In The News: Department of Anthropology
Is deep kissing a universal human behavior?
A new study finds that half of human cultures don’t practice romantic lip-on-lip kissing. Animals don’t tend to bother either. So how did it evolve?
Under his rainbow umbrella, which protects him from the harsh summer sun, Luis Sanchez happily serves one of his usual customers a raspado — shaved iced — into a plastic cup with homemade strawberry syrup on top.
Walking onto the Wisconsin Street property last week, the weight of what’s there hits you like a stone foundation. Exposed through careful hand excavation is a stretch of stone foundation very clearly laid out in the shape of half a cross.
Humans are born with instincts for crying and smiling, but not for kissing. Sometime in the past, our ancestors had the idea to smack their mouths together and call it romantic. And though we may not know who gave the first smooch, ancient records of these steamy sessions are helping us piece together when people started locking lips.
When was the first kiss? Recent papers have suggested that romantic or sexual kissing began 3,500 years ago in what is now India. But a new review paper in the journal Science says that this style of kissing is also mentioned in clay tablets from Mesopotamia that predate the Indian texts by about a thousand years.
As environmental crises cause a Las Vegas reservoir to recede, a trail of bodies from decades past is revealed.
Big History seeks to retell the human story in light of scientific advances by such methods as radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis. Brian Villmoare's book The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History provides a deep, causal view of the forces that have shaped the universe, the earth, and humanity.
Despite the fact that Genaro GarcÃa Luna, former security secretary in the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and one of the main implementers of the so-called "war on drugs", was found guilty of drug trafficking just last week, many people in Mexico are still waiting for him to be investigated for his role in the death and forced disappearance of thousands of people.
Take an apple, for example. This amazing fruit is brimming with pharmacologically (or better yet, nutrigenomically) active compounds, most notably ascorbic acid, also known as vitamin C. Another compound it contains is phlorizin, over a dozen polyphenols, potent antioxidants concentrated in the skin of the apple and known to elicit multitargeted effects that reduce the impact of high blood sugar in animal models.1 But this strictly material layer of nutritional analysis barely touches the surface when it comes to appreciating the informational complexity of food.
There are different perspectives behind our reasoning for kissing. The history of kissing is also very diverse, from being an instinct from breastfeeding to having to do with chimpanzees’ habits.
DRI archaeologist Greg Haynes, Ph.D., recently completed a synthetic report on the prehistoric ceramic artifacts of the Colorado and Mojave deserts for the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) California Desert District (CDD). The CDD manages the 11 million-acre California Desert Conservation Area, which holds cultural artifacts dating back thousands of years. Following a century of research on the prehistoric people and cultures of the Colorado and Mojave deserts of California, this is the first large-scale synthesis focused on ceramics and what they can tell us about the past.
