• From the delta to the dump
Shame on Chavez: an article in the New York Times describes how many Warao Indians survive by foraging in the massive Cambalache dump of Cuidad Guayana, Venezuela, a city planned by experts from Harvard and MIT. According to Wikipedia, the Warao have for centuries earned their living fishing and gathering: “The Warao diet is varied with an emphasis on the products of the delta, mostly fish…many of their daily fruits and vegetables come from the wild orchards of the delta. In July and August, Warao feast on crabs…” According to the NYT article, many Warao now barely survive by finding discarded bits of food and partially finished beverage bottles in the dump. No country has a good record for treating indigenous people well. Even the Scandinavian countries have discriminated against the indigenous Saami. President Chavez, however, claims that empowerment of indigenous people is a pillar of his government. As quoted in the NYT article, Christian Sørhaug, a Norwegian anthropologist who has done fieldwork with the Warao for over a decade, says, “Cambalache is the worst place I have ever seen.” Anthroworks says: President Chavez, build that pillar and the Warao will come out of the dump.

• “We’ve seen university research before”
Rethinking race and hypertension: the Chronicle for Higher Education published a review article about the role of “race,” genes, culture and hypertension. Culture came out the winner (if one can call it that). Many anthropologists are cited along the way including Clarence Gravlee, Alan Goodman, Marvin Harris, Franz Boas, Connie Mulligan, and William Dressler.

• Love hurts
Oxford University researchers including Professor Robin Dunbar present findings that falling in love means the loss of two friends.

• Kudos
Alison Galloway, a forensic anthropologist, has been named to the number 2 position at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the past several years, she has tackled both unsolved homicides and campus budget cut-backs. She will now oversee day-to-day operations of UCSC as the top academic and finance official.

• In memoriam
Alan Jacobs, professor of anthropology at Western Michigan University, died at age 80 years. His research focused on the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania. Besides many years of dedicated teaching at WSU, he also consulted for the World Bank, the International Livestock Center in Africa, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the U.S. Peace Corps.

Bernard James, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, died at age 88 years. In addition to his academic contributions, James devoted substantial time to serving the city of Milwaukee. He wrote several novels, including one titled Greenhouse, set in the academia of a poisoned planet. He also created large abstract oil paintings.

• Consider trying this at home
In the Huffington Post, medical anthropologist and licensed midwife, Melissa Cheyney of Oregon State University, takes on a recently published article by Dr. Joseph Wax et al. in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The article argues strongly that hospital-based births offer the best way to ensure a safe delivery and avoid neonatal death. Cheyney zaps the article for flawed methods and for sending a message that is harmful to women. Along the way she critiques the American health care system and its failure to address the highest infant mortality rate among rich countries.

• Stop blaming the victim
Drug Week highlighted an article in Anthropology & Medicine by medical anthropologist Carolyn Rouse of Princeton University and colleagues on patient and practitioner noncompliance in the United States. The article argues that behavioral explanations for health disparities shift attention from structural issues such as health care rationing and the limits of therapeutic medicine.

• Anthro in the city
Cultural anthropology, via the work of Chicago sociologist Robert Parks, got a loud shout out in the first line of an essay in the New York Review of Books about the TV series, Treme, situated in New Orleans. As in The Wire, writer David Simon displays a strong ethnographic touch in depicting complexity, detail, and systemic relationships.

• Aboriginal contact art
Art in a rock shelter at Djulirri, in Australia’s Arnhem Land, is the oldest and largest collection of “first contact” art in Australia. It includes depictions of Southeast Asian sailing ships from the 1600s.

• Off road in Egypt leads to oasis city
Desert-road archaeology as practiced by John Coleman Darnell and Deborah Darnell of Yale University has produced a detailed survey of caravan routes and oasis settlements in Egyptian antiquity including the discovery of a major administrative settlement in the desert 300 miles south of Cairo that is more than 3,500 years old.

