Anthropology
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Were Neanderthal men the Romeos of the prehistoric world?
Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study, says he’s not surprised to see potential evidence of mate preference in Neanderthals, given its prevalence in human history.
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UCSC students develop website to support Seabright small businesses amid Murray Street Bridge overhaul
As the Murray Street Bridge overhaul disrupts Seabright traffic, students from University of California, Santa Cruz step up with a new website to spotlight local shops and keep the neighborhood thriving.
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Ancient bacterium’s genome could rewrite the history of syphilis
The discovery of the microorganism’s DNA in the man’s bones was made “totally by chance,” says Lars Fehren-Schmitz, one of the study’s co-authors and an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Nagaland University hosts workshop on ‘Ecologies of care’
UC Santa Cruz cohosted the workshop, and Professor Dolly Kikon, director of Center for South Asian Studies, introduced the initiative as a collaborative dialogue to explore the Himalayan region’s various intersections, expressions and care practices.
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A Bid to Undo a Colonial-Era Wrong Touches a People’s Old Wounds
Anthropology Professor Dolly Kikon was part of a delegation of 20 Indigenous Naga leaders, elders and scholars that recently visited the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford to advocate for repatriating the hundreds of human remains in the collection back to Naga ancestral lands on the Indian subcontinent.
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County’s ancient Indigenous sites face new threat as California eases environmental rules to spur housing development
“Cultural resources are finite resources that can provide unparalleled opportunities to learn about human history generally,” said Tsim Schneider, an archaeologist and associate professor at UC Santa Cruz.
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Where were enslaved Africans taken from? The answer could be hidden in their bones.
Anthropology Professor Vicky Oelze's groundbreaking map of strontium isotopes found across sub-Saharan Africa could help descendants of enslaved people reconstruct their family histories. By comparing strontium values found in a person's remains to strontium values across a landscape, scientists can gauge where that person is most likely from. "Individual histories are completely erased" by the slave trade, says…
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Strontium: the metal with remarkable powers to help track ancestral roots
A new strontium isotope map of Sub-Saharan Africa developed by Anthropology Professor Vicky Oelze could help descendants of the transatlantic slave trade to finally trace their roots. So far, the map has been used to precisely trace the origins of two people found in the Anson Street African Burial Ground: Kuto and Banza (both named…
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Pinpointing the origins of people taken from Africa for the slave trade
Anthropology Professor Vicky Oelze explained that, in the past, archaeologists who worked on ‘slave cemeteries’ in the African Diaspora could only use isotope ratios and genetic analysis to identify that an individual must have been born and raised somewhere on the African continent. “Now, with strontium isotopes being mapped for most of sub-Saharan Africa, we…
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An African strontium map sheds light on the origins of enslaved people
Anthropology Professor Vicky Oelze and colleagues spent more than a decade amassing nearly 900 environmental samples from 24 African countries and combined those measurements with other published data to create a strontium map of sub-Saharan Africa and have demonstrated how it can be used to shed light on the transatlantic slave trade.
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Research by UC Santa Cruz professor, others yields gruesome discovery
New research by an anthropology professor at UC Santa Cruz and other experts revealed a startling twist on the human sacrifice traditions of an ancient people of Peru.“Most of what we know about human sacrifices with the Moche relates to very public and gruesome forms of human sacrifice,” said Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an archaeogeneticist at UC…
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Famed Polynesian island did not succumb to ‘ecological suicide,’ new evidence reveals
Anthropology Professor Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropological geneticist, commented on a new first-of-its-kind study of the genomes of ancient Rapanui, which demonstrates that Rapa Nui, or "Easter Island," did not experience a population crash caused by overexploitation of natural resources. The new results “deliver solid data that the ‘ecocide’ hypothesis is not supported,” said Fehren-Schmitz.