Focusing on the Lake Titicaca Basin in the Andes mountains, a team of anthropologists led by UC Davis anthropology graduate student Luis Flores-Blanco, found through analysis of 1,179 projectile points that the rise of archery technology dates to around 5,000 years ago.
When it comes to the architecture of the human genome, it’s only a matter of time before harmful genes — genes that could compromise future generations — arise in a population. These mutations accumulate in the gene pool, primarily affected by a population’s size and practices like marrying within a small community. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal provides rare direct evidence showing that increased homozygosity — meaning two identical alleles in a genome — leads to negative effects on fertility in a human population.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that there is an association between how songs sound and their place in our emotional lives. Sourcing songs from across the globe, Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, and his fellow researchers found that people from different types of societies can successfully identify a song’s type by how it sounds, regardless of the language of its words.
In modern society, one parent may take a daughter to ballet class and fix dinner so the other parent can get to exercise class before picking up the son from soccer practice. To an observer, they seem to be cooperating in their very busy, co-parenting, monogamous relationship. These people may think they are part of an evolved society different from the other mammals that inhabit earth. But their day-to-day behavior and child-rearing habits are not much different than other mammals who hunt, forage for food, and rear and teach their children, researchers suggest.
Violence during climatic change has evidence in history. University of California, Davis, researchers said they have have found a pattern of increased violence during climatic change in the south central Andes between A.D. 470 and 1500. During that time, which includes the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (ca. A.D. 900-1250), temperatures rose, drought occurred, and the first states of the Andes collapsed.
Five faculty from the UC Davis College of Letters and Science were recently elected as new fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the society announced Jan. 31.
