biology | Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives

Browsing All posts tagged under »biology«

Grand Challenges for Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality

January 31, 2016

A few years back there was a survey of archaeologists to determine the 25 Grand Challenges that archaeology could help solve…That survey was pretty specific about what they considered ‘Grand Challenges’: ‘The Web survey defined grand challenges to be fundamental problems in science and explicitly excluded “disciplinary challenges with respect to the practice of archaeology, […]

Ain’t I a Woman?

March 19, 2013

Well, no, actually– not even 30% of one. But you sure are making history. That’s my gut reaction after being asked by BBC Radio to participate in a broadcast reacting to a news story published on the BBC website today. Tagline: Rocky Horror Show writer Richard O’Brien thinks of himself as 70% male and 30% […]

Honoring Janus, looking backward and forward

January 2, 2012

Happy New Year! Ever wonder why January 1 is observed as New Year’s Day in the Gregorian calendar? I went on a journey to find a rationale for this unusual choice; biased by years of studying ancient Mesoamerica, I found it odd that with the winter solstice so close, the year began at an apparently […]

Where the Girls Are, Roman Edition

November 12, 2011

Once upon a time, the kinds of things we could know about ancient populations were highly generalized. Now, through the work of people like Kristina Killgrove, that is changing– and you can be part of making it happen. I couldn’t be more happy. A while ago (a loong while ago) I started writing a blog […]

Bone deep: sex and the skeleton

August 27, 2011

I have been waiting to see how long it would take the mainstream press to make the obvious joke about news the New York Times recently reported, that a protein called osteocalcin, which is produced by bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, binds to a specific receptor on cells of the testes. Male mice that were unable […]

Body Histories: “Expressive muscles” and women’s fatigue

July 8, 2011

“Any doctor who saw how even experienced female athletes collapsed and were lying on the ground after the race could not support this kind of athletic competition for women.” Norwegian historian Kerstin Bornholdt cites this statement, by a German doctor, H. Franzmeyer, reacting to what he saw as the unsuitable participation by women in the […]

Evolution as Fight Club

May 21, 2011

This just in: ancestral humans adopted bipedal posture so that males could fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making their punches more dangerous. OK. I actually thought I knew the range of arguments for bipedalism. I guess I appreciate having something novel to think about? The research described in news reports I read was […]

Burying the dead (at Tlatilco and elsewhere)

March 19, 2011

I read a wide swath of archaeological news every day, and this past week the news I am reading has been resonating– or really, has presented a counterpoint to– the writing I have been doing myself. Because, as is typical, many of the news stories I am reading are about finds of human remains, which […]

Penis spines! (oh, and something about brains too…)

March 10, 2011

Nature‘s editors and authors tried, they really tried, titling the report published yesterday “Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits”. But from the earliest news report I can find (yesterday on Science 2.0, titled “Why Your Penis Has no Spine”) through to the raft of articles today, reporters have had their […]

British, Roman, or African? On race, ethnicity, and nationality

January 26, 2011

The past was not full of homogeneous towns. People in the past were not uniform in their cultures, their sexualities, or their subjective experiences. If I have one goal in my teaching– one goal in my writing– it would be to get that point across, so that finding difference in past populations would be expected, […]