HENRY - The human evolution news relay

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I’ve just noticed that the Australian National University Press has released some of its older books online as PDF! My picks are:

• The Austronesians - This wonderful little book has long been the standard introduction to the Austronesian world, and is totally worth a read:
  

  The Austronesian-speaking population of the world are estimated to number more than 270 million people, living in a broad swathe around half the globe, from Madagascar to Easter Island and from Taiwan to New Zealand. The seventeen papers in this volume provide a general survey of these diverse populations focusing on their common origins and historical transformations. The papers examine current ideas on the linguistics, prehistory, anthropology and recorded history of the Austronesians. This volume is a publication of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies’ Comparative Austronesian Project.

• The Lexicon of Proto-Oceanic - this is volume 2 of the Oceanic Lexicon project, which is trying to reconstruct the history of Proto-Oceanic (the ancestor language of all the 500 or so Polynesian, Micronesian and “Melanesian” languages):
  

  Volume 2 examines how Proto Oceanic speakers described their geophysical environment. An introductory chapter discusses linguistic and archaeological evidence that locates the Proto Oceanic language community in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 2nd millennium BC. The next three chapters investigate terms used to denote inland, coastal, reef and open sea environments, and meteorological phenomena. A further chapter examines the lexicon for features of the heavens and navigational techniques associated with the stars. How Proto Oceanic speakers talked about their environment is also described in three further chapters which treat property terms for describing inanimate objects, locational and directional terms, and terms related to the expression of time.

• Another classic - Peter Bellwood’s Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, which is considered one of the standard reference works on the archaeology of Island South-East Asia:
  

  Since its publication in 1985, Peter Bellwood’s Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago has been hailed as the sole authoritative work on the subject by the leading expert in the field. Now that work has been fully revised and includes a complete up-to-date summary of the archaeology of the region (and relevant neighboring areas of China and Oceania), as well as a comprehensive discussion of new and important issues (such as the “Eve-Garden of Eden” hypothesis and its relevance to the Indo-Malaysian region) and recent advances in macrofamily linguistic classification.

  Moving north to south from northern Peninsular Malaysia to Timor and west to east from Sumatra to the Moluccas, Bellwood describes human prehistory from initial hominid settlement more than one million years ago to the eve of historical Hindu-Buddhist and Islamic cultures of the region. The archaeological record provides the central focus, but chapters also incorporate essential information from the paleoenvironmental sciences, biological anthropology, linguistics, and social anthropology. Bellwood approaches questions about past cultural and biological developments in the region from a multidisciplinary perspective. Historical issues given extended treatment include the significance of the Homo erectus populations of Java, the dispersal of the present Austronesian-speaking peoples of the region within the past 4,000 years, and the spread of metallurgy since 500 B.C. Bellwood also discusses relationships between the prehistoric populations of the archipelago and those of neighboring regions such as Australia, New Guinea, and mainland Asia.

Nice work! It’s fantastic to see an academic publisher releasing some of its back catalogue like this, and this will hopefully spur some other presses into doing the same.

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I’ve been rather quiet for the last few days, having been at the fantastic Evolution 2007 meeting, but here’s a quick post to catch up:

•   Dosenbach et al in P.N.A.S. report on Distinct brain networks for adaptive
  and stable task control in humans.
• David McDonald has a fun paper on Predicting fate from early connectivity in a social network.
• Shī Shì shí shī shǐ:
  • The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (Simplified Chinese: 施氏食狮史; Traditional Chinese: 施氏食獅史; Pinyin: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ) is a famous example of constrained writing by Zhao Yuanren which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin.
•   35,000-Year-Old Mammoth Sculpture  Found in Germany:
  • Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a 220-meter long plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. “You can be sure,” Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, “that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years.”.
• “burro, burrow– A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.“
• For the phylogeneticists here, Daniel Huson’s got a new app, Dendroscope which
  is “an interactive viewer for large phylogenetic trees”.

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Peter Austin recounts the recent International Conference on Austronesian Endangered Language Documentation in Taiwan (why did I miss that one?):

  The current struggles by the Thao, Pazeh, Kaxabu and other groups in Taiwan are reminiscent of the situation in eastern Australia, though historically with rather less positive participation by linguists. It is interesting that it is anthropologists, ecologists and others who are at the forefront of involvement in the current grass-roots language and cultural revitalisation efforts in central Taiwan.

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