I apologize for my blog silence of late. It has been a busy few weeks of writing. Later this week I am headed to the AAA meetings in San Francisco, however, and I will try to provide some updates on the conference while I am away. There is actually quite a lot of interesting biological anthropology at this year’s conference. The Biological Anthropology section and Evolutionary Anthropology section of AAA have a rundown of the sessions they are sponsoring. In addition, together with Jamie Clark (Univ. Alaska-Fairbanks), I am co-organizing an AAA Executive Committee-sponsored interdisciplinary session on modern human origins that will take place Saturday afternoon and, I think, will be quite interesting. Here is a brief rundown of our panelists:
Session Title: A SUM GREATER THAN ITS PARTS: MULTI-DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON LATER HUMAN EVOLUTION
When: Saturday, November 17, 2012: 1:45 PM-5:30 PM
* Blurred Boundaries and Constructed Niches: Interweaving the Individual, the Group and the Community In Human Evolution – Agustin Fuentes (University of Notre Dame)
* Why Humans (especially simple foragers) Are So Egalitarian – Frank W Marlowe (Cambridge University)
* Territoriality, Tolerance and Testosterone: Hormonal Correlates of Male Chimpanzee Behavior and Their Implications for Human Evolution – Marissa Sobolewski (University of Michigan), John Mitani (University of Michigan) and Janine Brown (Smithsonian Institution)
* A Primate Perspective On the Evolution of Human Life History – Tanya M Smith (Harvard University), Andrew Bernard (Freelance Nature Photographer), Ronan Donovan (Freelance Nature Photographer), Zarin Machanda (Harvard University), Amanda Papakyrikos (Wellesley College) and Richard Wrangham (Harvard University)
* Childhood, Play and the Evolution of Cultural Capacity In Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans – April Nowell (University of Victoria and University of Victoria)
* Discussant – Milford Wolpoff (University of Michigan)
BREAK (3:15-3:30)
* Fuzzy Boundaries: The Importance of High-Resolution Datasets for Studying Behavioral Change Across Transitional Periods In the Later Pleistocene – Jamie L Clark (University of Alaska Fairbanks)
* Cultural Diversity and Rates of Change In Structured Populations: A Review of Some Recent Models and Their Implications for Understanding the Appearance of Behavioral Modernity During the Paleolithic – Luke Premo (Washington State University and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
* Neandertal Genetics: Drawing a New Boundary for Humanity – John Hawks (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
* If Not the Neandertals: Reproductive Barriers and Speciation In the Pleistocene – Adam P Van Arsdale (Wellesley College)
* Working Hard or Hardly Working? A Preliminary Study of the Metabolic Costs of Stone Knapping – Eric Martin Heffter (University of Arizona), David Raichlen (U of Arizona and University of Arizona) and Steven Kuhn (University of Arizona)
* Language, Myth and the Symbolic Mind: Cultural Anthropology Enters the Middle Stone Age – Alan J Barnard (University of Edinburgh and University of Edinburgh)
* Discussant – Julien Riel-Salvatore (University of Colorado-Denver)
I know that for a number of our panelists, this will be a first-time visit to AAAs, something that Jamie and I had as a goal. Should be fun. Now back to writing…
