Ministry of Culture

Hominid fossils predating the emergence of Australopithecus have been sparse and fragmentary. The evolution of our lineage after the last common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees has therefore remained unclear. Ardipithecus ramidus, recovered in ecologically and temporally resolved contexts in Ethiopia's Afar Rift, now illuminates earlier hominid paleobiology and aspects of extant African ape evolution. More than 110 specimens recovered from 4.4-million-year-old sediments include a partial skeleton with much of the skull, hands, feet, limbs, and pelvis. This hominid combined arboreal palmigrade clambering and careful climbing with a form of terrestrial bipedality more primitive than that of Australopithecus. Ar. ramidus had a reduced canine/premolar complex and a little-derived cranial morphology and consumed a predominantly C3 plant-based diet (plants using the C3 photosynthetic pathway). Its ecological habitat appears to have been largely woodland-focused. Ar. ramidus lacks any characters typical of suspension, vertical climbing, or knuckle-walking. Ar. ramidus indicates that despite the genetic similarities of living humans and chimpanzees, the ancestor we last shared probably differed substantially from any extant African ape. Hominids and extant African apes have each become highly specialized through very different evolutionary pathways. This evidence also illuminates the origins of orthogrady, bipedality, ecology, diet, and social behavior in earliest Hominidae and helps to define the basal hominid adaptation, thereby accentuating the derived nature of Australopithecus.

The timing of the dispersal of anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa is a fundamental question in human evolutionary studies. Existing data suggest a rapid coastal exodus via the Indian Ocean rim around 60,000 years ago. We present evidence from Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates, demonstrating human presence in eastern Arabia during the last interglacial. The tool kit found at Jebel Faya has affinities to the late Middle Stone Age in northeast Africa, indicating that technological innovation was not necessary to facilitate migration into Arabia. Instead, we propose that low eustatic sea level and increased rainfall during the transition between marine isotope stages 6 and 5 allowed humans to populate Arabia. This evidence implies that AMH may have been present in South Asia before the Toba eruption.

Ancient migrations in Southeast Asia The past movements and peopling of Southeast Asia have been poorly represented in ancient DNA studies (see the Perspective by Bellwood). Lipson et al. generated sequences from people inhabiting Southeast Asia from about 1700 to 4100 years ago. Screening of more than a hundred individuals from five sites yielded ancient DNA from 18 individuals. Comparisons with present-day populations suggest two waves of mixing between resident populations. The first mix was between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers associated with the Neolithic spreading from South China. A second event resulted in an additional pulse of genetic material from China to Southeast Asia associated with a Bronze Age migration. McColl et al. sequenced 26 ancient genomes from Southeast Asia and Japan spanning from the late Neolithic to the Iron Age. They found that present-day populations are the result of mixing among four ancient populations, including multiple waves of genetic material from more northern East Asian populations. Science , this issue p. 92 , p. 88 ; see also p. 31

The Hata Member of the Bouri Formation is defined for Pliocene sedimentary outcrops in the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia. The Hata Member is dated to 2.5 million years ago and has produced a new species of Australopithecus and hominid postcranial remains not currently assigned to species. Spatially associated zooarchaeological remains show that hominids acquired meat and marrow by 2.5 million years ago and that they are the near contemporary of Oldowan artifacts at nearby Gona. The combined evidence suggests that behavioral changes associated with lithic technology and enhanced carnivory may have been coincident with the emergence of the Homo clade from Australopithecus afarensis in eastern Africa.

Abstract The Bronze Age in Europe has been the subject for some books over the years, including Coles and Harding’s The Bronze Age in Europe and Jacques Briard’s The Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe. This handbook aims to add relevant information about the Bronze Age, and covers Bronze Age Europe outside the Aegean area. It is split into two main parts, which provide a thematic approach (Part I) and geographical approach (Part II) to the study of the European Bronze Age. The first part presents various articles on themes and topics about the Bronze Age in Europe, such as warfare, animal husbandry, and burial practices. The second part describes some European countries during the Bronze Age, including Scandinavia, the western Balkans, and Iberia.

By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra-West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe.

As one of the most important applications of digitalization, intelligence, and service, the digital twin (DT) breaks through the constraints of time, space, cost, and security on physical entities, expands and optimizes the relevant functions of physical entities, and enhances their application value. This phenomenon has been widely studied in academia and industry. In this study, the concept and definition of DT, as utilized by scholars and researchers in various fields of industry, are summarized. The internal association between DT and related technologies is explained. The four stages of DT development history are identified. The fundamentals of the technology, evaluation indexes, and model frameworks are reviewed. Subsequently, a conceptual ternary model of DT based on time, space, and logic is proposed. The technology and application status of typical DT systems are described. Finally, the current technical challenges of DT technology are analyzed, and directions for future development are discussed.

