Physical-Biological (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kristin Kovarovic.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The remains of fossil animals represent an abundant dataset by which to address a variety of important questions relating to human evolution, including the ecological conditions in which our hominin ancestors evolved. However, because of the multitude of processes that modify or even remove remains from the fossil record, analytical techniques that utilize them cannot assume that the once living...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sharon DeWitte.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Crisis mortality, a dramatic but temporary increase in mortality rate above the baseline level resulting from a single extraordinary factor, was an important phenomenon in past human populations and continues to affect living people in ways that might be preventable. One of the most important mortality crises in history was the Black Death; in Europe alone, the epidemic killed tens of millions of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jill Pruetz.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) living in a savanna environment at Fongoli, Senegal are the only known mammalian population besides humans that hunt with tools. Chimpanzees here use modified stick tools ('spears') to hunt nocturnal prosimians (Galago senegalensis) as they nest in tree cavities during the day. Additionally, females hunt significantly more than expected with tools, while males...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Melissa Manus.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The human microbiome -the collection of microorganisms (and their genes) that live in, on, and around us- represents an interface through which contact with the environment impacts human biology. More specifically, contact with the social environment shapes host microbial communities, which in turn influence host physiology and immune system development. Despite these important connections,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sofia Forss.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Human behavior is characterized by the motivation to seek out new knowledge, often leading to discoveries or innovations. Already as infants, we are curious about the world around us. Paradoxically, scientific work on curiosity in non-human animals is surprisingly rare and we know remarkably little about the origins of curiosity and how the trait is distributed and expressed among non-human...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Christopher Gilbert.

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Despite recent advances in chronometric techniques, the geological ages of many Plio-Pleistocene deposits containing early hominins, particularly those in South Africa, remain in doubt. Consequently, biochronology and relative faunal dating methods remain valuable age-assessment tools, and cercopithecoid monkeys have historically been among the most biochronologically useful faunal elements....

DOCUMENT Full-Text Marian Hamilton.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. While the fossil record captures many crucial details of our evolutionary past, it does not preserve social behavior. Certain aspects of spatial landscape use, such as dispersal and home range size, have major consequences on social organization. An accurate reconstruction of landscape use by fossil hominins would therefore be an empirical proxy for otherwise-elusive social behaviors....

DOCUMENT Full-Text Luisa Rivera.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. What can anthropology do to reconcile the ubiquity of generational resilience with the growing science of heritable alterations to the stress response to adversity? Engaging a critical biocultural approach, I investigate the intergenerational embodiment and transmission of trauma in the wake of the Guatemalan genocide. My work is rooted in three generations of indigenous genocide survivors...