• Arab Detroit
The Detroit Free Press carried an article about a new book about life in the Detroit area’s Arab-American community in the decade since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The book, Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade, incorporates academic, artistic and everyday voices and viewpoints from one of the most well-known and largest communities of Arabs outside the Middle East. It is edited by three experts on Arab life in the Detroit area: University of Michigan anthropology professor Andrew Shryock, University of Michigan-Dearborn history professor Sally Howell, and Henry Ford Community College anthropology professor Nabeel Abraham.

• Spotlight on Minangkabau women as “hidden feminists”
The HuffPo carried an article about the Minangkabau people, among whom it is a blessing to have a daughter. The article starts with a comment from Nursyirwan Effendi who is not wealthy. But people in his community see him as blessed with good fortune: “Why? Because I have four daughters…People say I am a rich man.” Effendi is a senior lecturer in anthropology at Andalas University in Padang, the regional capital of West Sumatra. He is a Minangkabau, the world’s largest matrilineal society, numbering between 4 and 5 million people who live in Malaysia and Indonesia and are Muslims.

• Maya palace unearthed in Mexico
Mexican researchers have discovered remains of a 2,000-year-old Maya palace at an archaeological site in the state of Chiapas. The project director, Luis Alberto Martos, said the discovery represents the first evidence of occupation of that area between 50 B.C.E. and 50 C.E.

• Archaeo dates keep getting pushed back
The New York Times and Science News covered findings from a new study showing that stone tools from a site near Lake Turkana in Kenya were made about 1.76 million years ago, making them the oldest Acheulean tools so far. The articles include quotations from Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Eric Delson, a paleoanthropology professor at the City University of New York. The study findings are published in the journal Nature.

• Lecture at the Kenya Museum
The National Museum of Kenya’s Louis Leakey Auditorium in Nairobi hosted one of the world’s foremost paleoanthropologists, Rick Potts. Potts is the director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and a Research Associate at the National Museums of Kenya. His lecture was about his research at Olorgesailie in the Rift Valley and the story it tells of 6 million years of human evolution.

• In memoriam
On August 16, 2011, cultural anthropologist Fernando Coronil died in New York City. Coronil’s many contributions to anthropology include the development of the joint doctoral program in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan as well as many publications. Here is a quotation from one tribute: “Fernando’s interventions have resonated with special force in Latin American history and politics, colonial studies and postcolonial theory, Third World state formations, historical anthropology, and Marxist geography and state theory. He was part of the innovative Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. He engaged forcefully with contemporary Venezuelan state politics and oil policies while also introducing synthetic and comparative frameworks for understanding the Latin American left today and the history of empire in the Southern Hemisphere. He argued persuasively that the field of colonial studies was too focused on Northern Europe and the modern period. He insisted that scholars of empire integrate into their analytic frameworks the history of early modern Iberian imperialism as well as the precocious experiments in decolonization and national emancipation that unfolded in nineteenth-century Latin America. His work demonstrated that political economy, historical geography, state forms, and political discourses cannot be studied in isolation from one another.” A collection of other tributes can be found at Savage Minds.

• Libya: the oily truth
FoxNews quoted William Beeman, chair of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota: “Our interests are mostly commercial,” he said. “The U.S. has an important supply of excellent sweet crude out of Libya. There are very few places in the world that have oil of this quality.” According to Beeman, Libya produces 2 percent of the world’s oil supply. At its peak, that amounts to 500,000 barrels a day. Most of that goes to Europe, but Beeman says that with a new regime in place, more of that oil could come to the U.S. like it did before Gadhafi rose to power 42 years ago. “Whoever takes over the government after this political action will need to sell oil,” Beeman said.

• Anthro study of college student research habits
Not good news: The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project enlisted two anthropologists to collect data using open-ended interviews and direct observation to generate accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of library research at five institutions in the midwest U.S. One finding is that students’ research habits are worse than expected.

