The VariKin project has examined the cultural evolution of kinship terminology from a range of perspectives and methods. Considerable research by our group and others has focused on the comparison of cousin and sibling terms, but grandparent terms, the topic of this paper, are largely understudied. The social salience of grandparents, due to their frequent … Read more
I’m giving a talk tomorrow (Tues 21 Feb) at the University of Bath, for the AI folk in the computer sciences department. My thanks to Joanna Bryson for being adventurous and inviting an anthropologist to speak to CompSci folk! Counting coconuts for the chief: coevolution in language and culture Across the world, languages vary in … Read more
Putting together cross-cultural information on the sorts of fishing that men and women did is interesting. Oceanic women were much more involved in fishing than I had realised. The typical pattern is for women to fish along the reef or by line/net in the lagoon. Spear-fishing, deep-sea diving, offshore fishing and other beyond-the-reef activities seem … Read more
Via Savage Minds, who have reproduced the article from the Dominion. Gavin Menzies (author of a book called 1421: The Year China Discovered The World–which I have not read) claims all sorts of interesting selective stuff about Chinese exploration of the Pacific (transcript of a speech, here) and most mindbogglingly, that the Maori were not … Read more