With its inclusion of original essays challenging the view of travel writing as a Eurocentric genre, this book will stand as a benchmark study of future inquiries in the field. It will revitalize the

This is a report and recommendations on joint UNEP/UNESCO/ECA mission to the Kalahari region Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe June 9 – July 3, 1982. The purpose of the mission was to assess the state of desertification and brought among the Kalahari region countries, paying special attention to national programming activities designed to implement the recommendations of the United Nations plan of action to combat Desertification (PACD).

Contemporary archaeology can be understood from a number of perspectives including those who consider all archaeology contemporary in terms of the production of knowledge in comparison to those who explicitly conduct their research on the materiality of contemporary society. Amongst the archaeologists currently active in the sub-discipline there is a diversity of foci, some of which follow trends established by historical archaeology – such as an interest in the everyday and mundane – and others that are responding to emerging contemporary issues such as the experiences of undocumented refugees. A further distinction can be made between those who are focused on retrieving human experiences and those who wish to move beyond the centrality of humans and instead conduct research that is object orientated. The many areas of interest, methodologies and theoretical frameworks that are currently emerging reveal the diversity and vibrant nature of contemporary archaeology, especially as we grapple with how to conduct research in the Anthropocene. Indeed, one could argue that the only place the sub-discipline is not established is with tenured employment in the academy.

Reversing the field Do terrestrial geomagnetic field reversals have an effect on Earth's climate? Cooper et al. created a precisely dated radiocarbon record around the time of the Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees. This record reveals a substantial increase in the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere culminating during the period of weakening magnetic field strength preceding the polarity switch. The authors modeled the consequences of this event and concluded that the geomagnetic field minimum caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration that drove synchronous global climate and environmental shifts. Science , this issue p. 811

Literary and archaeological sources have preserved a rich history of Southern Europe and West Asia since the Bronze Age that can be complemented by genetics. Mycenaean period elites in Greece did not differ from the general population and included both people with some steppe ancestry and others, like the Griffin Warrior, without it. Similarly, people in the central area of the Urartian Kingdom around Lake Van lacked the steppe ancestry characteristic of the kingdom's northern provinces. Anatolia exhibited extraordinary continuity down to the Roman and Byzantine periods, with its people serving as the demographic core of much of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome itself. During medieval times, migrations associated with Slavic and Turkic speakers profoundly affected the region.

Little is known about the timing of modern human emergence and occupation in Eastern Eurasia. However a rapid migration out of Africa into Southeast Asia by at least 60 ka is supported by archaeological, paleogenetic and paleoanthropological data. Recent discoveries in Laos, a modern human cranium (TPL1) from Tam Pa Ling's cave, provided the first evidence for the presence of early modern humans in mainland Southeast Asia by 63-46 ka. In the current study, a complete human mandible representing a second individual, TPL 2, is described using discrete traits and geometric morphometrics with an emphasis on determining its population affinity. The TPL2 mandible has a chin and other discrete traits consistent with early modern humans, but it retains a robust lateral corpus and internal corporal morphology typical of archaic humans across the Old World. The mosaic morphology of TPL2 and the fully modern human morphology of TPL1 suggest that a large range of morphological variation was present in early modern human populations residing in the eastern Eurasia by MIS 3.

OBJECTIVE: Survey of a group of snowboarders and study of their injuries, as well as analysis of the risk of injury considering the time spent on the snowboard. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Of 7,221 students participating in winter sport programs organized by Austrian schools, 2,745 of those riding snowboards were asked to fill out questionnaires pertaining to demographics, their experience level, equipment, snowboard riding habits, and associated injuries. RESULTS: A total of 2,579 snowboarders (94%), who spent a total of 10,119 days snowboarding, filled out a questionnaire which could be evaluated. A total of 152 snowboarders had suffered a mean of 10.6 injuries per 1,000 days of snowboarding, which required medical care; 5.4/1,000 injuries were moderate or severe. The most common injuries were to the wrist (32%), the hand (20%), and the head (11%). The rate of injury was especially high during the first half-day (roughly 3 hours). Use of wrist protection devices reduced injuries to the wrist from 2 to 0.5% (p = 0.048). CONCLUSION: Risk of snowboard related injury was highest in beginners. Through the use of wrist protection devices, the incidence of the most common injuries was dramatically reduced.

