I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, but I do welcome opportunities, arbitrary or not, to pause, reflect, and change direction. With the arrival of 2019, I am ready to jump back into the blogging world. This might seem counter to existing trends, with most accounts of blogging having crystalized on a story of the rise and fall of the form (e.g. https://daily.jstor.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-blog/).
Blogs exploded in popularity fast. According to Drezner and Farrell, in 1999, there were an estimated 50 blogs dotted around the internet. By 2007, a blog tracker theorized there were around seventy million. Yet, a popular question today is whether blogs still have any relevance. A quick Google search will yield suggested results, “are blogs still relevant 2016,” “are blogs still relevant 2017,” and “is blogging dead.”
But there remain lots of good reasons to blog, and at least some reason to believe that intelligent and strategic online outreach–including blogs–might be a more important form of science outreach now than ever (Iyengar & Massey, 2018).
For me, though, the motivations are primarily personal. For one, I want to reinforce the discipline (and pleasure) of writing in my daily life. For the past several years the administrative side of academia has taken on a larger fraction of my professional life. I have no regrets about these roles (departmental chair, Biological Anthropology Section chair of the AAA, co-associate editor for biological anthropology for American Anthropologist), but they have allowed me to see them as an excuse to do less writing. I’d like to change that. The second motivation is simply that I have a lot of projects going on that I am excited about and that I want to be able to share in ways beyond the formal products of the work (i.e. publications) themselves, and elaborate on the process going into this work in addition to the end-products. This post will introduce a few of those projects that will be populating this page in the coming weeks and months.
Running for Science: Science for Running
This one is fun. And hard. And a little bit terrifying. I’ll have a longer post dedicated to this over the weekend, but I am running the Boston Marathon in support of the Boston Museum of Science. As part of my fundraising campaign (see here: https://give.mos.org/fundraiser/1801782), I am putting together a 15-part podcast series focused on the science of running from an evolutionary perspective. Each week, beginning next week, I’ll be interviewed an expert in the field of paleoanthropology, anatomy, human biology, and related disciplines who do work on this topic. I have three episodes in the can already and am very excited for what the full series will look like. And in the meantime, I’ll be chronicling my own journey of training for and (hopefully) running (and completing) the Boston Marathon. I have never been a runner before, so this is new, but since my first year at Wellesley I have always had a dream to run the marathon. For those not familiar with the marathon, Wellesley sits right at about the halfway point of the course. After watching and cheering and shouting for the runners on the course throughout the past 11 years, this year I will be joining them. And hopefully raising some awareness about the science of running, and funding for the Museum of Science’s traveling outreach programs in the process.
South-Central Kazakhstan Paleolithic Survey
For something completely different, this summer will be the primary field season for a small, National Geographic funded project conducting Paleolithic survey work in South-Central Kazakhstan. The origin of this project goes to a collaboration with Mica Glantz (Colorado State Unversity), including several of her colleagues and students, a number of years ago. Some of the work we started has already been published (e.g. Glantz, et al., 2018), with a focus on trying to understand the dynamics of hominin population occupation in the Middle-Late Pleistocene. What determined where hominins were able to persist? And what might that tell us about the structure of hominin populations in the Pleistocene?
Unfortunately, Central Asia is a big area, but one that does not have a huge or well-documented paleo-record. I had the great pleasure of spending time with folks from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences last summer, including a visit to the site of Denisova (and other Altai sites), who have done much of the paleo work in this region. But as I said, the area is large, and the focus it has received (especially outside the Russian scientific community) has been relatively small. My project is trying to fill in just some of the gaps, by doing preliminary survey work in just a small corner of South-Central Kazakhstan. While this part of Central Asia has not gotten much attention in the past, interest in at the moment is at an all-time high. In this case, not because of fossil finds, directly, but because of a fascinating record of ancient DNA. Ancient DNA from the aforementioned site of Denisova (and related Altai sites) attests to a complex population history in this region, including Neandertals, Denisovans, and early humans (at least). The so-called “Inner Asian Mountain Corridor” is one possible avenue of hominin occupation connecting Southern sites such as Obi-Rahkmat with the Altai. I did some very preliminary work in the region last summer,which went well, but this summer will have a somewhat more intense field season. Which I am looking forward to!
Creating a Virtual Platform for Teaching/Sharing Paleoanthropology
I have been working with a wonderful colleague here at Wellesley, Jordan Tynes, on developing a virtual platform for teaching and exploring paleoanthropological/evolutionary/anatomical material. The eventual aim is to make a platform that is smart-phone accessible and public, so that anyone can access, explore, and investigate high-resolution fossil, skeletal, and archaeological materials. In the meantime, it is an in-development classroom tool that is going to get some great work from a few outstanding undergrads this semester. We’ll be presenting some of it (and hopefully bringing along a version for people to try out) at the annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropology meetings this March in Cleveland.
On-going Research and Publications
I’m also still actively working on a few projects outside of the above. Most notably (in my mind), is that I’ll have a piece coming out later this year on race, genetics, and ancestry later this year in the Annual Review of Anthropology. I’m really excited to see this piece come out and engage in its outcomes with a broader audience here. There will be a few other things making their way out in the meantime, in addition to thoughts on other Pleistocene and anthropological items in the news.
May 2019 be a good year for all of us!
References:
-Iyengar, Shanto, and Douglas S. Massey. “Scientific communication in a post-truth society.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018): 201805868.
– Glantz, Michelle, et al. “How to survive the glacial apocalypse: Hominin mobility strategies in late Pleistocene Central Asia.” Quaternary International 466 (2018): 82-92.
