HENRY

There’s a rather fascinating article in Marie Clare (!?) about Kayan refugees in Thailand being forced to show off their native dress in a “human zoo”:

Zember, a quick-witted young woman with a cheerful, oval face, doesn’t want to be a human exhibit. Ever since she was 5, she has worn brass rings around her neck and smiled at foreigners who tromp through her rural village in Thailand. For tourists, it seems like the adventure of a lifetime — riding in a jeep through the snake-infested jungle to see the exotic “long-neck women” of the Kayan tribe. But now Zember has removed her coil — in protest of her captivity. She no longer wants to keep Thailand’s shameful secret: that the long-neck women are Burmese refugees who are being prevented by Thai authorities from taking up asylum overseas. As a lucrative tourist attraction, the women are forced to live in a virtual human zoo.

Lee Berger defends himself against the attack on him by Nature (which we mentioned a few days ago):

In fact, it is Mr. Dalton’s attempts to find a story where there was none that may have done damage to our ability to conduct research on human remains on Palau. We who do field research are very much aware of the sensitivities and rights of indigenous people - and respect them. Mr. Dalton’s inappropriate stirring of these emotions – deliberately and despite clear evidence that my team and I had conducted ourselves in an appropriate and legal manner is quite frankly reprehensible.

Concerning his utilization of the wording of some ad campaign made by a media company that is promoting a yet to be made television show, and calling these planned popular television science shows “other areas of his (my) research”, well, this is frankly contemptible. Those planned shows – which have nothing in fact to do with my own scientific research – are meant to be fun and educational. That is all, and Dalton is aware of this as well.

The rest of his response is on Anthropology.net

University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.

The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study’s final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment.

Ahh stupid and parochial science reporting:

Neanderthals have spoken out for the first time in 30,000 years, with the help of scientists who have simulated their voices using fossil evidence and a computer synthesiser.

And they may have sounded a bit like New Zealanders.

For something less stink, see Kambiz’s piece at Anthropology.net

Today’s Nature covers the controversy about the recent paper Small-bodied humans from Palau, Micronesia by Berger et al. Last month, Berger and colleagues claimed that they’d found a collection of small bodied humans dating back between 940 and 2890 years (cal bp) in a burial cave in Palau:

Preliminary sampling of two burial caves in Palau, Micronesia has produced the remains of small-bodied recent H. sapiens, possibly representing a case of insular dwarfing. Individuals in this sample exhibit, in addition to small body size, reduction of the absolute size of the face, distinct supraorbital tori (in some individuals), a weakly developed mental eminence, relatively large dental dimensions, and dental dysplasias and agenesis.

Some of these features may be considered primitive for the genus Homo (or trending towards the primitive condition), thus the human fossils from Palau may provide important insights into the relationship between small body size and the expression of morphological features generally considered to be taxonomically diagnostic in our genus.

Given the scarcity of skeletal samples of small-bodied modern humans, and their importance for resolving taxonomic and phylogenetic issues in genus Homo paleontology, we provide here a brief description of the more salient specimens and a preliminary analysis of the material relative to small-bodied modern humans and to the holotype specimen of one small-bodied member of our genus, H. floresiensis (LB1).

(I’m not sure what “trending towards the primitive condition” means, so I’ll ignore that).

The Nature paper by Rex Dalton (Bones, Islands and Videotape) discusses a few of the technical - and rather vicious - criticisms of the Berger paper:

“The more I read their paper, the more I am convinced it is complete nonsense and cannot be accepted as serious science,” says Michael Pietrusewsky

and:

Berger, charges Fitzpatrick, “hasn’t made adequate comparisons to other skeletal material from Palau. And I don’t think he understands variance in human populations”.

That is - those bones aren’t small people and this ain’t island dwarfing. Dalton suggests that a large part of the problem is how this research is funded by the National Geographic Society. Berger features in a TV show Fossil Hunter, with the slogan “entertainment first, science second”. Now, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of entertainment-based funding and science, and certainly I think Nat.Geo. does some really good work. However, the paper does raise the issue of how science and entertainment tend to get in each other’s way:

the Palau story illustrates how science can get caught up in the entertainment process. Like many palaeoanthropologists, Berger has long worked with film crews to document discoveries. But sometimes the demands to catch a significant finding on tape can clash with the slow, rigorous nature of the scientific process. The question anthropologists are asking now is: did entertainment needs in Palau overwhelm the evidence from field research

“Ethanolomics” by Madelina @ Tipping the spherical cow

The instructions for packing a fresh brain for shipment to the New York Brain Bank. Step 1: Put the fresh brain (A) in the first ziploc bag…