Abstract Even with an unprecedented breakthrough of deep learning in electroencephalography (EEG), collecting adequate labelled samples is a critical problem due to laborious and time‐consuming labelling. Recent study proposed to solve the limited label problem via domain adaptation methods. However, they mainly focus on reducing domain discrepancy without considering task‐specific decision boundaries, which may lead to feature distribution overmatching and therefore make it hard to match within a large domain gap completely. A novel self‐training maximum classifier discrepancy method for EEG classification is proposed in this study. The proposed approach detects samples from a new subject beyond the support of the existing source subjects by maximising the discrepancies between two classifiers' outputs. Besides, a self‐training method that uses unlabelled test data to fully use knowledge from the new subject and further reduce the domain gap is proposed. Finally, a 3D Cube that incorporates the spatial and frequency information of the EEG data to create input features of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is constructed. Extensive experiments on SEED and SEED‐IV are conducted. The experimental evaluations exhibit that the proposed method can effectively deal with domain transfer problems and achieve better performance.

This is a book about the politics of gender, sexuality, race, class and location in contemporary culture, at a moment that, we argue, is, in many places, distinctively neoliberal and postfeminist. The book brings together 20 original essays in which scholars were asked to reflect on the changes and continuities in gender relations and other intersecting axes of power, across a range of different texts, sites and practices. The collection traverses disciplines, geopolitical spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus — from analyses of North American and British celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of young female migrants to Europe; from readings of diasporic Indian cinema to an analysis of the complicated positioning of African American First Lady Michelle Obama; from examinations of alternative female-produced pornographies, to new, Third Wave and critical race feminisms. What unites the contributions is not their sub-stantive focus, nor their disciplinary ‘take’, but their attempts to think critically about the contours of the current moment in all their troubling complexity.

In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new appr

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the myths and challenges in the field of organizational ethnography and methodological angst. Design/methodology/approach This paper is initially written as an invited keynote address for the 3rd Annual Joint Symposium on “Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences” (University of Liverpool Management School and Keele University Institute for Public Policy and Management, Liverpool, September 3‐5, 2008). It explores what might be distinctive about organizational ethnography and how that might be different from “anthropological” ethnography. In particular, it engages a kind of collective methodological performance anxiety among organizational studies scholars without formal training in anthropology who do ethnographic research. Findings The paper argues that it is time to be explicit about a variety of forms of professional angst that many ethnographic researchers within organizational studies carry which have not been discussed. Originality/value The paper is of value to those willing to consider the myths and challenges that need engaging and perhaps uprooting and casting off.

Time-of-flight (ToF) sensors offer a cost-effective and realtime solution to the problem of three-dimensional (3-D) imaging-a theme that has revolutionized our sceneunderstanding capabilities and is a topic of contemporary interest across many areas of science and engineering. The goal of this tutorial-style article is to provide a thorough understanding of ToF imaging systems from a signal processing perspective that is useful to all application areas. Starting with a brief history of the ToF principle, we describe the mathematical basics of the ToF image-formation process, for both time- and frequency-domain, present an overview of important results within the topic, and discuss contemporary challenges where this emerging area can benefit from the signal processing community. In particular, we examine case studies where inverse problems in ToF imaging are coupled with signal processing theory and methods, such as sampling theory, system identification, and spectral estimation, among others. Through this exposition, we hope to establish that ToF sensors are more than just depth sensors; depth information may be used to encode other forms of physical parameters, such as, the fluorescence lifetime of a biosample or the diffusion coefficient of turbid/scattering medium. The MATLAB scripts and ToF sensor data used for reproducing figures in this article are available via the author?s webpage: http://www.mit.edu/~ayush/Code.

The Tanner-Whitehouse method to predict adult stature uses current stature, current skeletal age (SA), and chronological age (CA), and, if available, change (gain) in stature and SA over the previous year. Since assessment of SA requires invasive techniques, a method is proposed to predict adult stature noninvasively and to use percentage of adult stature as a maturity indicator. Age-specific multiple regression equations were calculated in a sample of 102 Flemish boys 13 through 16 yr who were followed during adolescence and remeasured at 30 yr of age. The proposed procedure, the Beunen-Malina method for prediction of adult stature, includes four somatic dimensions (current stature, sitting height, subscapular skinfold, triceps skinfold) and CA. In this age range multiple correlations (Rs between 0.70 and 0.87) and SEEs (between 3.0 and 4.2 cm) compare favorably with the original Tanner-Whitehouse method. Furthermore, when maturity groups based on percentage of adult stature calculated from the Beunen-Malina predictions are contrasted for somatic dimensions and performance characteristics, differences are similar to those observed when maturity grouping is based on skeletal maturity.