• Missing link media star fades

The much-hyped fossil nicknamed “Ida,” discovered in May 2009 was the subject of a rapidly produced book and television show about her place in prehistory as a “missing link” in the human-primate line. More recent detailed analysis questions that claim, saying Ida is an ancient primate but part of a line that did not lead to humans. Oops. But some would say, hey: that’s science. Scientists look at the data and formulate findings; then other scientists look at the data and substantiate, reverse, or reformulate earlier findings. So no oops: just science at work. In this case it appears to be somewhat premature science aligned with the voracious media and, apparently, a public audience hungry for the sexy fossil bits of both.

• Give us back our queen

Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, is leading an effort by Egypt to get Germany to return a 3,500 year-old image of Queen Nefertiti. Hawass claims that the image (referred to in the media as “bust”) was taken illegally from Egypt nearly a century ago. If Germany can prove that the work was not stolen, then okay. But Hawass is convinced it was stolen. Queen Nefertiti’s bust is one of many other contested artifacts that were removed from their original sites during the many decades of European and US colonialism.

• Stone Age sex

Svante Pääbo, an expert on the Neanderthals, asserted at a conference at the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York, that the Neanderthals and modern humans certainly had sex. But whether sex led to offspring is less clear. He is, however, confident that the Neanderthal genome sequence he is working on will provide an answer. His findings will be published soon. Neanderthals existed until about 30,000 years ago and inhabited a vast range from Europe to the Middle East and Siberia. They overlapped with modern humans for about 10,000-12,000 years.

•Anthropologist named one of the “Brilliant Ten” young scientists

Popular Science annually shines its gaze on 10 men and women under the age of forty whose work “will change the future.” One of this year’s winners is Nate Dominy, associate professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Dominy ‘s research in human evolution focuses on the acquisition and consumption of food of the human ancestors who lived around 2 million years ago. He combines approaches of anthropology, ecology, and genetics to understand what drove the evolution of bipedalism and big brains. Currently, Dominy is in Uganda, launching a multiple-continent investigation of pygmy populations to learn about the biomechanics and metabolic costs of locomotion.

• Too Poor to Do the Right Thing

Many people in the United States can no longer afford to bury or cremate their dead loved ones due to the so-called economic downturn. According to an article in the New York Times, “Coroners and medical examiners across the country are reporting spikes in the number of unclaimed bodies and indigent burials with states, counties, and private funeral homes having to foot the bill when families cannot.” Oregon has seen a 50 percent increase in unclaimed bodies.

In Tennessee, unclaimed remains are donated to the Forensic Anthropological Research Center, also known as the “Body Farm.” The bodies are buried and students use them to study patterns of decomposition over time. This year, the Center received more bodies than it could handle and was forced to halt its donation program.

There is no good news here.

• Son of an Anthropologist Wins Nobel Peace Prize

On a brighter note, President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this week, a happening that was widely covered in the mainstream media though, as far as I can tell, no one so far has connected his peace-making efforts to the potential influence of his mother, Ann Dunham, who was a cultural anthropologist.

A BBC documentary, “Dreams from My Mother,” provides insights into the life of Stanley Ann Dunham (so-named because of her parents’ wish to have a son). It shows how, after her second divorce, she moved to Yogyakarta, in Java, and began her lifelong study of indigenous crafts industries. Later she was admitted to the PhD program at the University of Hawai’i where she pursued the archaeology and cultural anthropology of blacksmithing in Java. Moving beyond her academic studies, in order to help people in these industries, she constructed a model of micro-financing which is now the standard in Indonesia. She generated support for her work from the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to help poor rural people launch small businesses.

Ann Dunham was an unconventional woman: a devoted mother, pioneering scholar, and applied anthropologist working on behalf of the poor. Is her importance, as an anthropologist and humanitarian activist, in the achievements of her son getting the attention it deserves?

• Ethnography Gains a Toehold in Political Science

An article entitled “Political Scientists Get Their Hands Dirty” in the Chronicle for Higher Education describes how some US political scientists are doing “political ethnography,” or fieldwork-based research involving long-term participant observation, the hallmark research method invented by cultural anthropologists. Edward Schatz is one of the “new” political ethnographers. He is the editor of a new book from the University of Chicago Press called Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. The book includes contributions from 16 scholars who argue that political scientists should take a serious lesson from cultural anthropology. That’s the good news. The bad news is this: Given the dominance in US political science of formal modeling and quantitative analysis, a political scientist who opts for an ethnographic approach and qualitative data is likely to be seen as far from the leading edge of the discipline and maybe even unworthy of full tribal membership when it comes to searches for tenure-line positions in academia. Perhaps, however, political ethnographers will be welcome in anthropology departments? Or will the anthropologists view them as less than anomalous and not unworthy of being full members of their tribe?

• Gold Hoard a Treasure for Archaeologists in England

Related to the topic of disrespected methods: vindication for hobbyist “metal detectorists” came from an announcement of a major discovery in a field in Staffordshire, England, of 1,500 military- related pieces of gold and silver, some encrusted with gems. No longer the subject of mockery for his hobby, Terry Herbert, who discovered the hoard, will receive half its monetary value. Archaeologists are already involved in analyzing the find and its context. Tentative dating places it in the 7th century, a time of war between vying kings, plunder and fine metalwork devoted to the creation of beautiful objects for warriors.