• Thriller anthropology
USA Today and other mainstream media covered Kathy Reichs, Chicago native who has used her scientific skills to help identify victims and determine cause of death in dozens of police cases investigated by the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciares et de Médecine Légale in Canada’s Quebec province. Reichs is author of 14 thrillers starring forensic anthropologist Temperance “Tempe” Brennan — No. 14, Flash and Bones, is on sale Tuesday. She is also producer of the popular Fox TV show Bones, a series inspired by Reichs’ career and a fictional forensic anthropologist.

• Earliest horse domestication relocated
Saudi Arabia is excavating a new archeological site that will show horses were domesticated 9,000 years ago in the Arabian peninsula, the country’s antiquities expert said Wednesday. Reuters quoted Ali al-Ghabban, Vice-President of Antiquities and Museums at the Saudi Commission for Tourism & Antiquities: “This discovery will change our knowledge concerning the domestication of horses and the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period.”

• Gruesome mummies
The oldest deliberately-created mummies ever found in Britain comprise body parts from several different people. The four prehistoric bodies were unearthed in 2001 on South Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

• Earliest naked chef
Science News and the Guardian covered a report that early humans cooked their first hot meals nearly two million years ago, according to researchers at Harvard University. They have traced the origins of cooking through studying tooth sizes and the feeding behavior of monkeys, apes and modern humans.

• Listening to the evolution of the body
The New York Times carried an interview with evolutionary anthropologist, Dan Lieberman, professor at Harvard University. Lieberman focuses on the evolution of the human foot and head.

• Cultural critique of sex offender treatment in the U.S.
Cultural anthropologist Roger Lancaster published an opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times that draws from his book, Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Lancaster is a professor of anthropology at George Mason University and director of cultural studies. In his essay he indicates how sex offenses in America are over-exaggerated in the public imagination in relation to their statistical frequency. He looks at existing laws about registration and notification and argues that they are not effective in protecting children from sex abuse.

• U.K. rioting not random
Anthroworks’ Sean Carey, cultural anthropologist at Roehampton University, published an article in the Guardian in which he argues against statements that the recent riots in several English cities were random. He acknowledges that the disorders do not fit the conventional sense of a race riot with people from different ethnic groups pitted against each other or an ethnic group in conflict with the police. Yet, he sees “a racial component” — specifically, the death of a 29-year-old black man, Mark Duggan, who was shot by police in Tottenham — which set off the disorders.

• Two new books on Australian Aboriginal affairs
The Australian carried a positive review of two new books about Aboriginal affairs: “In The Protectors: A Journey Through Whitefella Past, Stephen Gray takes as his subject, and as the mirror for his self-scrutiny, the record of the past century of Aboriginal affairs management in the Northern Territory. How did we get where we are? What are the hidden wellsprings of our conduct?” In her book, A Different Inequality: The Politics of Debate about Remote Aboriginal Australia, “Diane Austin-Broos gazes back in equally unflinching fashion on the role of her own profession across the same stretch of time. How did anthropologists observe and respond to the conditions of remote area Aboriginal life?” In sum: “Both books are clear and even-handed, and their open perspective is achieved in great part through urgent self-examination. They are models of the public intellectual’s craft.”

• Career tip: “search anthropology”
The Atlantic interviewed Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google. He studies how people do searches and has found that 90 percent of people do not know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. [Blogger’s note: I am in that group of dummies and can’t wait to try out this search command! Furthermore, I have been living so far without knowing what “search anthropology” is!]

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes tie-in #1
John Mitani, professor of biological anthropology at the University of Michigan, published an opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times entitled, “Fearing a Planet without Apes.” Mitani argues for reauthorizing of the U.S. Great Ape Conservation Fund which seems to be stuck in Congress, like many other important issues. He describes the extent of habitat loss for the great apes, such as orangutans, and the positive impact that the Great Ape Conservation Fund has had, in spite of its relatively modest budget. [Blogger’s query: One can only imagine where the radical Republican right stands on primate conservation versus habitat destruction in the name of resource extraction, “modernity” and consumption. We know where they stand on the scientific story of human evolution and, therefore, the need to protect our closest relatives. Among humans, the word genocide would apply to the kind of treatment generally given to non-human primates today].

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