• Paul Farmer on U.S.-Haiti relations
Last Thursday, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing to explore how U.S. foreign aid can best help Haiti. Senator Christopher Dodd (Democrat, Connecticut) suggested that “some sort of receivership,” at least temporarily is in order. Senator Bob Corker (Republican, Tennessee) agreed. One of the three witnesses at the hearing was anthropologist/doctor/health activist Paul Farmer, now also the deputy United Nations envoy to Haiti. He disagreed with such an idea, pointing to the long history of Washington overthrowing and blockading Haitian governments which has contributed to the currently dysfunctional government.
• Let freedom ring
Tristam Riley-Smith first worked as a journalist and then earned a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University. He later began working for the British civil service and was posted for several years to the British Embassy in Washington, DC. As reviewed in the Economist, his book The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty, draws on all three strands of his training and experience to provide an “engaging and ambitious” commentary on contemporary America and its use and abuse of the concept of “liberty.”
• Neolithic surgery
A discovery in France of an apparent warrior male with an amputated limb joins two other archaeological findings of evidence that surgery was practiced in the early Neolithic in Europe. Limb amputations have also been found in what is now Germany and the Czech Republic.
• Smart chimpanzees and slow bonobos?
It is well known that substantial social differences exist between two closely related great ape species: chimpanzees and bonobos (the latter are less well-known and often lumped under the former). Notably, bonobos are typified as a peaceful species whose members use sexual interactions to prevent conflict. Chimpanzees are typified as more prone to conflict and competition, and thus, sadly, more like modern humans. The question of why such differences exist between chimpanzees and bonobos prompts biological anthropologists to look for answers in biology. Recent research led by Victoria Wobber of Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, suggests that the reason lies in differences in the pace of cognitive development over the life cycle. She and her team compared skills of semi-free-ranging infants, juveniles, and adults in three feeding competition tasks. The findings show that chimpanzee infants and juveniles are more likely to share food than adult chimpanzees who advance to a stage of “sharing intolerance.” In contrast, bonobo adults retain juvenile levels of “sharing tolerance.” The upshot, per Wobber and colleagues, is that adult bonobos are less cognitively advanced than adult chimpanzees because they retain a juvenile tendency to share. The study was published online in Current Biology. This blogger asks readers to check out the article and ponder the argument, evidence, findings, and implications for understanding cognitive development in humans, variations in selfishness/generosity across cultures, and the cultural shaping of researchers’ categories and values (ie, selfish/successful chimpanzees and sharing/loser bonobos).
• Altruistic chimpanzees adopt orphans
Behavioral variation across chimpanzee groups throws into question any attempt, such as the above study, to lump all chimps into one category. Adoptive behavior of chimpanzee caregivers, both male and females, has been discovered in the Taï Forest of the Ivory Coast. The adopters devote substantial time and care to juveniles not biologically related to them. The research leader, Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig comments: “I don’t know of any other cases of unrelated orphans being adopted.” This discovery, he goes on to argue, requires a major shift in discussions about what makes humans human since altruistic behavior has been long argued to make us special. It also requires attention to variation within species and avoidance of broad generalizations at the species level.
anthropologyworks 