Arts and Humanities Research Council

War and Peace? Modern behavior, including the development of advanced tools, musical instruments, and art, seems to have arisen in humans in stages. The earliest hints are seen in Africa about 70 to 90,000 years ago, but later in Europe about 45,000 years ago. An ongoing discussion centers on the origins and significance of human prosociality. During early human development, could the benefits of altruistic behavior have outweighed its costs (see the Perspective by Mace )? Bowles (p. 1293 ) constructed a model of conflict between groups of humans and extracted estimates of the critical parameters from archaeological and ethnographic data sets. Provocatively, it appears that warfare might have enhanced the emergence and persistence of altruistic behavior. Powell et al. (p. 1298 ) present a population model that shows that the development of modern behaviors may rely on the attainment of critical population densities and migratory patterns required for stable cultural transmission. The model is consistent with genetic inferences of population dynamics in Africa and Europe and suggests that these cultural changes may not solely reflect increased cognitive evolution.

Lactase persistence (LP) is common among people of European ancestry, but with the exception of some African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian groups, is rare or absent elsewhere in the world. Lactase gene haplotype conservation around a polymorphism strongly associated with LP in Europeans (-13,910 C/T) indicates that the derived allele is recent in origin and has been subject to strong positive selection. Furthermore, ancient DNA work has shown that the--13,910*T (derived) allele was very rare or absent in early Neolithic central Europeans. It is unlikely that LP would provide a selective advantage without a supply of fresh milk, and this has lead to a gene-culture coevolutionary model where lactase persistence is only favoured in cultures practicing dairying, and dairying is more favoured in lactase persistent populations. We have developed a flexible demic computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairying, other subsistence practices and unlinked genetic markers in Europe and western Asia's geographic space. Using data on--13,910*T allele frequency and farming arrival dates across Europe, and approximate Bayesian computation to estimate parameters of interest, we infer that the--13,910*T allele first underwent selection among dairying farmers around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe, possibly in association with the dissemination of the Neolithic Linearbandkeramik culture over Central Europe. Furthermore, our results suggest that natural selection favouring a lactase persistence allele was not higher in northern latitudes through an increased requirement for dietary vitamin D. Our results provide a coherent and spatially explicit picture of the coevolution of lactase persistence and dairying in Europe.

After the domestication of animals and crops in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, farming had reached much of central Europe by 7500 years before the present. The extent to which these early European farmers were immigrants or descendants of resident hunter-gatherers who had adopted farming has been widely debated. We compared new mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from late European hunter-gatherer skeletons with those from early farmers and from modern Europeans. We find large genetic differences between all three groups that cannot be explained by population continuity alone. Most (82%) of the ancient hunter-gatherers share mtDNA types that are relatively rare in central Europeans today. Together, these analyses provide persuasive evidence that the first farmers were not the descendants of local hunter-gatherers but immigrated into central Europe at the onset of the Neolithic.

Niche construction is the process by which organisms construct important components of their local environment in ways that introduce novel selection pressures. Lactase persistence is one of the clearest examples of niche construction in humans. Lactase is the enzyme responsible for the digestion of the milk sugar lactose and its production decreases after the weaning phase in most mammals, including most humans. Some humans, however, continue to produce lactase throughout adulthood, a trait known as lactase persistence. In European populations, a single mutation (-13910*T) explains the distribution of the phenotype, whereas several mutations are associated with it in Africa and the Middle East. Current estimates for the age of lactase persistence-associated alleles bracket those for the origins of animal domestication and the culturally transmitted practice of dairying. We report new data on the distribution of -13910*T and summarize genetic studies on the diversity of lactase persistence worldwide. We review relevant archaeological data and describe three simulation studies that have shed light on the evolution of this trait in Europe. These studies illustrate how genetic and archaeological information can be integrated to bring new insights to the origins and spread of lactase persistence. Finally, we discuss possible improvements to these models.

We show that the frequency distributions of cultural variants, in three different real-world examples--first names, archaeological pottery and applications for technology patents--follow power laws that can be explained by a simple model of random drift. We conclude that cultural and economic choices often reflect a decision process that is value-neutral; this result has far-reaching testable implications for social-science research.

