The Archaeology of Animal Bones (Texas A&M University Anthropology Series)

The Archaeology of Animal Bones (Texas A&M University Anthropology Series)

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Animal ecologists can observe the present and reconstruct the last one or two centuries from historical sources, but the study of animal bones adds valuable insight into the peoples and landscapes of the past while telling much about the evolution of human-animal relationships. In this standard work, now available in paperback, O’Connor offers a detailed overview of the study of animal bones. He analyzes bone composition and structure and the archaeological evidence left by the processes of life, death, and decomposition. He goes on to look at how bone is excavated, examined, described, identified, measured, and reassembled into skeletons. The bulk of the book is devoted to the interpretation of bone fragments, which tell much about the animals themselves—their health, growth, diet, injuries, and age at death.

 

Everyone Is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race

Everyone Is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race

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What does science say about race? In this book a distinguished research geneticist presents abundant evidence showing that traditional notions about distinct racial differences have little scientific foundation. In short, racism is not just morally wrong it has no basis in fact.The author lucidly describes in detail the factors that have led to the current scientific consensus about race. Both geneticists and anthropologists now generally agree that the human species originated in sub-Saharan Africa and darkly pigmented skin was the ancestral state of humanity. Moreover, worldwide human diversity is so complex that discrete races cannot be genetically defined. And for individuals, ancestry is more scientifically meaningful than race.Separate chapters are devoted to controversial topics: skin color and the scientific reasons for the differences why ancestry is more important to individual health than race intelligence and human diversity and evolutionary perspectives on the persistence of racism.This is an enlightening book that goes a long way toward dispelling the irrational notions at the heart of racism.

 

Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History

Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History

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A geneticist explains the science behind genetic history and what it has revealed about Jewish originsWho are the Jews? Where did they come from? What is the connection between an ancient Jewish priest in Jerusalem and today’s Israeli sunbather on the beaches of Tel Aviv? These questions stand at the heart of this engaging book. Geneticist David Goldstein analyzes modern DNA studies of Jewish populations and examines the intersections of these scientific findings with the history (both biblical and modern) and oral tradition of the Jews. With a special gift for translating complex scientific concepts into language understandable to all, Goldstein delivers an accessible, personal, and fascinating book that tells the history of a group of people through the lens of genetics.In a series of detective-style stories, Goldstein explores the priestly lineage of Jewish males as manifested by Y chromosomes the Jewish lineage claims of the Lemba, an obscure black South African tribe the differences in maternal and paternal genetic heritage among Jewish populations and much more. The author also grapples with the medical and ethical implications of our rapidly growing command of the human genomic landscape. The study of genetics has not only changed the study of Jewish history, Goldstein shows, it has altered notions of Jewish identity and even our understanding of what makes a people a people.

 

Hunter-Gatherer Adaptation and Resilience: A Bioarchaeological Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutiona...

Hunter-Gatherer Adaptation and Resilience: A Bioarchaeological Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutiona...

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Hunter-gatherer lifestyles defined the origins of modern humans and for tens of thousands of years were the only form of subsistence our species knew. This changed with the advent of food production, which occurred at different times throughout the world. The chapters in this volume explore the different ways that hunter-gatherer societies around the world adapted to changing social and ecological circumstances while still maintaining a predominantly hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Couched specifically within the framework of resilience theory, the authors use contextualized bioarchaeological analyses of health, diet, mobility, and funerary practices to explore how hunter-gatherers responded to challenges and actively resisted change that diminished the core of their social identity and worldview.

 

The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Biological Theories of Race at the Millenium)

The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Biological Theories of Race at the Millenium)

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In this groundbreaking book, Joseph Graves traces the development of biological thought about human genetic diversity. Greek philosophy, social Darwinism, New World colonialism, the eugenics movement, intelligence testing biases, and racial health fallacies are just a few of the topics he addresses. Graves argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. He champions the scientific method and explains how we may properly ask scientific questions about the nature of population differentiation and how (if at all) we may correlate that diversity to observed human behavior. He also cautions us to think critically about scientific findings that have historically been misused in controversies over racial differences in intelligence heritability, criminal behavior, disease predisposition, and other traits. According to Graves, this country cannot truly address its racial problems until people understand the empirical evidence behind this truth that separate human races do not exist. With the biological basis for race removed, racism becomes an ideology, one that can and must be deleted.

 

Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar (Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture Series)

Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar (Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture Series)

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In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive spaces to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought. These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self abstract change expressions in Japanese mood in Spanish deictic expressions copular sentences in Japanese conditional constructions and reference in American Sign Language.The ground-breaking research presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists. The contributors are Claudia Brugman, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Yo Matsumoto, Errapel Mejias-Bikandi, Laura A. Michaelis, Gisela Redeker, Jo Rubba, Shigeru Sakahara, Jose Sanders, Eve Sweetser, and Karen van Hoek.

 

Missing & Murdered: A Personal Adventure in Forensic Anthropology

Missing & Murdered: A Personal Adventure in Forensic Anthropology

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The popularity of TV programs such as the CSI trilogy attests to people s fascination with forensic science as a means of solving crimes, and this book follows the pathway into forensics via the fields of anthropology and anatomy. Missing & Murdered explains the practice of forensic anthropology and the skills base of skeletal biology, while at the same time debunking the CSI effect (the phenomenon of popular television raising crime victims real-world expectations of forensic science, especially crime-scene investigation and DNA testing). From muti murders, criminal cases and the Missing Persons Task Team to the study of archaeological skeletons, Missing & Murdered will grip and engross readers from one intriguing chapter to the next.