#bio Anth

[anthropology-with-cat]

I found an ‘interesting’ YouTube channel today.

I saw a video talking about plague corpse disposal from the black death.  The thumbnail was eye catching, and admittedly, pretty extreme. But I assumed it was just to get clicks and would primarily be educational.

I was so, so wrong.

The video’s base concept was about an island that was used as burial grounds for plague corpses. The island is off limits to the public (as it should be) but YouTube guy wants to see whats there.

By this point I have fully recognize that this is not an educational video and it’s just strange YouTube.

Then thing get worse. 

He gets onto the island via a loop hole in the law, and starts finding bones. Which at this point are small animal bones. Most likely chicken.

They move on to a different area where they start to find human remains. At first they were sticks, the camera showing them for a few frames. Then things got, questionable.

And while I’ve only taken an into to forensics anthropology, it’s pretty easy to tell that these bones were staged. Skeletons are not going to stay in articulation when in a tidal zone. The waves would move them out of out of association.  in the video, the segment had part of the pelvis, the femur and what appeared to be either another femur or the tibia. Again they didn’t linger. They ‘found’ a mandible after that. It was sitting arranged on a pile of shells.

I can’t tell if these were real remains, but regardless. If you spend an entire video talking about how bad you feel about these forgotten individuals then stage bones to be those forgotten individuals. You’re doing far worse, using deceased individuals real or not, just to generate clicks and views on a video.

[gayestcowboy]

genuinely i think biological and cultural anthropology should be taught at some point in every school ever

[treecakes]

i wish my uni had a good linguistics program i love languages etc. but archaeology is neat too i guess. 😭 it is actually fun. i like digging holes. but linguistics <3

[boirad]

I get skeletonin everytime I see bones tbh

skeletonin is the happiness chemical released when you see a ghoul or perhaps a ghost

[ay-its-grey]

i shouldn’t have to know the steps of mitosis for an anthropology class,,, just teach me about the monkeys please

[iocheaira]

okay its been like 6 weeks of migraine flare up and the excedrin has been working the whole time but im still shocked when it clears up the pain or reduces it by like 80%. perhaps partly bc of my slightly critical stance on western biomedicine like you’re telling me medication? can treat? physical symptoms????

[fakeoldmanfucker]

wait wait wait wait, does the fact that males are on average taller than females mean that humans are a little bit sexually dimorphic?? just a little bit?

[rowanjasper]

Q: are the lexigram based great ape language experiments as suspect? Ive been pretty disillusioned with primatology since i found out that the "chimps do war" has only been observed in troops that Goodall gave massive crates of non native foods to and she never acknowledged that it could have effected their behavior

Sometimes I'll think about that time when that one lady taught a gorilla to wiggle its hands around in exchange for treats and told the world she'd taught the gorilla sign language and so many people just believed her

[eredhes]

Hey!

I majored in anth at a p awesome school for it (had a so fun class where we hands on used paleo to neo lithic techniques- from making stone tools to processing hides) but there wasn't much available for prehistoric art (+ I was a major switch from microbiology so bio anth, epidemiology and forensics stuff, made more sense with my course history). Been out of school for almost 10 years now and unfortunately doing nothing even remotely related, but I'm wanting to learn more about prehistoric art of all sorts. With search engines being overrun with AI misinfo I'm not really sure where to start other than Wikipedia. Do you have any favorite resources you'd be up for recommending?

Thanks a ton! Happy holidays, and may the new year be kind.

Hello! I should preface this with saying I am just someone with a general interest and not remotely an expert haha! Getting to do hands on stuff sounds really fun!

A lot of my reading has been restricted to Upper Palaeolithic Europe, and cave art at that, so I can't really recommend anything outside of that.

I've been concerned also with avoiding misinformation - there was a painting I saw a while ago where it was obvious the level of research involved was typing "Lascaux" into pinterest and just using whatever results came up (the art used was from Cueva de los Caballos and Mesolithic) and it's been driving me nuts. I've been sticking to books for information, almost everything I've read has been through Internet Archive, and majority are over 30 years old so could be outdated, can contradict each other, and should be noted are can be very racist.

Putting the list of everything under a read more as it's quite long, I hope there's something useful in amongst all of this! Happy holidays, I hope you have a good new year!

Books and other resources I've found useful in no particular order:

The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs by Mario Ruspoli (1987) [Is on Internet Archive but currently unavailable, the German version is still up.] When Lascaux was closed to the public Mario Ruspoli was hired by the French govenment to document the entire cave on film and wrote this book afterwards. Even though it's focus is Lascaux I found it a good introduction to the topic of cave art. I have tried to find the footage online with little success so if anyone knows... do tell. This book brings you through the cave and gives a good idea of the layout and where paintings/engravings are in relation to each other. I would love if there was something like this for other caves but I'm not aware of anything 🤔

Lascaux Virtual Tour [Link here] The video isn't toally clear but it gives a good sense of the layout, and you can click the little 'i' icon to see clearer photos and get more details.

Images of the Ice Age by Paul Bahn and Jean Vertut (1988) [Internet Archive Link] This book is also a good starting point! There's also Journey Through the Ice Age which is the same book.

Cambridge Illustrated History of Cave Art by Paul Bahn (1998) [Internet Archive Link] I haven't gotten around to reading this yet but it appears to be a broader scope and not restricted to Europe.

