On the efficacy of shamanism from Mike Jay's review of M. Singh's "Shamanism".

I just finished M. Singh's "Shamanism" and at the very end he notes this incredible anti-intellectual nonsense from our post-modern colleagues.

Well worth a close read and includes humans - Biological Reviews - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/a...

Bonobo news: We found that females target males in 85% of their coalitions, that females occupy higher ranks compared to males when they form more frequent coalitions. ...female coalition formation is a behavioral tool for females to gain power over males. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Weird and irrelevant reference padding.

Whoever alerted me to this response by Azar Gat to Michael Mann's "On War", THANKS. The takedown was systematic and exposes a certain blindness in sociology. networks.h-net.org/group/discus...

Although Cavalli-Sforza died in 2018 at the age of 96, here is a retrospective piece on his truly innovative contributions to the story of human evolution in joining archaeology and other human sciences with population genetics. Met him when I worked at NSF www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/b70f0d...

"the narrow bandwidth of ideas that Western academics often draw upon when formulating hypotheses for socio-cultural phenomena in other times and places"

Today's re-reading and noting a lovely photo of the Gunwinggu from Jon Altman's important work. They no doubt feasted for days and called in friends and relatives to join in

I know that you-all occasionally get this academic junk but the subject line in the email is so - I really don't know what to say "Great News! You are Highly Invited for Servicing as a Editor in Chief"

We could use more studies like this one by sociologists who are not afraid of evolutionary theory sociologicalscience.com/articles-v10...

Mass editorial board resignation at the Journal of Human Evolution. Why? Elsevier the publisher of JHE has an enormous 24% profit margin. To increase it further they are cutting back copy editing and other human resources necessary for a well-run journal. x.com/markwgrabows...

Montaigne in "Of Cannibals" described Brazilian native Tupinamba visitors to France in 1562 and their assessment of French civilization

My profile image has been blurred because of "explicit sexual imagery". Dumb AI I suspect. The suspect link to my homepage has a bare chested Yanomamo woman with other bare chested men peering over my shoulder as I work on my computer. I have appealed. I hope I get a pass.

Excellent history of evolutionary anthropology as it relates to human behavior and culture. The take home point is that both human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology need to account for culture per se more effectively and intergratively. Open access at www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

Seems that it has a small chance of success but one can hope and hope it will lead others to effectively expose the collusion and exploitation: www.chronicle.com/article/a-ma...

Luke Glowacki just published an excellent critique on war among mobile foragers with a focus on the work of Fry and Söderberg inter alia. I have published my own reservations of their Science paper. But Luke's paper uncovered more problems. I had to change my lecture notes to include the following

80% of the world's biodiversity found in indigenous territories. The figure is false and incomprehensible yet cited in 186 scientific publications www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thought of the day: scientific journals exploit reviewers. It takes me about half-a-day of work to do a good review and sometimes more with SOM's. A tiny step in the right direction would be to compensate reviewers with a gratis two year subscription to the journal. Thoughts?

Our failure to reproduce Anderson et al (2023), The Myth of Man the Hunter, is now published: 🧪 authors.elsevier.com/c/1j2qf3tz49...

Our article on women and hunting is now in press and online. Free views for the next 50 days. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

More on woman the hunter Martin,Melanie, AlejandraNuñezdelaMora, ClaudiaValeggia,and AmandaVeile.2024.“Can women hunt?Yes. Did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not.” American Anthropologist1–5. doi.org/10.1111/aman...

Our critique of "The Myth of Man the Hunter" is now up on a preprint server. It has been submitted to PLOS One www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Love this admonition "It is also imperative to stop assigning a starring role to each new fossil discovery to fit evolutionary scenarios that are not based on testable hypotheses." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

G. Purzycki has put out a call for applications to support up to two field seasons of support for a focused, 3-year project (ending Dec. 2026) on the relationship between religion, cooperation, and social ecology. For details go here and click on Call for Field Researchers pure.au.dk/portal/en/pr...

Ben Purzycki is looking for a postdoc (3-years) with quant./methods skills to help with a big cross-cultural project on small-scale religions and cooperation/coordination. Details in the link below, deadline is 25 Feb. international.au.dk/about/profil...

My biographical memoir of Napoleon Chagnon is now up" www.nasonline.org/publications...

Someone Twitter posted this yesterday. The common pattern is to compare human social patterns to animals but this reverses showing how human clans may be models of animal social organization Whitehead, "Sperm whale clans and human societies." Royal Society Open Science 11, no. 1 (2024)

I just received page proofs and it is not starting well.

An important critique of "Woman the Hunter" now out at osf.io/preprints/os... And there is more to come!

An encore to their two American Anthropologist articles www-scientificamerican-com.libproxy.unl.edu/article/the-...

Noble Prize winner Katalin Karikó was forced to retire from Penn ten years ago because she was "not faculty quality" www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/h...

Excellent piece by anthropologist Manvir Singh on the carnivore diet. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Interesting account of foraging specialists in Borneo and their isolation and relationship to settled groups as well as how they are similar to others (Agta, Batek, etc.) in SE Asia www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/s...

"How can I explain this to you?" This is so sensible. Much like Tinbergen's four questions, but in a modern context. www.danielnettle.org.uk/2023/09/11/h...

Fascination cross-cultural study of "Universal Interpretations of Vocal Music pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37676911/