The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.
The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.
"We know that the Picts had a spoken language to complement the writing of the symbols, as Bede (a monk and historian who died in 735) writes that there are four languages in Britain in this time: British, Pictish, Scottish and English," lead author Rob Lee told Discovery News.
Read the story on Discovery News
Scientific American's take on the story
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Primate metacommunication
Jonah Lehrer, mastermind behind Front Cortex, has "always been fascinated by tip-of-the-tongue moments. It's estimated that, on average, people have a tip-of-the-tongue moment at least once a week. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can't remember, although you know that it begins with the letter "J." Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail.
What's interesting about this mental hiccup is that, even though the mind can't remember the information, it's convinced that it knows it, which is why we devote so many mental resources to trying to recover the missing word. (This is a universal experience: The vast majority of languages, from Afrikaans to Hindi to Arabic, even rely on tongue metaphors to describe the tip-of-the-tongue moment.) But here's the mystery: If we've forgotten a person's name, then why are we so convinced that we remember it? What does it mean to know something without being able to access it?
The larger question is how the mind decides what to think about. After all, if we really don't know the name - it's nowhere inside our head - then it's a waste of time trying to find it. This is where metacognition, or thinking about thinking, comes in handy. At any given moment, we automatically monitor the flux of thoughts, emotions and errata flowing in the stream of consciousness. As a result, when a name goes missing we immediately analyze the likelihood of being able to remember it. Do we know the first letter of the name? Can we remember other facts about the person? Are we able to remember the first names of other acquaintances from high school? Based on the answer to these questions, we can then make an informed guess about whether or not it's worth trying to retrieve the misplaced memory.
Interestingly, a new experiment with a variety of primates (gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans) demonstrated that great apes also demonstrate some rudimentary metacognitive skills. The study, conducted by Josep Call at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, involved presenting the primates with two hollow tubes. One of the tubes came with a food reward, while the other was empty. The apes were then observed as they searched for the reward.
Read on for the results.
What's interesting about this mental hiccup is that, even though the mind can't remember the information, it's convinced that it knows it, which is why we devote so many mental resources to trying to recover the missing word. (This is a universal experience: The vast majority of languages, from Afrikaans to Hindi to Arabic, even rely on tongue metaphors to describe the tip-of-the-tongue moment.) But here's the mystery: If we've forgotten a person's name, then why are we so convinced that we remember it? What does it mean to know something without being able to access it?
The larger question is how the mind decides what to think about. After all, if we really don't know the name - it's nowhere inside our head - then it's a waste of time trying to find it. This is where metacognition, or thinking about thinking, comes in handy. At any given moment, we automatically monitor the flux of thoughts, emotions and errata flowing in the stream of consciousness. As a result, when a name goes missing we immediately analyze the likelihood of being able to remember it. Do we know the first letter of the name? Can we remember other facts about the person? Are we able to remember the first names of other acquaintances from high school? Based on the answer to these questions, we can then make an informed guess about whether or not it's worth trying to retrieve the misplaced memory.
Interestingly, a new experiment with a variety of primates (gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans) demonstrated that great apes also demonstrate some rudimentary metacognitive skills. The study, conducted by Josep Call at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, involved presenting the primates with two hollow tubes. One of the tubes came with a food reward, while the other was empty. The apes were then observed as they searched for the reward.
Read on for the results.
how humans adapted to climate change
U. BUFFALO (US)—Siberia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula, a rough and extremely volcanic wilderness region the size of California, is the current site of an international effort to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes.
Since 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland, and Kamchatka. Their findings will tell governments, scientists, and NGOs how relationships between human beings and their environments may change in decades to come as a result of global warming.
“The circumpolar north is widely seen as an observatory for changing relations between human societies and their environment,” Zubrow explains, “and analysis of data gathered from all phases of the study eventually will enable more effective collaboration between today’s social, natural, and medical sciences as they begin to devise adequate responses to the global warming the world faces today.”
The study, which will collect a vast array of archeological and paleoenvironmental data, began with the Social Change and the Environment in Nordic Prehistory Project (SCENOP), a major international research study by scientists from the U.S., Canada, and Europe of prehistoric sites in Northern Quebec and Finland.
“With forecasts of sea-level rises and changing weather patterns, people today have been forewarned about some likely ramifications of climate change,” Zubrow says, “but those living thousands of years ago, during the Holocene climatic optimum, could not have known what lay ahead of them and how their land—and lives—would be changing.
“This was a slower change,” he says, “about one-third the rate we face today. In the Holocene period, it took a thousand years for the earth to warm as much as it has over the past 300 years—roughly the time spanned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Phases I and II of the effort were headed by André Costopoulos and Gail Chmura of McGill University, Jari Okkonen of Finland’s Oulu University, and Zubrow, who also holds academic positions at the University of Toronto and Cambridge University. Phase III of the project is under way now in Kamchatka.
“As in other phases of the study,” Zubrow says, “our goal in Kamchatka is to clarify ancient regional chronologies and understand the ways prehistoric humans adapted to significant environmental changes, including warming, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and the seismic uplift of marine terraces that impacted the environment during the period in question.”