Authenticity has become a widespread ethical ideal that represents a way of dealing with normative gaps in contemporary life. This ideal suggests that one should be true to oneself and lead a life expressive of what one takes oneself to be. However, many contemporary thinkers have pointed out that the ideal of authenticity has increasingly turned into a kind of aestheticism and egoistic self-indulgence. In his book, Varga systematically constructs a critical concept of authenticity that takes into account the reciprocal shaping of capitalism and the ideal of authenticity. Drawing on different traditions in critical social theory, moral philosophy and phenomenology, Varga builds a concept of authenticity that can make intelligible various problematic and potentially exhausting practices of the self.

BACKGROUND: The ability of adult humans to digest the milk sugar lactose - lactase persistence - is a dominant Mendelian trait that has been a subject of extensive genetic, medical and evolutionary research. Lactase persistence is common in people of European ancestry as well as some African, Middle Eastern and Southern Asian groups, but is rare or absent elsewhere in the world. The recent identification of independent nucleotide changes that are strongly associated with lactase persistence in different populations worldwide has led to the possibility of genetic tests for the trait. However, it is highly unlikely that all lactase persistence-associated variants are known. Using an extensive database of lactase persistence phenotype frequencies, together with information on how those data were collected and data on the frequencies of lactase persistence variants, we present a global summary of the extent to which current genetic knowledge can explain lactase persistence phenotype frequency. RESULTS: We used surface interpolation of Old World lactase persistence genotype and phenotype frequency estimates obtained from all available literature and perform a comparison between predicted and observed trait frequencies in continuous space. By accommodating additional data on sample numbers and known false negative and false positive rates for the various lactase persistence phenotype tests (blood glucose and breath hydrogen), we also apply a Monte Carlo method to estimate the probability that known lactase persistence-associated allele frequencies can explain observed trait frequencies in different regions. CONCLUSION: Lactase persistence genotype data is currently insufficient to explain lactase persistence phenotype frequency in much of western and southern Africa, southeastern Europe, the Middle East and parts of central and southern Asia. We suggest that further studies of genetic variation in these regions should reveal additional nucleotide variants that are associated with lactase persistence.

Abstract In this article we seek to build on efforts to apply the insights of social learning theory to interpret patterns of continuity and change in the archaeological record. This literature suggests that stable and often highly arbitrary material culture traditions are likely to be founded on our biologically evolved capacity for imitation. However, it has recently been argued that the latter may be insufficient to explain the long-term maintenance of complex and difficult-to-master skills, such as those required to produce stone tools, pots, textiles and other cognitively opaque cultural forms. To ensure that these skills are accurately transferred to the next generation, adults must actively guide and control the learning activities of their children, a mode of transmission that can be labelled ‘pedagogy’. The importance of pedagogy has often been overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on craft learning, a fact that can probably be attributed to an unnecessarily narrow conception of teaching that equates it with explicit linguistic instruction. Using ethnographic data gathered from detailed case studies, we characterize pedagogy in the context of craft apprenticeships as involving the gradual scaffolding of skill in a novice through demonstration, intervention and collaboration. Although these processes cannot be directly observed in the archaeological record, they can sometimes be inferred through the detailed reconstruction of operational chains in past technologies. The evidence we present suggests that pedagogy has played an essential role in securing the faithful transmission of skills across generations, and should be regarded as the central mechanism through which long-term and stable material culture traditions are propagated and maintained.

Preface --<br/>Introduction --<br/>The generality of signs --<br/>Dicisigns --<br/>Some consequences of the dicisign doctrine --<br/>Dicisigns and cognition --<br/>Natural propositions--the evolution of semiotic self-control --<br/>Dicisigns beyond language --<br/>Operational and optimal iconicity in Peirce's diagrammatology --<br/>Cows, red cows, and red herrings --<br/>Corollarial and theorematic experiments with diagrams --<br/>Strategies of research: Peirce's enlightenment maxims --<br/>Perspective --<br/>References --<br/>Index.

Attitudes to the relationship between music and deafness suffer from two related misconceptions: the enduring assumption that hearing is central to musical experience in conjunction with an extreme impression of deafness as total aural loss; and, more recently, the tendency to reduce deaf listening to tactility, as narratives about inborn sensory acuities among the deaf proliferate in the popular imaginary. Increasingly, deafness symbolizes a set of sensory polarities that obscure an intrinsic diversity of musical experiences from which musicology stands to gain, a diversity that encompasses members of Deaf culture and non-culturally deaf people alike, and that is signaled through the person-centered compound “d/Deaf.” My article builds on recent music scholarship on disability to offer a pluralistic understanding of music and deafness. Beginning with Scottish deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, I investigate a range of d/Deaf accounts of music, including those of Deaf sign language users, hearing aid wearers, and cochlear implant recipients, and of people with music-induced hearing loss. Deafness resists automatic entry points into music, unsettling any straightforward hierarchy of the senses. Deaf people reflect on the musical status of aurality in markedly different ways, just as they offer a complex understanding of vision and touch. For instance, vision is a highly versatile listening strategy and is often more reliable than vibration; touch is feasible because of its contextual dependence on visual cues, and is further tied to a set of material and environmental variables. Ultimately, I argue that d/Deaf listeners enrich customary notions of musical expertise: deafness belongs in musicology as a diverse set of experiences within the full spectrum of listening.