Palaeolithic Cave Art by Peter J. Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld (1967) The main appeal of this bok is that it goes through the different possible reasons for cave art. I had to buy a physical copy as I couldn't find it online.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (2020) [Aeon article link "Sheanderthal: Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived?] Not solely focused on art but she does talk about what the neanderthals made including a large circular structure in Bruniquel Cave - there is footage of the cave in the recent netflix documentary Secrets of the Neanderthals (not great, at one point the narrator says neanderthals lived in the neolithic lmfao but the interviews with experts are interesting).

Don's Maps [Link here] Really great website. Some books will mention a painting/engraving/sculpture but no image, so my first place to check is Don's Maps as everything he includes is either from a book which will be referenced or from his own visits to caves.

The Neanderthal Museum Digital Archive [Link here] Despite the name is not exclusively Neanderthal, lots of photos of cave art in the Wendel Collection (including a photo of the one known instance of a saiga antelope in cave art that I hadn't been able to find a photo of before!).

There's also the Archaeology Podcast Network and sites like Academia.edu but I don't have any specific recommendations at present.

[hominoidea]

listen i know canonically ema skye does forensic bio/crim/chem but in my heart she is a forensic anthropologist. walk into any forensic anth department and you will probably find at least 10 carbon copies of her. she is the blueprint.

[justawrites]

Pen doodle in my bio anth class. Why is it actually decent. Not fair 😔

[gayestcowboy]

of course you have your foramen magnum located underneath your skull instead of at the back. and pronouns

[treecakes]

i was trying to explain a really not very interesting artifact (i think it’s fun and interesting though) we found during archaeology field school to a professor who. is in anthropology but she’s as far from archaeology as you can get in anthropology. and she was like uh huh. hm. yeah. and why is it interesting? and i was like well it’s the only artifact we found in the unit that is like. concurrent with the era we’re interested in in the site and reverse stratigraphy etc etc its placement was of note and she was just NOT interested she was like yeah i see. 😐

[wrathfulrook]

any chance any of you know anything about primatology/bio-anth with respect to grad school/academia?

[imaginingmoonlight]

Songs that remind me of Anthe (my Hazbin Hotel OC)

Because it’s fun okay?? Some of the stuff mentioned you’ll only really understand if you’ve read my other posts about her I’m sorryyyy. TW-family issues.

Our Word- 36 Questions. It sort of gives her old family on earth before she died.

Rule #3: Paperwork- Fish In A Birdcage. Girlie would NOT survive a normal office job or smth she wants to be OUTSIDE having FUN and LIVING LIFE.

Upside Down- Jack Johnson. It’s just. It’s very her. Again she wants to be out living her life and having fun rather than stuck in hell. She’ll get over it. Maybe.

Keep You Safe- The Crane Wives. She’s defo a lil too much like me and therefore an anxious girlie. So yeah this fits well.

If You Want The Rainbow- Lee Morse. She’d defo listen to this for comfort.

Dear Wormwood- The Oh Hellos. When she was trying to escape her bio family while alive. She finally realised she doesn’t have to stay. lol that didn’t end up too well but she didn’t know that would happen!!!

Hello My Old Heart- cos obvi she was gonna have trust issues after everything with her bio family but she’s slowly learning to trust people again and just be happy.

Now That We Don’t Talk- Taylor Swift. Cos you know. She doesn’t talk much with her bio family anymore. And she’s better off for it.

Sinner- The Last Dinner Party. Get it? Cos she’s a sinner? In hell? Also SHE’S GAY who said that??? But like overall her loss of innocence in a mental way rather than physical way after having to go to hell and all that fun stuff. So only parts of the song but like still.

Smile- Nat King Cole. Cos that gal looks UP to Alastor. A horrible choice really.

Eurus- The Oh Hellos. No real relation to her, she would just have an awesome time dancing to it. As would I.

So yeah, that’s it. Thanks for reading my silly lil rant 😭

[irlnikeiyomiuri]

rating the four fields of american anthropology so i have reason to not think abt my bio anth test i literally have up and started in a browser rn.

archaeology - starting out strong and by that i mean i need to get this out of the way. haven’t done anything specific to archaeology, just gotten a little bit into the approach/focus/done some archaeology stuff within the context of other courses. like a 7/10 it seems chill if not my thing! would be willing to dabble in the field again for other work

bio anth - i genuinely hope this concept fucking explodes. maybe one day we’ll get to a point with this subject where i’m not just willing canvas to explode so i don’t have to take this class, but it says a lot that the happiest ive been this quarter was when i found out i didn’t have a weekly lab for bioanth. 2/10 gets a few points for the fact that bio on its own is fine

cultural anth - if only this course had been set up better. content seems engaging and interesting and it seems like a fun subject, but i think i’d die if i went into it. the things which r studied are fun, but not enough to make me enjoy fieldwork and ethnographies. 5/10 because i really really really don’t like fieldwork and ethnographies

linguistic anth - was doing this in alphabetical order but look at that. best for last. this is my favorite this is my child this is my beloved. linguistic anth is like if cultural anth was cool and is also the exact opposite of bio anth (makes me want to explode /pos not /neg). the only subject that my adhd self could sit through weeks and weeks of non stop videos and readings for. 10/10