Anthropology Midterm #2

Linguistics

The scientific study of language
Linguistic anthropology is about exploring language and how it relates to culture and people around the world

Language

• A system of arbitrary symbols used to encode and communicate their experience

• "5" ex) we understand it as unit of measurement but saying five is arbitrary

• Not necessarily learning customs and norms associated with the culture that language "belongs" to

• Spanish ex) Learn in the classroom but pace, cadence, words that aren't dictionary are an entirely different thing

Learning a Language

• Phonemes- sound, smallest units of a langiuage

• Morphemes- patterns of use, words

• Grammar- rules of use of morphemes

• The boy bit the dog versus the dog bit the boy

• ASL - units called charing= phonemes (gestures that are not auditory)

• Has rules of engagements and grammar

• Do other species have language with grammatical rules? --> studies for a long time, Koko the Gorilla- Dr. Patterson claims Koko can understand thousands of words because she talks while she signs (Claims that Koko has learned a form of sign language), grasps of concepts (square wheel being wrong), something more complex than mimicry

Symbols

• Stand for something else, completely, very arbitrary

• Like the symbol of Apple is the apple with a bite taken out of it --> No real connection to the computer in front of me, but we learn to connect them

• Golden arches representing McDonald's

Gestures

• A gesture is a movement to express an idea or motion

• Raising your hand, waving, differ from culture to culture

Call Systems

• Natural communication systems of other animals, limited by sounds (humans have 6 universal calls --> laughing, crying, sobbing in pain, screaming with fright, groaning, and sighing)

• Twycross Chimps --> Katja hopes to make chimp dictionary, Peter makes facial expression that signals fear, chimps gesture can be more subtle than facial expressions, tap of the shoulder to say sorry

Kinesics

Study of non-verbal communications, body language, express age, gender, and power dynamics

Proxemics

• Comfortable distance between people from culture to culture

• normal for two men who fighting in MLB to get close but wouldn't see that in a situation with that close of a proximity in the subway (you'd get beat up)

• proxemics is situational, impact of COVID on proxemics

Semiotics & Pragmatics

• Semiotics - Study of signs and symbols and their use

• Pragmatics - Study of language in that context of its use
  Doesn't have to be in another place (can study your own language)

• Reno going to different fitness centers in Binghamton and looked at language of a gym, gym culture, workout culture

• Can study it. on the internet, newspapers

• Studying language also means studying music (communicating it something to the listener themselves)

Languages Change

• Just like cultures change, languages change as well

• Merriam-Webster adds new words every (cringe, yeet, metaverse, greenwashing, subvariant, janky)

• studying new words is lingustic anthropology (reflects changes)

Variation in Language by Region

Dialect- a variety of language spoken by groups of people with distinct phonemes and/or syntax (her Minnesota accent as an eample, NY Times Test, TA-Kansas)

Focal Words

• Set of words and distinctions important to a certain group

• Hockey example - different words to hit a puck in hockey

• Shape how we perceive the world

• Manipulated to make us perceive the world differently (Friendly fire, neutralize, collateral damage, soft targets, non-operative personnel--> sounds less upsetting on the news to hear US soldiers shot US soldiers)

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Different languages produce different ways of thinking (because they all have different focal worlds, do you really understand hockey if you don't know all its focal words) foundational idea of linguistic anthropology

Politics

Politics are a good example of language being intentionally selected to sway a particularly world view (defense of marriage act, patriot act, no child left behind, protect america)

Southern Accent Disappearing

• Study of those living in Georgia spanning 4 generations and focused on 4 vowels (more southern in older speakers than in younger, younger use pan-regional accent)

• demographic change in US could be reason, increasing migration, early linguistic input is by our parents

Variation in Language by Gender

• Mostly refers to the gender binaries when discussing variation in language

• sexual differences (female vocal tract or male vocal tract)

• why study gender in the US- over last 50 years women's participation in labor force has risen while men's has gone down
  Women are paid 86 cents to the dollar

Linguistic Anthropology and Gender

• How do gendered differences manifest in language

• Is there something about language contributing to gender inequities todays?