• The way you dance
An article in Science discusses findings from an experimental study by evolutionary psychologist Nick Neave of Northumbria University on male dancing and what females think of it. The study used male avatar figures dancing in videos watched and rated by a panel of heterosexual women. Key findings are that males wanting to be attractive to females while dancing should not flail arms and legs about. Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, comments that it makes evolutionary sense for a woman to care about how a man dances since dance moves show creativity which is associated with energy, optimism, and daring. Judith Hanna, cultural anthropologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, said the idea of using avatars is brilliant and has great potential for replication in other cultural contexts.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 9/13/10” →

• Peanuts for poverty and to heck with patents
The New York Times magazine featured an article on the rise of Plumpy’nut, a foil-wrapped peanut paste produced as a nutrition booster for starving people. A French company first started manufacturing and selling it. Now other manufacturers are making a similar product including Partners in Health in Haiti, founded by medical anthropologist/doctor/activist Paul Farmer. PIH, which calls its paste Nourmanba, is planning to expand its operations. Discussions are ongoing about whether the usual patent protections should apply to such life-saving products.

• On the bus
The state of Florida has the third most illegal immigrants in the US and is considering Arizona-style policies. Many recent immigrants are departing. The St. Petersburg Times quoted Ella Schmidt, cultural anthropology professor at the University of South Florida and an expert on US migration issues: “Every day people are leaving and going back home … especially those who came in the last five or six years.”

• The Hispanic paradox explained
Drug Week noted an ethnographic study of the Hispanic paradox. Hispanics in the United States are economically disadvantaged but their health profiles are equal to or better than Euro-Americans. Medical anthropologist Anna Waldstein and colleagues at the University of Kent did research on women’s popular medicine in a Mexican immigrant population in Athens, Georgia. Women’s home care and medical knowledge explain much of the so-called paradox. Findings are published in Medical Anthropology.

• Breaking up is hard to do
The Ottawa Citizen carried an article about cultural anthropologist Ilana Gershon‘s new book, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Gershon, who teaches at Indiana University, interviewed undergraduates about what is a bad break-up and discovered a variety of perspectives about how the message should be delivered (in person, texted, or telephone) and who should post the official news on Facebook (the dumper, the dumpee, or whoever gets there first), among other factors.

• Community immunity against PTSD
Drug Week picked up on an ethnographic study of a new therapeutic program in Israel that seeks to prevent PTSD through building community resilience. The authors discuss the relevance of their results for other contexts such as Bali, Haiti, and Ethiopia. Findings are published in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.

• Boys being boys
Hemant Apte, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Pune, presented findings at the 26th Annual Conference of Sexology in Chennai, India, that women sex workers in their 50s are favored by younger men perhaps because they “pamper their young clients.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 09/06/10” →

This week’s anthropology in the news is the final posting made with the assistance of Graham Hough-Cornwell. For the past year, Graham has been a vital force behind the blog from inspiration, contributing his own posts, editing, photo-research, publishing posts, checking analytics, and more. He is now moving on to intensive study of Arabic this fall in Morocco and then perhaps to doctoral study in the history of the Middle East. Fare thee well, Graham, and don’t forget us!

• Read my lips
An article in the New York Times magazine about how language shapes people’s perception of reality rose to the top of the list of articles emailed, blogged, searched and viewed last week. It was all about linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Whorf‘s theory that language has the power to shape how people think. This is Anth 101 stuff, and if it can go big time in the mainstream media, then there is hope that other basic questions in cultural anthropology can similarly engage the public.

• Trafficked sex workers in China
Cultural anthropologist Tiantian Zheng, of the State University of New York at Cortland, spoke before the US Congressional Executive Committee on China. An expert on the sex trade in China, she said that police raids are counterproductive: “Usually when a woman is ‘rescued’ from the sex trade and put into police custody, she is subject to possible sexual assault by the police, deportation to her hometown, and forced relocation into more dangerous work areas. In my research on migrant sex workers in China, frequent police raids, crackdowns, and raid-and-rescue have pushed sex work underground and made it more dangerous.”

• What do Haitians want
The New York Times quoted Louis Herns Marcelin, cultural anthropology professor at the University of Miami, as saying that Haiti has become an “apartheid country” and most Haitians want “an opening out of the ghetto, an opening out of the permanent prison and segregation they are living in.”