'Language shift' is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100-120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the 'natural wastage' as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission.

The prefrontal cortex is commonly associated with cognitive capacities related to human uniqueness: purposeful actions towards higher-level goals, complex social information processing, introspection, and language. Comparative investigations of the prefrontal cortex may thus shed more light on the neural underpinnings of what makes us human. Using histological data from 19 anthropoid primate species (6 apes including humans and 13 monkeys), we investigate cross-species relative size changes along the anterior (prefrontal) and posterior (motor) axes of the cytoarchitectonically defined frontal lobe in both hemispheres. Results reveal different scaling coefficients in the left versus right prefrontal hemisphere, suggest that the primary factor underlying the evolution of primate brain architecture is left hemispheric prefrontal hyperscaling, and indicate that humans are the extreme of a left prefrontal ape specialization in relative white to grey matter volume. These results demonstrate a neural adaptive shift distinguishing the ape from the monkey radiation possibly related to a cognitive grade shift between (great) apes and other primates.

A simple model of random copying among individuals, similar to the population genetic model of random drift, can predict the variability in the popularity of cultural variants. Here, we show that random drift also explains a biologically relevant cultural phenomenon--changes in the distributions of popularity of dog breeds in the United States in each of the past 50 years. There are, however, interesting deviations from the model that involve large changes in the popularity of certain breeds. By identifying meaningful departures from our null model, we show how it can serve as a foundation for studying culture change quantitatively, using the tools of population genetics.

There is no such thing as rest. The world is always on the move. It is made of movement. We find ourselves always in the midst of it, in transformations under way. The basic category for understanding is activity – and only derivatively subject, object, rule, order. What is called for is an ‘activist’ philosophy based on these premises. The Principle of Unrest explores the contemporary implications of an activist philosophy, pivoting on the issue of movement. Movement is understood not simply in spatial terms but as qualitative transformation: becoming, emergence, event. Neoliberal capitalism’s special relation to movement is of central concern. Its powers of mobilization now descend to the emergent level of just-forming potential. This carries them beyond power-over to powers-to-bring-to-be, or what the book terms ‘ontopower’. It is necessary to track capitalist power throughout its expanding field of emergence in order to understand how counter-powers can resist its capture and rival it on its own immanent ground. At the emergent level, at the eventful first flush of their arising, counter-powers are always collective. This even applies to movements of thought. Thought in the making is collective expression. How can we think this transindividuality of thought? What practices can address it? How, politically, can we understand the concept of the event to emergently include events of thought? Only by attuning to the creative unrest always agitating at the infra-individual level, in direct connection with the transindividual level, bypassing the mid-level of what was traditionally taken for a sovereign subject: by embracing our ‘dividuality’.

