Category Archives: Anthropolgy

Anthropolgy

The ancient refuge of southern Arabia

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It seems that southern Arabia has provided shelter to people, 20,000 years earlier, following an ice age that made much of the Earth uninhabitable, according to new evidence provided by University of Huddersfield researchers this week.

Once the Ice Age receded, the Red Sea plains of what we know now as southern Arabia in addition to the far side of the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the Horn of Africa were among glacial sanctuaries where people were able to cluster and survive.

This has been hypothesized before by scientists but never confirmed until this study.

It defies what was commonly thought of Arabia; that humans did not settle there in large numbers until the development of agriculture, roughly 10,000 years earlier.

Analyzing mitochondrial DNA for a lineage that’s common in Arabia and the horn of Africa, the researchers discovered that the lineage, named R0a, is more ancient than what was thought.

The ancient gene flow infiltrated the horn, well before the spread of agriculture into that region. It seeped into the rest of the Middle East (present day Iran, Pakistan and India) and other territories, like Europe through the movement of people and the development of trading networks.

The study mapping human dispersals, post the Ice Age, and deep ancestry was published in Scientific Reports. The DNA analyzed was extracted from living people, since to date this couldn’t be recovered from prehistoric remains. So the scientists had to rely on modern diversity to draw conclusions about the history of the DNA lineage.

The (biological) spoils of war

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Despite the destruction war yields, there’s a biological benefit for engaging in it, a study that observed nomadic herders in South Sudan and southwest Euthopia reveals.

The Harvard study is lead by Luke Glowacki, a doctoral student under the guidance of Richard Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Curator of Primate Behavioral Biology in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

The author explains that in herding tribes in East Africa, those who have participated in raids or engaged in violent conflict, had more wives and in turn a greater opportunity to reproduce successfully; in short, those who “took part in more raids, had more children” over the course of their lives, according to Glowacki, who was quoted in Science Daily.

“The currency of evolution is reproductive success,” adds Glowacki. He says that in his paper, published on 29 December in PNAS, he emphases that it’s not just a case of “biology made me do it.”

“It’s very clear what the pathway to greater reproductive success is — it’s access to livestock, which are obtained through raiding and then used for marriage,” he’s quoted as saying. “But the cultural mechanism is mediated by the elders who control virtually all aspects of the society. After a raid young men give any livestock they capture to the elders and the raider cannot use them at that point even if he wants to get married. Later in life, as the raider gets older he can gain access to them, so there’s a lag in receiving benefits from participating in a raid.

“The overriding question I’m interested in is how humans cooperate, and one type of cooperation is participating in intergroup conflict.”

It’s not clear whether Glowacki’s conclusions can be generalized to the rest of the region, specifically North Africa and the Middle East, where civil conflict is rampant, as well as the idea of polygamy among many Muslim fighters, say in countries like Syria or Iraq – and whether or not religious, as well as cultural, forces play a part here. In Syria and Iraq, for instance, notorious Islamist group IS (Islamic State) cover ground, raiding new towns and villages, and taking over valuable resources, leaving destruction in their wake. They’re field combatants too, perhaps not unlike the study’s subjects: armed Nyangatom men between the ages of 20 and 40. Taking female hostages or forcing themselves upon communities, for instance, IS has been asserting its right to “Jihad marriages” and offing those who refuse.

Is this the same? Can the same link between war and reproductive capacity be applied to them?

According to the paper, evolutionary anthropologists have argued that individuals can benefit from participating in warfare despite the risks they face, but field data to confirm this hypothesis were rare, until this paper; considered the first quantitative study on warfare and reproductive success.

“Greater warriorship gives men increased access to bridewealth over the life course.”

The study however makes it clear that its conclusions, so far at least, are restricted to small-scale societies engaged in warfare; Nyangatom men are essentially villagers, small numbers compared to organised groups like IS. The politics of the conflict and the community dynamics may also be a deciding factor.