Calling her an “institutional cornerstone,” the Middle East Studies Association of North America recently presented its annual Jere L. Bacharach Service Award to Distinguished Professor Suad Joseph. The award recognizes outstanding service to the association and the profession, and is named after the University of Washington historian who received the honor in 2004.
Inuit sled dogs have changed little since people migrated with them to the North American Arctic across the Bering Strait from Siberia, according to UC Davis researchers and colleagues who have examined DNA from the dogs from that time span. The legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in Arctic sled dogs, making them one of the last remaining descendant populations of indigenous, pre-European dog lineages in the Americas.
UC Davis anthropologist Jeffrey Kahn’s book on Haitian boat migration to the United States is the co-winner of the 2019 Avant Garde Book Prize from the Haitian Studies Association. The award selection committee called Kahn’s book, "Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire" (Chicago University Press, 2019) a “timely and important contribution” to the field.
Many people mistakenly think of evolution as progress. But humans, despite their ability to manipulate objects and change their environment, are not “on top” of the world’s species. Research by Lynn Isbell, chair of the UC Davis Department of Anthropology, suggests that ancestral humans and other primates developed different strategies to find food and avoid predators.
Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, according to a new University of California, Davis, study. The date is about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists previously believed.
It is well known that men benefit reproductively from having multiple spouses, but the reasons why women might benefit from multiple marriages are not as clear. Women, as a result of pregnancy and lactation, can’t reproduce as fast as males. But new research by UC Davis challenges evolutionary-derived sexual stereotypes about men and women, finding that multiple spouses can be good for women too.
The first days at UC Davis were full of self-doubt for Valencia Scott. As a transfer student from American River College in Sacramento, this double major in anthropology and international relations questioned if she truly belonged and if she could handle the rigors of university life. But after finding support networks on campus and joining advisory boards, Scott emerged as a role model for serving fellow students and the wider community.
Students from any major on campus can engage in undergraduate research in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science. As a senior, Cole Williams pursued his interests in genetics with a project in the lab of Brenna Henn, associate professor of anthropology. Williams, a genetics and genomics major in the College of Biological Sciences, designed an algorithm capable of handling diverse population and complex family genealogies in human genomic datasets.
Rene Olivas (B.A., anthropology, '97) is a special agent with the fraud detection office in the U.S. Office of Inspector General, Department of Justice. Last year, Olivas won the Inspector General’s Award for Fraud Prevention and completed an investigation of a former Department of Justice trial attorney accused of stealing and attempting to sell sensitive, sealed court documents. In November he received a Law Enforcement Award from the U.S.
The story of how Claudio Monteza-Moreno came to UC Davis illustrates how research today often crosses boundaries — reaching across disciplines and around the globe to explore complex problems. Monteza-Moreno is a graduate student working in the lab of evolutionary anthropologist Meg Crofoot, studying how wildlife in Panama navigate landscapes transformed by humans. However, his background is in biology.