• does the way a man speaks lead him to get paid more?

• real world implications

• Language Acquisition- happens from moment child is born, primary comes from mother (main caregiver in a lot of cultures bc of biological necessity, early language mimics biological female speaker)

• Language Development and Expression (program speech throughout childhood), kids exposed to different sports, toys, activities, clothes etc.

Men, Women, and Uptalk

• Cher from Clueless- end of sentence intonation goes up

• Younger men and women engage in uptalk

• as you age, it's not accepted by men in speech and encouraged in women to increase likability

• encouraged women to sound unsure of themselves to be more likable

Language Development and Expression

Rapport Talk, Report Talk, Link to Gender

Rapport Talk

• A way of establishing connection and negotiating relationships

• women encouraged to do so, seen as a way for a woman to leverage her power (otherwise seen as a threat or something not right)

• even in the workplace and politics, discouraged for men, make yourself approachable and nice, Kamala Harris Example

Report Talk

• A way of delivering facts and establishing status in a hierarchical order

• encouraged for men

• doesn't need to make you feel comfortable

• makes you feel sage and as though as everything is under control

• Barack Obama example

Rapport and Report Talk are Linked to Gender

Rejecting them can lead to questioning and stereotyping

Guest Lecture (Dr. Nielsen)

Linguistics Program

Business Process Outsourcing

• Companies started to offshore work to other countries

• US started to outsource customer service to India (these companies are called business process outsourcing companies)

• India was ideal because of a large English-speaking population leftover from British Colonialism, Affordable labor for American companies

• Large cyber cities and special economic zones popped up around the country where International Corporations opened up shop, using Indian labor to run different aspects

Delhi National Capital Region

Where she did most of her research

Customer Service and Language

• Call centers and other BPOs faced a problem: People in a different places have different social norms, people in different places speak different ways (midwest v. ny)

• people viewed as rude, this applies to India and they may have different ideas of how to speak for customer service

• how do we bridge this gap? - this solution was language and customer service training

• before working at a call center, trainees undergo weeks of rigorous training to learn how to handle people on the phone from different parts of the world

On the Training

• Accent Training

• British or American English?

• Neither. "Let us first get to 0"

Neutral Accents & Global English

When speaking with Call Center professionals and accent trainers they describe what they trained as a neutral accent that was global english, this english was not

Method: Ethnography of an Accent

• Ethnography- study of cultural differences that involves long-term participant observation

• Linguistic Ethnography- ethnography that focus on linguistic forms as a means of understanding cultural and linguistic differences

• Participant Observation- not just observing, but participating in what is happening at field site

Why Ethnography?

• You are able to dispel some of personal cultural assumptions by participating not just observing

• You gain a physical experience of the thing you are studying

• People often say one thing in an interview, but do something else in practice, much of social regularity in unconsciously patterned (we aren't aware of the bigger picture when it comes to routines and norms, gaining a deep understanding of people's live through long-term interaction can foster greater understanding for their perspectives)

Research Questions

• What types of social and linguistics interactions are coordinated by the terms "global english" and "netural accent" in Delhi's call center industry

• what do tell us about bigger picture concepts such as Globalization

One Direction Skill Solutions

Where she worked, interviewed, observation and participated (training and hiring process), voice examplea

Neutral Accent in the NCR

Accent training, accent hiring, accent sourcing

History of the Accent

• English in India

• wanted to form a class of English speakers, Hobson-Johnson (anglo-indian words)

• very old history

Arjun Rania

• Father of BPO Accent Training

• Actor and vocal coach

• Trained in England

• Graduate and Coach at the National School of Drama

• Classical Dance Instructor in Australia

• Headliner of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

• Hired by General Electric and gave him the job of making Indians "sound American" in these call centers