• At the top of your game and being studied
Cambridge University cultural anthropologist Mark de Rond first studied the Cambridge boat race squad. Then military surgeons in Afghanistan. Now he is launching a study of comedians and doing fieldwork in Edinburgh during the Fringe festival. The Scotsman provides some insights about why he is focusing on comedians: “They are very smart…and go out in front of the audience and make themselves vulnerable…if things don’t go well…it affects them terribly personally.”

• DNA and the Dirty War in Argentina
Forensic anthropologists, aided by DNA technology and a growing database of DNA samples from victim’s relatives, have been able to speed up their identification of victims of state violence in Argentina.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 8/30/10” →

• If Clef were president
Louis Herns Marcelin, a Haitian-born cultural anthropology professor at the University of Miami is paraphrased in the Seattle Times as saying that people with money and influence in Haiti are more likely to fear outsiders.

• About the mosque (you know which one)
An article in the Huffington Post discussed how Muslims around the world are watching the US debate about the proposed mosque and community center at Park 51 in New York City near the location of the former World Trade Center towers. It included commentary from Zubair Ali, a retired Pakistani professor of anthropology who has lived in the US and who is presumably Muslim. He said that any decision to stop the mosque will empower those who say the US is waging a war against Islam. The New York Times included this statement from Muntasir Sattar, an anthropology student at Columbia University: “It’s been nine years, but it feels like we haven’t moved an inch since then to come to terms with the issues.”

• Take your cruise ship and…
Mauritius is pumping up efforts to promote cruise ship tourism. According to cultural anthropologist Sean Carey of the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism at Roehampton University, the Vanilla Island should tell the cruise ships to shove off since little evidence indicates any long term positive effects for the destination while much evidence suggests negative environmental and social effects.

• Dilemma about book on nuclear testing resolved
Cultural anthropologist Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University is relieved to know that nuclear testing will not start again. That means he can carry on with his current book plans.

• Rural Thais no longer provincial
William Klausner, one of the “most senior and best known observers of rural Thailand,” has urged Thailand to address its urban-rural divide and city people’s disdain toward rural people: “The villagers are no longer uneducated and they’re no longer provincial…today they have mobile phones, televisions, satellite dishes and ‘even the odd computer in the village’.” Hope might instead lie in the maintenance of a healthy disdain of the “provincial” people toward the city dwellers.

• Get out of my genes
Don’t freshmen have enough to worry about? A plan to offer free genome scans to incoming freshmen at the University of California at Berkeley has been modified under protest from many students. Cultural anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes supported the state’s decision to back off from the tests. The Dean of Biological Sciences was not pleased.

• What can you do with a degree in anthropology?
Much appreciation to the Guardian for posing this question and offering some insights. Readers of this blog know that with a BA in anthropology you can, for example, become a top chef (Rick Bayless), a hip hop star (Ndeka), a novelist (Camilla Gibb), leading financial journalist (Gillian Tett), or documentary-maker and author (Sebastian Junger). Go for it, anthros.

• Speaking of which, a great job for anthros: film producer
Michael Lieber, a former cultural anthropologist, is producing a new political action thriller in which an anthropologist goes to West Africa to clear the name of a friend who is implicated in a terrorist attack. James Bond screen writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade are involved. This could be good! Can you imagine swapping out the anthropologist in the lead part for….an economist?

• Last slave ship to the US
Just as there was a first one, there had to be a last one and thank goodness for that. Neil Norman, anthropology professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia is excavating sites in north Mobile county, Alabama, to learn about the lives of slaves who arrived from Benin on the Clotilde in 1860.

• Students excavate Civil War POW camp in Georgia
Mary Craft, a graduate from Gainesville State College, discovered the camp and is now working with others to excavate the site and develop the exhibit about it.

• Addicted to archaeology
The Frederick NewsPost carried a story about student excavators working at an African American slave site in Maryland. It highlights the dedication of Shayla Monroe, a senior archaeology major at Howard University.