He points out that, despite our more sophisticated prediction technology, and technologies overall, many of the world’s people have residences and lifestyles that are just as vulnerable to climatic shift as those of our prehistoric ancestors. They, too, live along estuaries and coastlines subject to marked alteration as oceans rise.
Ultimately, information gathered over the next year by the geologists, archaeologists, geochemists, volcanologists, and paleoecologists on Zubrow’s team will be compared with data from the two other ICAP sites.
The project is being funded by the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Social Sciences Program of the Office of Polar Programs, which is supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
University at Buffalo news: www.buffalo.edu/news/
Article taken from Futurity.org - http://futurity.org
URL to article: http://futurity.org/earth-environment/how-early-humans-adapted-to-climate-change/
Since 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland, and Kamchatka. Their findings will tell governments, scientists, and NGOs how relationships between human beings and their environments may change in decades to come as a result of global warming.
“The circumpolar north is widely seen as an observatory for changing relations between human societies and their environment,” Zubrow explains, “and analysis of data gathered from all phases of the study eventually will enable more effective collaboration between today’s social, natural, and medical sciences as they begin to devise adequate responses to the global warming the world faces today.”
The study, which will collect a vast array of archeological and paleoenvironmental data, began with the Social Change and the Environment in Nordic Prehistory Project (SCENOP), a major international research study by scientists from the U.S., Canada, and Europe of prehistoric sites in Northern Quebec and Finland.
“With forecasts of sea-level rises and changing weather patterns, people today have been forewarned about some likely ramifications of climate change,” Zubrow says, “but those living thousands of years ago, during the Holocene climatic optimum, could not have known what lay ahead of them and how their land—and lives—would be changing.
“This was a slower change,” he says, “about one-third the rate we face today. In the Holocene period, it took a thousand years for the earth to warm as much as it has over the past 300 years—roughly the time spanned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Phases I and II of the effort were headed by André Costopoulos and Gail Chmura of McGill University, Jari Okkonen of Finland’s Oulu University, and Zubrow, who also holds academic positions at the University of Toronto and Cambridge University. Phase III of the project is under way now in Kamchatka.
“As in other phases of the study,” Zubrow says, “our goal in Kamchatka is to clarify ancient regional chronologies and understand the ways prehistoric humans adapted to significant environmental changes, including warming, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and the seismic uplift of marine terraces that impacted the environment during the period in question.”
He points out that, despite our more sophisticated prediction technology, and technologies overall, many of the world’s people have residences and lifestyles that are just as vulnerable to climatic shift as those of our prehistoric ancestors. They, too, live along estuaries and coastlines subject to marked alteration as oceans rise.
Ultimately, information gathered over the next year by the geologists, archaeologists, geochemists, volcanologists, and paleoecologists on Zubrow’s team will be compared with data from the two other ICAP sites.
The project is being funded by the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Social Sciences Program of the Office of Polar Programs, which is supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
University at Buffalo news: www.buffalo.edu/news/
Article taken from Futurity.org - http://futurity.org
URL to article: http://futurity.org/earth-environment/how-early-humans-adapted-to-climate-change/
Vervet females better teachers
Not an april fool's story:
When vervet monkeys play follow the leader, they prefer to follow a female. That was the conclusion of Erica van de Waal, whose lengthy study of these primates in South Africa will be published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. When her team presented them with a tricky contraption they had to open to reach a tasty snack, the monkeys learned better if they watched a female from their group demonstrate the solution rather than a male.
Seeking some answers to how social learning works in monkeys, van de Waal and her colleagues headed to Loskop Dam Nature Reserve.
The scientists saw that other monkeys paid more attention when the dominant female was solving the puzzle as opposed to the dominant male. Later, the team passed out the same kind of box to other members of the groups. If those monkeys were among the groups that had watched the male, they didn’t show a preference for which side of the box to open, which suggested they hadn’t learned much during their spectating days. In fact, van de Waal says, they didn’t even show a preference toward attempting to open the box. But, in the groups that watched their dominant female, 80 percent went for the side of the container they’d seen her open before.
Read full story
When vervet monkeys play follow the leader, they prefer to follow a female. That was the conclusion of Erica van de Waal, whose lengthy study of these primates in South Africa will be published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. When her team presented them with a tricky contraption they had to open to reach a tasty snack, the monkeys learned better if they watched a female from their group demonstrate the solution rather than a male.
Seeking some answers to how social learning works in monkeys, van de Waal and her colleagues headed to Loskop Dam Nature Reserve.
The scientists saw that other monkeys paid more attention when the dominant female was solving the puzzle as opposed to the dominant male. Later, the team passed out the same kind of box to other members of the groups. If those monkeys were among the groups that had watched the male, they didn’t show a preference for which side of the box to open, which suggested they hadn’t learned much during their spectating days. In fact, van de Waal says, they didn’t even show a preference toward attempting to open the box. But, in the groups that watched their dominant female, 80 percent went for the side of the container they’d seen her open before.
Read full story
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