• Identity Management and Sounding Americans -putting your head under desk, make voice more nasally, he developed the smart system of the 5 sounds you need to sound American

• viewed this as colonial and began training in what he deemed as neutral rather than sounding British or American

Covent English

• Sound like yourself, but better (meant for the wealthier class at first)

• After 2008 Market Clash (neutral was still convent english without the overt association of Christianity)

• wages remained the same despite a drastic decrease in the purchasing power of the rupee

• the new employees still tried to sound neutral to achieve this "elite" level of Indian English

• call centers were less paid and were starting to be viewed as a less respectable job

• the original group were extremely elite and now view it as beneath them, the neutral accent being the standard is a question of money and power

• Covent english (neutral) was meant for elite class, then started to attempt to get adopted by those at call centers (less respectable after 2008), so it shows that neutral is also a question of money and power

Hiring Neutral Accents

Importance of skills talk in the hiring process (saying you have skills is often enough)

Accents are not just Sounds

• Sound linked to ideas about people (used to describe a person), therefore, no accents are "neutral"

• MTI (mother tongue influence)- language scores are based on whether someone is perceived to have MTI

• people who weren't neutral weren't hired (people from lower-caste backgrounds, people from South India, people with speech impediments, people from North-East India)

Whose Communication Skills?

• Neutral is not just an idea in India, applies all over

• Exists in the US hiring process as well

• neutral was often defined in terms of what it is not (difference between us telling the difference between a Wisconsin and Minnesota accent vs. NY and Jersey)

• Trainers have to be able to hear the right kind of difference

• Speaking neutral is speaking the “right kind” of Indian - systemically eliminating sounds and people associated with non-urban, non upper-caste, and on-elite

• The differences in people in the Call Center Industry are things customers are unlikely to notice, so people are eliminated for really no reason

Sapir-Whorf Revisited

• Language greatly influences how we think but doesn’t contain it

• How many languages are there?

• How many have there been?

• Where are they being spoken?

• Several dominant languages (English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, etc), estimated to have 6,900 distinct languages at least being spoken today

Languages of the World

• Language tree- metaphorical example of how languages sprout off each other

• Historical linguistics is about find the similarities in languages

• What makes a language unique?

• mutual intelligibility: if a speaker of one language can understand another, and vice versa, it's not a unique language

Dialect Continua

Canadian English to English in South (Texas), if you walked, it would be hard to tell because gradual, but side by side they would so different in direct comparison, sounds the same all the way across but all of a sudden it gets so far these two can't understand each other and have to draw the line as a unique language

Languages are not Evenly Distributed

• Language hot spots

• Interesting correlation between language hotspots and a lot of biodiversity- perhaps needed more language to understand the climate

• Lowest density in Europe, Asia, Papua New Guinea

• Biodiversity map kinda falls over language hotspots pretty well

Indigenous Languages (North America)

• 165 Indigenous languages in North America, only 8 are spoken by 10,000 or more people

• Languages are dying

• Why do we care that many languages are dying now?

• UNESCO estimates that ½ of world's languages will be gone by 2100
  Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• We lose that world view, culture, and knowledge encoded in that language

Endangered Languages

One that is spoken by relatively few people, is not being learned by next generation, and/or is likely to become extinct in the near future

Chickasaw as an Example (13th largest recognized NA group)

• Conquistador told the Chica. he was a deity of the sun god, Chica. thought he was suspect and attacked him, no Europeans went back for 150 years, then French claimed it

• Indian Remove Act forced many to move to Oklahome (includ. Chica.) NA children were placed in boarding schools as form of cultural genocide, forced to not speak their language, saving a language from extinction saves that culture

• Underwent centuries of intentional cultural genocide

• In 2013, only 100 spoke Chicasaw fluently (60+)

• Joshua Hinson (?) learned it from the elders and founded the Chickasaw Revitalization Program

• Paired novice speakers with expert speakers
  Built a TV station, social media campaigns, etc.

