Four Stone Hearth #93

The Four Stone Hearth is here again! Welcome to the 93rd edition, hosted by yours truly. There wasn't many submissions for this edition so I had to deploy my baboons to prance around the blogosphere in hopes that they will fetch me more blog posts. I am happy to tell you that my baboons did well and came back with lots of goodies. Don't worry, they are just prancing baboons not those terrifying flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. Anyway, without further ado, here's Four Stone Hearth #93:

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Archeology
Martin Rundkvist from Aardvarchaeology writes about an interesting field work method by Swedish rock art surveyor, Einar Kjellén (1903 - 2000). Do you know that it is good field method to crawl around with a blanket in your head? Read about Kjellén's technique in "Kjellén's Blanket: Methods of a Rock-Art Master Surveyor".

On A Hot Cup of Joe, Carl Feagans discusses about The Application of Cognitive Archaeology to the material record.



Socio-cultural
Greg Laden from Greg Laden's Blog shows us what "falsehood" is in his post, "Primitive Cultures are Simple, while Civilization is Complex: Part 1".

On Anthropology in Practice, Krystal D'Acosta explores ethnic food trucks on the streets of New York City with her post "The Lunch Truck: Providing a Small Taste of Ethnic Foods for the Adventurous". Yum! My favorite are the halal carts. What's yours?



Bio-physical
On A Primate of Modern Aspect, Zinjanthropus's blog post "Of Brains and Faces" talks about the relationship between brain size and facial size on the basicranium, and also the relationship between brain size and facial size on the position of foramen magnum in humans and non-human primates.

"Monkey Stress" is about male Barbary macaques's strategy in coalition building among group members by carrying infants of other males. Infant carriers were observed to have significantly stronger relationships with other macaques than non-carriers. However, infant carriers had higher stress hormone outputs than non-carriers. Read more about this blog post on Barbara J. King's self titled blog.

Eric Michael Johnson wrote "Punishing Cheaters Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation" on his blog, The Primate Diaries. While William Hamilton's theory of kin selection and Robert Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism explains the evolution of cooperation between kin and individuals in close knit communities (low level of immigration and emigration), these theories do not explain the evolution of cooperation between societies of unrelated individuals (with high level of immigration and emigration). So, a new model proposed by Boyd et al. posit that fitness is enhanced if individuals come together to punish those that don't cooperate (cheaters) thus these coordinated punishments leads to cooperation. Take that Tiger Woods and Jesse James!

On This Is Serious Monkey Business read about the pros and cons of primate "Captive Breeding".



Linguistic
On Language Log, David Bamman guest blogged an interesting post about Twitter and language analysis. In Bamman's "Mapping the Demographics of American English with Twitter", he analyzed words used in tweets by geographical location and age demographics. He did so by using Lexicalist, a program he developed himself.

Ewelina Gonera on Ewelina Gonera's Blog wrote How baby words are made, not "goo-goo-ga-ga" but how new words in modern English came to be. Sorta like the birds and bees of modern English, as told by linguistic geeks.


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Well I guess that's it. Thank you for reading this edition of Four Stone Hearth and I hope you enjoyed your visit. A big THANK YOU to all the contributors. The next Four Stone Hearth will be hosted by Anthropology In Practice on June 9th. Please send your submissions to the blog owner or to Martin Rundkvist.