Sex and Gender in Anthropology

Recently a controversy has erupted in anthropology circles about dropping a panel on “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” from a conference proposed by Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta. The panelists believe that the biological sex is binary either male or Read More

Stone tools and Hominins

Students of anthropology have long been taught that tool-making is a human characteristic. But the social media is now abuzz with videos of monkeys using big stones to crush nuts to obtain their kernels. Jane Goodall’s elaborate research on chimpanzees has shown that they insert small twigs in ant-holes to fish them out. Ewen Callaway wrote an article in Read More

Sexual dimorphism in size

Almost all human population groups show sexual dimorphism in stature where females are significantly shorter than males.  Some exceptions do occur in populations living under stressful conditions where this sexual dimorphism is diminished. Very often the reason given for this situation is the impact of malnutrition which affects the females relatively less than the males Read More

Dragon Man

Recently in a paper, Qiang Ji and his colleagues of Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang, China, claimed to have discovered a new human species in the form of a Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium. This skull has reverberated the internet with various names as ‘Dragon man’ and ‘Homo longi’. The skull of this specimen was dumped Read More

Harappan people and cattle meat

An interesting fact from Harappan culture about the consumption of cattle, pig and sheep/goat meat has come to light recently in a study conducted by Akshyeta Suryanarayan and her team. Harappan culture vessels provided evidence that ruminant meat, dairy products and fats from plants and animals especially non-ruminants were cooked in them and were the delicacies of these Read More

Debunking racism scientifically

The German American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942), pioneered a school of thought popularly known as cultural history and suggested to study human evolution from bio-cultural perspective. He motivated his students to work and study human behavior of people in their natural habitats by focusing on the material artefacts, implements and cultural processes. He opined that Read More

COVID-19 Pandemic

Corona virus disease (COVID-19) dramatically appeared in a Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. While treating the patients, the doctors noticed pneumonia-like symptoms which were difficult to treat. Detailed studies of patients have shown them to be infected with a novel corona virus which the WHO has finally named as ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome Read More

Metabolic Syndrome (MetS)

Obesity, hypertension and diabetes is affecting a lot of people worldwide which is taking the form of a pandemic. Many health conditions are interlinked which arise from the malfunctioning of the metabolic system of the body. The scientific community has named this condition as Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) or Syndrome X. National Heart, Lung and Blood Read More

Refugees: A Human Concern

People living peacefully in their native land everywhere in the world fondly call it as their motherlands. They love their land, rivers, hills, deserts, streams, lakes, animals and birds, flowers and crops and hold them close to their heart. The emotional attachment with the land of their ancestors and parents is unfathomable. We love the culture and customs Read More

New Frontiers in Cancer Cure

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to James P. Allison, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, San Francisco, CA, USA and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. Their landmark discoveries in cancer cure with different but complimentary strategies is likely to immensely Read More

Physical activity levels and child growth

What happens when physical activity levels in a community decrease drastically as a result of big transformation of a traditional agricultural economy to a mechanized society? Scientists at the CUNY Hunter College, New York, and University of Utah, Salt Lake City have come up with a conclusion that sizable increases in mean height, weight, and triceps skin fold thickness Read More

Mother Tongue and Education

Linguists, language experts and child-psychologists believe that children can learn better in their mother tongue but that doesn’t go against multilingual education. It has also been observed that children studying through multilingual system develop better thinking and skills than monolingual education systems. Parents and peer all can help the child understand the issues if it Read More

The vanishing human tribes

The biodiversity has been on the decline very fast  in the  recent past due to large scale deforestation, mining, urbanization, warfare, migrations and  emission of gases. These  human activities have been affecting the survival of the isolated human tribes as well. Now, there are very few isolated human tribes living on the edge who are Read More

Sustainable Development Goals

Ruthless exploitation of natural resources in the name of development took place exponentially during the last few decades globally. Those nations which were left behind in this race have now embarked upon a path of using the bounty of nature to extract maximum out of it and register a higher rate of national growth. Alarmed by Read More

Urban Rural divide in Healthcare

Recent report of United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) indicated a large global rural population of 56 per cent having no access to critical healthcare. The disparity in healthcare widens when rural household conditions are coupled with poverty. Such instances abound in Africa where up to 83 per cent of the people don’t have these Read More

Ebola virus outbreak

The current outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is the largest of all earlier outbreaks and is the cause of serious concern for all of us. The Ebola virus disease (EVD) is believed to be transmitted from wild animals to humans and then it spreads through human-to-human transmission. The disease is highly fatal with an Read More

El Niño effect

El Niño events have been occurring for hundreds of years, but have recently become a point of huge concern for the human race and the global climate. For the fishermen of Peru and Ecuador, warm water currents on their coastline bring scarcity of fish and heavy rainfall which occurs every three four years and are Read More

GDP and its Alternative

Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success”, Robert Costanza and colleagues write in Nature’s issue of 15th January 2014. This sounds interesting and make us think about it very seriously. The well being of every individual on earth should be the motto of all national governments. Gross Domestic Product was devised during Read More

Universal Health Coverage

The Globalization and Liberalization have brought about tremendous changes in the overall development scenario, consumption patterns and distribution of wealth throughout the world. While the rich are getting richer the poor have no hope of improving their lot. Health care delivery systems in many countries have become privatized. People have to spend a lot of Read More

17th World Congress of IUAES 2013

The 17th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences IUAES 2013) will be hosted by the University of Manchester, Manchester (UK) on August 5th-August 10th, 2013. The IUAES congress is held after every four years. The theme of the presentCongress is “Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds”.The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Read More

Anthropological Diversity

Anthropological Diversity Biological diversity is responsible for opening new vistas for evolutionary processes among living beings. Exploration of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Human Genomes of different ethnic groups and individuals is paving the way to understanding the complexity of different human diseases as well as specific traits. Recently a group of human geneticists Read More

All Editorials