• Speaking the g-word on the Hill
Cultural anthropologist, medical doctor, charismatic social justice activist, and co-founder of Partners in Health, Paul Farmer came to DC last week and testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill of the Congressional Black Caucus. He argued that donors need to strengthen Haiti’s public sector: “How can there be public health and public education without a strong government at the national and local levels?”

• Out of gas, we hope
The Australian Magazine carried an article about the heroic work of Andrew Stojanovski who lived for over a decade in a desert Australian Aboriginal community fighting the deadly habit of petrol sniffing among young people. Over time, thanks to his efforts and the support of local elders, youth gave up sniffing and others no longer started. Stojanovski has a degree in anthropology and is the author of Dog Ear Cafe, a book documenting his work and the community’s recovery. He will present the book to the Warlpiri elders, and all royalties will go to the program he helped establish.

• The silence of the bears
In an article in the Los Angeles Times, cultural anthropology professor at U.C. Berkeley, Laura Nader comments that “Berkeley is not a very progressive campus anymore.” This comment was made in relation to the absence of protest on the campus against the $500-million, 10-year deal to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute.

• Prince Charles creams the French
Watch out crème brûlée: here comes Cambridge burnt cream staking a claim to its place in culinary history long before the French created crème brûlée. A happy coincidence is that the English dessert was apparently first created at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the Prince of Wales studied. Note: Prince Charles read archaeology and anthropology, and it is he who is promoting Cambridge burnt cream in his new supermarket product line, Duchy Originals. See what you can do with anthropology!

• Not a typical career option for an anthropologist
Fiona Graham, with a PhD in anthropology, works full time in Japan as a geisha.

• Nighty night
James McKenna, a biological anthropology professor at Notre Dame University, was mentioned in an article about getting children to sleep in their own beds. He is an expert on infant sleeping patterns.

• Scents and non-scents
Christina Drea, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, is a member of a research group that has documented how hormonal birth control alters scent communication in lemurs. Contracepted lemur females tend to lose their scent. Since lemurs and other nonhuman primates identify kin through scent, contracepted females are at a social disadvantage. Does this finding apply to humans? One can’t leap from lemurs to humans, so stay tuned.

• In memoriam
Professor Celestin Misago Kanimba, president of the National Commission against Genocide (CNLG), died on July 20. He graduated with a degree in anthropology from Lubumbashi University in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then obtained a PhD in Hamburg, Germany.  Before his appointment as president of the CNLG, he served as Director of the National Museum of Rwanda.

• Death Valley, New Mexico
The Espanola Valley of northern New Mexico has the highest rate of heroin-related deaths in the United States. The only prize for this distinction is the constancy of death. Angela Garcia is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and the author of The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. She spent three years living in the Valley, doing participant observation. In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, she writes about the death of a two-year-old named Dion.

• Chris Beyrer: epidemiologist, social activist, Buddhist, and BA anthropologist
Read this Lancet interview for a great example of what a BA in cultural anthropology can lead to: Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, is Professor and Director of the Johns Hopkins Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program and of the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights. His five years in Thailand led to his book, War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia. Beyrer’s joint BA degree in anthropology and Asian Studies is from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, NY. His medical degrees are from Johns Hopkins.

• Girls being bad
Research by cultural anthropologist Donna Swift indicates that girls in the Tasman Police District, New Zealand are behaving more violently. For young girls aged six to eight years, one apparent causal factor is witnessing violence at home; for older girls, violent behavior is related to alcoholism and having a relationship with a significantly older male. Swift is also involved in awareness and prevention programs.

• Catering for a Roman orgy
The Guardian profiled the “improbable research” of Merry “Corky” White, cultural anthropology professor at Boston University, for her applied research on how to cater a Roman orgy for a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts. How did she do it? She consulted many old texts. Dessert was honey buns shaped to look like…buns.

• Anthro adds to joy of cooking
And more on the food and culture scene in Boston: the Boston Globe carried an article on cooking classes in and around Boston including mention of one by Ahmad Yasin who adds a dash of anthropology to his classes. Boston University is in the mix with its culinary degree programs launched by Jacques Pepin and Julia Child. I hope my university wakes up, smells the stirfry, and launches a food, culture, and sustainability program!

