News Item
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Colin Barras
Summary: Archaeological evidence suggests that humans developed numbers tens of thousands of years ago, and scholars are now exploring the first detailed hypotheses about this transformative invention.
Review
Biology
Stephen Shennan, Rebecca Sear
Summary: Population demographics play a crucial role in shaping human behavior in various domains. While contemporary and recent historical populations have rich data available, the lack of written records poses challenges for studying ancient populations. However, the emergence of new methods has allowed researchers to piece together archaeological, skeletal, and DNA evidence to reconstruct past population patterns.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Anthropology
Gayoung Park, Li-Ying Wang, Ben Marwick
Summary: This article investigates the frequency and contexts in which archaeologists have discussed racism over the past four decades by analyzing abstracts from meetings of the Society for American Archaeology. The study finds that discussions of racism are rare, often mentioned briefly in relation to broader social issues. Historical archaeologists tend to address racism more frequently.
Article
Environmental Sciences
Alessandra Cianciosi, Sasa Caval, Diego Calaon, Krish Seetah
Summary: This study presents an integrated approach to examine the impact of health management on immigrant health conditions during the colonial period in the Indian Ocean. By reconstructing the spatial organization and built landscape of the quarantine station on Flat Island, the study assesses the effectiveness of public health practices promoted by European colonizers.
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Alberto Alcantara, Corina Solis, Maria Rodriguez-Ceja, Miguel Angel Martinez-Carrillo, Efrain Chavez, Maria Esther Ortiz
Summary: The development of radiocarbon dating by W. F. Libby and its application to archaeological objects in Mexico in the 1950s sparked interest within the Mexican archaeological community, leading to the establishment of the first C-14 laboratory in Mexico in 1954 through collaboration between UNAM and INAH. Augusto Moreno, who had trained with Libby in Chicago, was appointed as the head researcher of this laboratory. The C-14 dating technique was then utilized in various archaeological research projects in Mexico during the 1960s.
Article
Anthropology
Maria Silva-Gago, Annapaola Fedato, Marcos Terradillos-Bernal, Rodrigo Alonso-Alcalde, Timothy Hodgson, Emiliano Bruner
Summary: This study used eye tracking to analyze the influence of archaeological knowledge on visuospatial attention during interaction with stone tools. The results showed that participants with archaeological experience paid more visual attention to functionally relevant regions compared to naive participants. This suggests that previous experience plays a significant role in the perception and understanding of stone tools.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary
Jeffrey I. Seeman
Summary: The passage raises a reasonable question about why no physical chemists, chemical physicists, or theoretical chemists, except for two, discovered the orbital symmetry rules for all pericyclic reactions by 1965. Two theoretical chemists, Luitzen Oosterhoff and Kenichi Fukui, had found parts of the rules. The passage then presents the concise yet significant stories of 19 other chemists who could have potentially discovered the same rules but didn't, providing social, political, and scientific explanations for their lack of discovery.
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Fabio Silva, Fiona Coward, Kimberley Davies, Sarah Elliott, Emma Jenkins, Adrian C. Newton, Philip Riris, Marc Vander Linden, Jennifer Bates, Elena Cantarello, Daniel A. Contreras, Stefani A. Crabtree, Enrico R. Crema, Mary Edwards, Tatiana Filatova, Ben Fitzhugh, Hannah Fluck, Jacob Freeman, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Marta Krzyzanska, Daniel Lawrence, Helen Mackay, Marco Madella, Shira Yoshi Maezumi, Rob Marchan, Sophie Monsarrat, Kathleen D. Morrison, Ryan Rabett, Patrick Roberts, Mehdi Saqalli, Rick Stafford, Jens-Christian Svenning, Nicki J. Whithouse, Alice Williams
Summary: This article highlights the importance of studying human-environment interactions over long time scales in order to fully understand the processes and implications involved. It identifies the challenges of integrating long-term datasets with other areas of sustainability science and proposes computational modeling as an ideal platform for transdisciplinary work. The goal is to provide a manifesto for an integrated scientific approach to studying socio-ecological systems over the long term.