Recent molecular research has provided a consistent estimate of phylogeny for the living papionin monkeys (Cercocebus, Lophocebus, Macaca, Mandrillus, Papio, and Theropithecus). This phylogeny differs from morphological phylogenies regarding the relationships of the mangabeys (Cercocebus and Lophocebus) and baboons (Mandrillus, Papio, and Theropithecus). Under the likely assumption that the molecular estimate is correct, the incongruence between the molecular and morphological data sets indicates that the latter include numerous homoplasies. Knowledge of how these homoplasies emerge through development is important for understanding the morphological evolution of the living papionins, and also for reconstructing the phylogenetic relationships and adaptations of their fossil relatives. Accordingly, we have used geometric morphometric techniques and the molecular phylogeny to investigate the ontogeny of a key area of morphological homoplasy in papionins, the face. Two analyses were carried out. The first compared allometric vectors of Cercocebus, Lophocebus, Macaca, Mandrillus, and Papioto determine which of the facial resemblances among the genera are homoplasic and which are plesiomorphic. The second analysis focused on early post-natal facial form in order to establish whether the facial homoplasies exhibited by the adult papionins are to some degree present early in the post-natal period or whether they develop only later in ontogeny. The results of our analyses go some way to resolving the debate over which papionin genera display homoplasic facial similarities. They strongly suggest that the homoplasic facial similarities are exhibited by Mandrillus and Papio and not by Cercocebus and Lophocebus, which share the putative primitive state with Macaca. Our results also indicate that Mandrillus and Papio achieve their homoplasic similarities in facial form not through simple extension of the ancestral allometric trajectory but through a combination of an extension of allometry into larger size ranges and a change in direction of allometry away from the ancestral trajectory. Thus, the face of Mandrillus is not simply a hypermorphic version of the face of its sister taxon, Cercocebus, and the face of Papio is not merely a scaled-up version of the face of its sister taxon, Lophocebus. Lastly, our results show that facial homoplasy is not restricted to adult papionins; it is also manifest in infant and juvenile papionins. This suggests that the homoplasic facial similarities between Mandrillus and Papio are unlikely to be a result of sexual selection.

Granting bodies need more data on how much they are spending on work that transcends disciplines, and to what end, explains Rick Rylance.

"Today, anyone with an internet connection can access hundreds of millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of their desk. And every day cultural institutions and private bodies add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere. Mass digitization is forming new central nexuses of knowledge and new ways of engaging with that knowledge. What at first glance appears to be a simple act of digitization (a transformation of singular books from boundary objects to open sets of data), at closer examination reveals a complex process teeming with diverse political, legal, and cultural investments. This book argues that mass digitization has become a global cultural political project. It offers an in-depth examination of mass digitization of cultural memory in the West and beyond. It suggests a new approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives, proposing to understand mass digitization not as neutral technical processes, but rather as distinct subpolitical processes that build new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with these archives. And it seeks to develop a critical theoretical framework for understanding the new archival apparatuses and the politics and memory dynamics they give rise to"...

This article discusses the use of computer logging as a means of investigating aspects of the second language (L2) writing process as writers are engaged in producing text at the keyboard. The observation of writing by means of this method provides researchers with detailed information concerning aspects of the planning, formulation, and revision processes. This function is illustrated by reference to a study in Sweden of school‐age learners of English as an additional language whose written production was recorded as part of a longitudinal study, and findings from the study are presented. The discussion highlights the potential uses of logging, not only not in relation to researching writers' processes, but also as a pedagogic tool given that its replay facility allows access to information about aspects of the writers' attention and strategies as they write.

Various authors have suggested behavioural similarities between tool use in early hominins and chimpanzee nut cracking, where nut cracking might be interpreted as a precursor of more complex stone flaking. In this paper, we bring together and review two separate strands of research on chimpanzee and human tool use and cognitive abilities. Firstly, and in the greatest detail, we review our recent experimental work on behavioural organization and skill acquisition in nut-cracking and stone-knapping tasks, highlighting similarities and differences between the two tasks that may be informative for the interpretation of stone tools in the early archaeological record. Secondly, and more briefly, we outline a model of the comparative neuropsychology of primate tool use and discuss recent descriptive anatomical and statistical analyses of anthropoid primate brain evolution, focusing on cortico-cerebellar systems. By juxtaposing these two strands of research, we are able to identify unsolved problems that can usefully be addressed by future research in each of these two research areas.

The niche construction model postulates that human bio-social evolution is composed of three inheritance domains, genetic, cultural and ecological, linked by feedback selection. This paper argues that many kinds of archaeological data can serve as proxies for human niche construction processes, and presents a method for investigating specific niche construction hypotheses. To illustrate this method, the repeated emergence of specialized reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) hunting/herding economies during the Late Palaeolithic (ca 14.7-11.5 kyr BP) in southern Scandinavia is analysed from a niche construction/triple-inheritance perspective. This economic relationship resulted in the eventual domestication of Rangifer. The hypothesis of whether domestication was achieved as early as the Late Palaeolithic, and whether this required the use of domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) as hunting, herding or transport aids, is tested via a comparative analysis using material culture-based phylogenies and ecological datasets in relation to demographic/genetic proxies. Only weak evidence for sustained niche construction behaviours by prehistoric hunter-gatherer in southern Scandinavia is found, but this study nonetheless provides interesting insights into the likely processes of dog and reindeer domestication, and into processes of adaptation in Late Glacial foragers.