• Comics for literacy
Christina Blanch, an instructor in cultural anthropology at Ball State University, participated in a panel at the San Diego Convention Center on “Comics in the Classroom.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/26/10” →

• One year after: return to repression in Honduras
Speaking from Honduras during a march of democracy protestors in the capital, professor Adrienne Pine, a cultural anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC, is quoted in the Huffington Post: “We’ve…returned to the 1980s, when death squads killed several hundred people…they’re using the same repressive strategies….Even the same people are in charge.” And what is the US position in terms of human rights?

• Not such a shura thing
Shura is the word for a meeting of village elders (men) in Afghanistan. NATO military frequently organize shuras to explain their intents and operations. The elders appear and make a case for their interests. Brief footage of shuras in the film Restrepo shows that people on the two sides totally speak past each other. An article in the Christian Science Monitor quotes cultural anthropologist Thomas Barfield: “Communications at any point is a good thing. [But] having them in the midst of combat operations is a bit like talking about fire safety when the fire engines have arrived — most attention on both sides is focused elsewhere.” If you’ve seen Restrepo, just think about the dead cow.

• Drug trials as a way of life
Phase I drug testing on prisoners was banned in the United States in the 1980s. Since then, financial incentives for participation by “volunteers” have produced a stream of participants as well as debate about the ethics of the system in terms of whether or not volunteers have sufficient information about potential risks. An article in the Chronicle for Higher Education profiles the research of cultural anthropologist Roberto Abadie on this topic and his new book, The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects. Abadie, now a visiting scholar in the health sciences program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, spent a year living in youth hostels and group hotels in Philadelphia to learn about why people volunteer for clinical trials and their experiences in and after the trials. One finding: volunteers underestimate their risks. Read the article for more.

• Making a difference
Dame Joan Metge is a Paheka, a white outsider living in New Zealand with many honors to her name including being an honorary member of the Te Rarawa. She is a also a cultural anthropologist and tireless advocate for the Maori people and for better relations between the Paheka and the Maori. The New Zealand Herald carried an article about her and her new book, Tuamaka: The Challenge of Difference in Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Real men don’t like shopping
An oped in the Times (London) gave a shoutout to cultural anthropologist Kate Fox and her book, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior. She wrote that shopping, in England, is a female skill, and for men, being good at shopping lowers your manliness quota.

• Channelling Sir Herbert Risley
The 1901 Indian Census systematically attempted to count all “castes” throughout British India and record their population. This effort was led by Sir Herbert Risley, a British colonial anthropologist. His legacy lives on in a new report, “Caste in the United Kingdom”.

• Let’s go England: archaeo dates pushed back again
It was very cool in England then, even cold. But archaic humans made the trek out of Africa to… Norfolk. There they were with their flint tools, 800,000 years ago at Happisburgh (pronounced HAZE-bura). Supporters of this new date include researchers Simon Parfitt and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum and Nick Ashton of the British Museum. A leading skeptic is Richard Klein of Stanford University, notorious for resisting date push back.

• Could we perhaps assume kindness
Selfishness and cruelty, in the Darwinian-informed world, need no explanation. They are rational and logical forms of behavior as individuals struggle to the top of whatever pyramid they have made for themselves. Frans de Waal, primatologist at Emory University, writes against the grain and is a good choice for the New York Times review of the new book, The Price of Altruism. He ends his review by saying, “This is a book for anyone interested in the question, first posed by Darwin himself, of how we ended up with so much kindness in a natural world customarily depicted as ‘red in tooth and claw.’

• Better than sex
Now that bonobos are becoming a bit more known, it’s time to correct their image as just all about sex. The New York Times provides an interview with Brian Hare, assistant professor at the Duke University Institute for Brain Sciences, and Vanessa Woods, research scientist in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and author of Bonobo Handshake. So what’s better than sex? I’ve read the interview several times, and I am not sure whether the answer is sharing food, females sticking together in the face of male aggression, or refusing to “grow up” and becoming selfish. Could be a winning trifecta.

