s on the ground,” he says. The grass, as well as twigs and fallen tree leaves, are more likely to become charcoal than the trees themselves, he adds.

    Because tree-derived charcoal has higher concentrations of the isotope carbon-13 than does charcoal from grasses, the researchers analysed the composition and geochemistry of the burnt residue in the sample. The authors found a sustained change from low-frequency, high-intensity fires — the ‘natural’ fire regime — to more frequent but less intense ones, which they suggested was the result of Indigenous fire-stick farming.

    The authors ruled out climate change as the cause of the shift by using the ratio of tree pollen to grass pollen as a type of climate history to show that vegetation changes did not explain the shift in the charcoal record.

    However, Bird notes that European colonization has mostly brought an end to cultural burning practices, and has shifted fire intensity back towards a natural pattern. “Because we’ve had, 10,000 plus years of a particular fire regime, it’s the release from that fire regime that’s actually creating quite significant issues,” he says, suggesting that this shift has contributed to the return of more high-intensity wildfires.

    Joe Fontaine, a fire ecologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, says that the growing understanding of how cultural burning has shaped the Australian landscape, particularly in the northern regions, is crucial for contemporary fire-management practices, which to a large extent have excluded Indigenous people and their expertise.

    “The barriers to doing cultural burning, in our arcane system of laws and bureaucracy,” are challenging to overcome, Fontaine says. There are also many more permanent structures in the landscape nowadays than there were before colonization, he says, so the challenge is to work out where and how cultural burning can be restored as a practice.

    The continuing work that “puts cultural burning practices out there and establishes it as something that really existed, is crucial to the evolution of contemporary fire management,” he says.

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  • Oldest stone tools in Europe hint at ancient humans’ route there

    Oldest stone tools in Europe hint at ancient humans’ route there

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    Close up view of a stone tool possibly from Layer VII at Korolevo I.

    A stone tool from the archaeological site of Korolevo in western Ukraine.Credit: Roman Garba

    Stone tools found in western Ukraine date to roughly 1.4 million years ago1, archaeologists say. That means the tools are the oldest known artefacts in Europe made by ancient humans and offer insight into how and when our early relatives first reached the region.

    The findings support the theory that these early arrivals — probably of the versatile species Homo erectus — entered Europe from the east and spread west, says study co-lead author Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “Until now, there was no strong evidence for an east-to-west migration,” he says. “Now we have it.”

    Prehistoric sites documenting the presence of human ancestors in Europe before 800,000 years ago are extremely rare, says Véronique Michel, a geochronologist at the University of Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, who was not involved in the research. “This new study adds another piece to the puzzle [of] the dispersal of early hominins in Europe.”

    The findings were published on 6 March in Nature.

    Set in stone

    The tools were discovered in the 1980s at the Korolevo archaeological site near Ukraine’s border with Romania, yet no one had been able to precisely date them.

    To do so, Garba and his colleagues used a dating method based on cosmogenic nuclides — rare isotopes generated when high-energy cosmic rays collide with chemical elements in minerals on Earth’s surface. Changes in the concentrations of these cosmogenic nuclides can reveal how long ago a mineral was buried. By calculating the ratio of specific cosmogenic nuclides in the sediment layer in which the tools were buried, the team estimated that the implements must be 1.4 million years old. The dating analyses, Michel says, “appear highly reliable”.

    Until now, the earliest precisely dated evidence of hominins in Europe comprised fossils2 and stone tools3 found in Spain and France. Both are 1.1 million to 1.2 million years old.

    Intrepid travellers

    The dates of the Korolevo tools lead the researchers to speculate that the human ancestors who made them were H. erectus, the only archaic humans known to have lived outside Africa about 1.4 million years ago. What’s more, the Korolevo tools resemble those found at archaeological sites in the Caucasus Mountains that have been linked to H. erectus and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, says Mads Knudsen, a geoscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who co-led the study. However, Knudsen adds, Korolevo’s most ancient layer of sediment didn’t yield any fossilized human remains, so it is impossible to say for sure that the tools were made by H. erectus.

    Geographically, Korolevo lies between older archaeological sites at the intersection of Asia and Europe, and younger sites in southwestern Europe. The findings give a fuller picture of the direction of travel probably taken by the first Europeans, supporting the idea that they spread from east to west — perhaps along the valleys of the Danube River, Garba says.

    Korolevo is a treasure trove of prehistoric remains, says study co-author Vitaly Usyk, an archaeologist affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, who visited the site last year with Garba for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Korolevo site is relatively safe and hasn’t been damaged during the war, although the area is now overgrown with vegetation, Garba says. “I can imagine doing fieldwork there even now.”

    However, Usyk notes, few scientists can participate in field research at Korolevo or anywhere else in the country, because of travel restrictions or because they have fled the conflict. Usyk himself left Ukraine in 2022 and is now working at the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, Czech Republic, with a fellowship that allows him to continue doing his research. “Would I like to go back [to Ukraine]? Yes, of course,” he says. “I would like to organize expeditions to Korolevo to help other scientists reveal how ancient humans came from Africa to Europe.”

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  • A mobile DNA sequence could explain tail loss in humans and apes

    A mobile DNA sequence could explain tail loss in humans and apes

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    Nature, Published online: 28 February 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00309-z

    The lack of a tail is one thing that separates apes — including humans — from other primates. Insertion of a short DNA sequence into a gene that controls tail development could explain tail loss in the common ancestor of apes.

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  • Why reciprocity is common in humans but rare in other animals

    Why reciprocity is common in humans but rare in other animals

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    Nature, Published online: 21 February 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00308-0

    Reciprocal cooperation can be advantageous, but why it is more common in humans than in other social animals is a puzzle. A modelling and experimental study pinpoints the conditions needed for reciprocity to evolve.

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