Article
Environmental Sciences
Maarten B. Eppinga, Koen Siteur, Mara Baudena, Martin O. Reader, Hanneke van 't Veen, John M. Anderies, Maria J. Santos
Summary: The study emphasizes the need to develop sustainable balances between societies and the resources they consume in order to avoid unwanted regime shifts amid looming planetary boundaries. Using simplified models, researchers show how feedback between anthropogenic harvest regimes and resource availability influences transient dynamics, highlighting the time lags between interventions and social-ecological outcomes, and the counter-intuitive measures that may be required to avert environmental crises.
COMMUNICATIONS EARTH & ENVIRONMENT
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Laurie J. Reitsema, Alissa Mittnik, Britney Kyle, Giulio Catalano, Pier Francesco Fabbri, Adam C. S. Kazmi, Katherine L. Reinberger, Luca Sineo, Stefano Vassallo, Rebecca Bernardos, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht, Kim Callan, Francesca Candilio, Olivia Cheronet, Elizabeth Curtis, Daniel Fernandes, Martina Lari, Ann Marie Lawson, Matthew Mah, Swapan Mallick, Kirsten Mandl, Adam Micco, Alessandra Modi, Jonas Oppenheimer, Kadir Toykan Ozdogan, Nadin Rohland, Kristin Stewardson, Stefania Vai, Chiara Vergata, J. Noah Workman, Fatma Zalzala, Valentina Zaro, Alessandro Achilli, Achilles Anagnostopoulos, Cristian Capelli, Varnavas Constantinou, Hovirag Lancioni, Anna Olivieri, Anastasia Papadopoulou, Nikoleta Psatha, Ornella Semino, John Stamatoyannopoulos, Ioanna Valliannou, Evangelia Yannaki, Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, Harald Ringbauer, David Caramelli, Ron Pinhasi, David Reich
Summary: Trade and colonization in the Mediterranean led to increased human mobility, while warfare played a significant role in cultural contact. By studying the genome-wide data of soldiers from the Greek colony of Himera, we found that many soldiers had ancestral origins in northern Europe, the Steppe, and the Caucasus. This highlights the importance of mercenaries in ancient Greek armies and sheds light on the continental-scale human mobility caused by participation in war in the Classical world.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Review
Anthropology
Ruth Tringham
Summary: In this Perspective article, the author presents a complex narrative of changing themes by drawing on their intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory. They emphasize the importance of inspirational triggers from colleagues' works, words, and events within and outside their discipline. The author also highlights the impact of a series of events on their professional trajectory and the constant trends in their way of working.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Agronomy
Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute, Rimvydas Lauzikas
Summary: This paper analyzes the cultivation of broomcorn millet in Lithuania from ancient times to the 19th century. It shows that millet was an important crop in the region until the 15th century, but its use declined significantly afterwards. The decline may have been influenced by climate change and agricultural reforms.
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Carole L. Crumley
Summary: How can the disintegration of ecosystems be halted and rehabilitated? Scholars must increase expertise, gather disappearing data, analyze with new methods, and apply actionable science to policy. The historical ecology framework constructs evidence-validated narratives of ecosystem evolution and transformation.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Julian Padro, Diego N. De Panis, Pierre Luisi, Hernan Dopazo, Sergio Szajnman, Esteban Hasson, Ignacio M. Soto
Summary: Cultural transformations in human evolution have been driven by changes in lifestyles and dietary practices. This study focuses on the influence of shamanism, the oldest religion, on the genetic adaptations of Native Andean populations. The results suggest a possible gene-culture coevolution driven by religious practices.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Review
Environmental Sciences
Dagomar Degroot, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, Jessica E. Tierney, Felix Riede, Andrea Manica, Emma Moesswilde, Nicolas Gauthier
Summary: In recent decades, there has been a rapid expansion of research on societal responses to past climate fluctuations. This interdisciplinary field, known as the History of Climate and Society (HCS), is primarily conducted by archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, and paleoclimatologists. This review provides an overview of the approaches and findings of scholars in each of these disciplines, discussing how climatic changes are reconstructed and the environmental consequences they have had. It also explores the potential for transdisciplinary approaches in the field and concludes by examining how HCS studies can inform policy and activism addressing anthropogenic global warming.
ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS
(2022)