• David Vine on Engaging the Military

Inside Higher Ed carried an op-ed by cultural anthropologist David Vine, assistant professor at American University. Vine summarizes key aspects of the debate within US anthropology concerning anthropological collaboration with counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reports on the highlights of a recent two-day meeting at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International Studies convened by the newly founded Eisenhower Research Project for the Critical Study of Armed Forces and Militarization. Participants included anthropologists, historians, and others. They discussed US military spending, military checkpoints in Iraq, the increasing use of remote-controlled robots and other advanced technologies in war, the military’s role in the war on drugs, the militarization of the US border, “military wives” and “military families,” and how Hollywood and popular culture glorifies war. Vine concludes by stating his view that no military solution to the Taliban exists and that US foreign policy must move more firmly toward international cooperation rather than invasion as a strategy. He sees a crucial role for anthropologists and other social scientists working with the military and engaged citizens in advancing policy in this direction. Anthropologists and other social scientists, however, have typically distanced themselves from policy debates in international relations. So Vine urges them (us) to proceed in a new direction as well.

• Evolutionary Anthropologists Link Sleep with Resistance to Infections across Species

An article in the New York Times on the relationship between the amount of sleep and the risk of catching a cold (yes, they are connected) mentioned related research by a team of evolutionary anthropologists (B.T. Preston, I. Capellini, P. McNamara, R. A. Barton, and C.L. Nunn) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Their comparative study of sleep patterns in many animal species demonstrates that the more members of a species sleep, the more resistance to infections they have. There’s a definite take-home message here.

· An episode of NOW on PBS discusses a Partners in Health project and includes an interview with Paul Farmer.

· On C-SPAN’s feature, “Top Non-Fiction Authors and Books,” Professor David Vine talks about the U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and the 2000 residents of the island who were forcibly exiled from there by the Americans and the British in the late 1960s and early 1970s. See the earlier post on this blog about Vine’s book, Island of Shame.

· The Hawaii News reported archaeological discoveries on Mokumanamana, a remote and currently uninhabited island north of the main Hawaiian islands. Kekuewa Kikilio, a University of Hawaii anthropology doctoral student, and Anan Raymond, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service archaeologist, found a partially finished stone carving, remains of a workshop, and agricultural terraces. Further research is required to provide information on when humans lived on the island and for how long.

· The Bill Moyers Journal featured an interview with Dr. Jim Young Kim assessing President Obama’s health care speech and ideas for reform. Dr. Kim is president of Dartmouth College and, with Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health. He has an MD degree and a PhD in anthropology, both from Harvard University. In the interview, Dr. Kim links U.S. health care reform to his experiences in global health work: “One of the things that we’ve learned is that community health workers, which are really members of the community who help people go through very difficult treatment regimens, this can work anywhere. We’ve done it first in Haiti. Then we did it in Peru. And then in Africa. But most remarkably, we’ve also implemented that program in Boston, and are now thinking of implementing it on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico…Having someone who just visits every day, just to make sure that you’re taking your medicines and you’re doing okay, that has a huge payoff down the line in terms of overall health outcomes.”

• A guest editorial by Nancy Scheper-Hughes in the August issue of the journal Anthropology Today on public/engaged anthropology was picked up by the British publication Times Higher Education on September 3. Scheper-Hughes argues that anthropologists should be publicly engaged but that universities do not reward public roles and contributions. UK academics, according to the article, are facing increased pressure to make their research relevant to public issues and thus face the challenge of how to convince their academic employers to recognize such contributions.

• Hugh Gusterson, professor of anthropology at George Mason University is quoted in an article on the Human Terrain System (HTS) in the September 8 issue of Foreign Policy. Gusterson emphasizes that, according to the longstanding code of ethics of the American Anthropological Association, “The prime directive is that you do no harm to informants” and that the information produced by Human Terrain teams is “inherently double-edged” because, while it may indeed reduce the amount of force by providing leaders alternative courses of action such as negotiation or a development project, it can also be accessed by military intelligence who may use it to target Taliban operatives. Gusterson argues that involvement of anthropologists with the HTS may taint the entire discipline with a reputation of miilitary collaboration.

• It’s fascinating to observe when the mainstream media do and do not mention that a particular high visibility person is an anthropologist. Paul Farmer, for example, is often described as a charismatic doctor with no mention of his being a medical anthropologist with a PhD from Harvard. Ashraf Ghani, who recently ran for president of Afghanistan, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and taught anthropology before joining the World Bank and then serving as Minister of Finance in Afghanistan. His World Bank and government credentials tend to be given center stage. Much less frequent is the attribution of “anthropologist” to someone who isn’t. In the September 8 article in Foreign Policy, we are told that David Kilcullen, who played a key role in developing the Human Terrain System has a PhD in anthropology. He does not. He earned a PhD in politics at the University of New South Wales. His dissertation was based on ethnographic research carried out in Indonesia and South Timor, so he stands as a prominent example of a non-anthropologist who uses anthropological methods. It is perhaps significant that, as opposed to a U.S. anthropologist, Kilcullen (an Australian who is not an anthropologist) plays such an important role consulting for the U.S. Department of State in its war efforts and in promoting the use of social scientists, especially anthropologists in the HTS.