• LOL a long time ago
Who had the first laugh? Humor in human prehistory was addressed at the EuroScience Open Forum in Turin, Italy. Tom Flamson, who recently completed his PhD in anthropology at UCLA and is an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College, noted that humor is a human universal. Thus, according to evolutionary biology, there must be an adaptive reason for it. The imputed answer: joking ability is a sign of mental fitness and a factor in female selection of male mates (apologies if I have any of this wrong–I am working from the media coverage only, always a risk). And the data? According to the article in the Irish Times, brain-scan studies show that women react more positively to humor than men do. Blogger’s note: Sounds to me like we have a long way to go in terms of generating hard data on funny stuff. I hope my tax dollars don’t pay for it, though I would rather pay for humor studies than for one nail in one wing of a Drone.

• Appointments
David Shankland, reader in social anthropology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bristol University has been appointed Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Brian Gilley, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont, will be the first director of First Nations Educational and Cultural Center at Indiana University Bloomington.

• A bridge too far: belated apology to Ngarrindjeri women
Labor Party Mike Rann, South Australia’s 44th Premier, formally acknowledged this week that Ngarrindjeri women did not fabricate claims about their secret “business” in the mid 1990s. They argued that construction of the Hindmarsh Bridge linking their territory to the mainland would violate their sacred and secret beliefs. Many years later, most of the women originally involved in the protest are no longer alive. The bridge still stands. Controversy among cultural anthropologists still roils. Cold comfort that the women’s claims are now recognized as valid.

• Should we or shouldn’t we?
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, so too continues the question of anthropological involvement in supporting US efforts. Time carried a piece reviewing pros and cons. It included commentary from cultural anthropologist David Price, a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, about how it takes at least a year of hands-on fieldwork for trained anthropologists to get their bearings. His implication is that the HTS process does not allow for competence among the social scientists they hire.

• Our technology ourselves
Intel’s Ninth Annual Research Day was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The theme was about who will use the devices of the future, and how. This kind of forward thinking requires anthropological/social science knowledge about people’s behavior, perceived needs, and current “users’ experiences.” To support this effort, the company announced the launch of the Interaction and Experience Research Division led by cultural anthropologist and Intel fellow, Genevieve Bell.

• Cannibalism nouveau
In an opinion piece about Australian politics, Philippe Mora draws on the work of cultural anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum on cannibalism and the false “primitive/modern” divide. He likens the demise of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a form of acceptable cannibalistic politics.

• Welcome to Timbuctoo, New Jersey
A newly discovered site in northern southern New Jersey is perhaps the most important African American site and one of the most significant in the US. Called Timbuctoo, it was likely founded by freed slaves in the 1820s. David Orr, Temple University historical archaeologist and professor, says that the site offers the opportunity to see how an African American community changed over time, from its founding through World War II. Many descendants of Timbuctoo families live in the area, and some have volunteered to help with the research.

• Paleo show time
The latest twist on interpreting European cave art is that it was “part of an audiovisual performance.” Researchers at Cambridge University and Sankt Poelten’s University of Applied Sciences in Austria say that the images created sequences that could create a visual narrative for the viewer. Along with Bauhaus University in Germany, the researchers are launching the “Prehistoric Picture Project” using computer technology to animate the sequences like a cartoon show. Stay tuned for men hunting, fighting, and dancing, but apparently no paleo of Wonder Woman.

• The high life
The pace of human biological evolution is generally thought to be very slow, many thousands of years at least, more often millions of years. Several independent studies, however, indicate that biological adaptation to high altitude life in Tibet occurred relatively rapidly, as recently as 3,000 years ago. Most of the studies are conducted by biologists, but one is carried out by a group led by Cynthia Beall, a biological anthropologist and professor at Case Western University. Their report appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• In memoriam
Jack A. Tobin, a cultural anthropologist who devoted his life to research in the Marshall Islands, died June 14 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Tobin served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II and earned a Bronze Star. He earned a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and then worked for many years as a community development officer in the Marshalls.