• Culture: we used to gather together regularly, a long time ago

• Knowledge: is a desert flower that is used to treat mouth sores

Biological Anthropology

• We are the products of millions of years of evolution, and biological anthropologists are trying to figure out how we came to be by studying that evolution in the past and present

• How we came to be, ask questions about ourselves

• Studying cultural and medical processes
  Jane Goodall and her studying and living with primates an example similar to anthropologists and humans

Paleoanthropology

• Goal of understanding where we came from through the study of human ancestors

• A lot of cross-over with the study of genetics

• A lot of the geological work is done in "the cradle of humanity" in Africa

• The last 7 million years of our evolutionary history → brains grew, gained the ability to walk, the beginning of cultural traditions, significant increase in intelligence

Evolution

• The process by which different kinds of living organisms developed

• Stands against some religions, some cultures have banned the practice of teaching evolution

• Science's "creation story"

• Scientists were thinking, "how are there so many different species on earth and how are they so diverse?"

• All about adaptation

Theories of Evolution

• Jean-Baptiste Lamark (Lamarckian Evolution): One of the first to theorize evolution
  Inheritance of acquired characteristics

• Giraffe example (long neck from eating the leaves passed onto the next generation)

• Inherently flawed (If you want to be taller, you can't simply just grow)

• Individuals don't evolve, it takes place at the population level

Adaptations

• Inherited structures, functions, or behaviors that help organisms survive and reproduce

• ONLY beneficial when it helps you reproduce (increase fitness)

Charles Darwin

• Fitness: described in terms of individual reproductive success compared to other individuals in their species

• Mostly evolved with apex predators in mind, changing flight patterns, most beneficial genetic adaptations in relation to environment

• Natural Selection: mutation creates variation → unfavorable mutations selected against → reproduction and mutation occur → favorable mutations more likely to survive and reproduce

Tenets of Natural Selection

• Phenotypic (morphological) variation exists among individuals and that variation is heritable

• Those with heritable traits are better suited to have more success and survive longer, greater reproductive success

• When reproductive isolation/imbalance in nature occurs for whatever reason, so too will speciation occur

Evolution Part 2

• The process by which different kinds of living organisms developed

• Explained by natural selection

• Larger species go extinct first due to longer reproductive cycles (e.g elephants with 22 month long reproductive cycle)

65 Million Years Ago

• Rise of the Primates

• Mammals adapted to live in trees, dextrous hands

• Mammals had really short reproductive cycles, were much smaller than dinosaurs

• Sexual Dimorphism: distinct difference in size or appearance between sexes of animal
  In gorillas, males are much larger than females and have extra thing on their head, like a helmet

• 4000 extant (living) mammals, only 1 true biped (walk on two feet)

• We are the only habitual biped

Changes from being a Habitual Biped

• C shaped spine in human vs. S shaped spine in gorilla

• Skull: Foramen magnum moved to front from back

• Shoulder blades: moved from side of body to the backs of body and muscle structure changed as well

• Pelvis: changed from flat and broad to bowl shaped and able to support are organs, crucial for us to be able to walk upright

• Femur Angle: Feet went from far apart acquired 7 million years ago

• Hallux: one big toe and remaining toes got shorter

• Foot arches: developed shock absorption

Why Bipedalism?

• WE NEED ARMS

• More energy efficient

• Possible visual surveillance

• Help avoid predators

• Extant primate model: walking upright shows dominance and could lead to more reproductive success

• Helpful for carrying tools, food, babies, and for hunting

• Was most likely multi-factoral

Hominins

• Refers to extinct and living members of the human lineage

• Brains got bigger, we developed tool use, speech, language, and culture

The Genus Homo

• Homo Habilis, handy person, East and South Africa, oldowan tools

• Homo habilis, Homo erectus (Upright), Homo sapiens (human)

Applied Medical Anthropology

Prof. Schechter

Biomedical Anthropology

Broad degree from those interested in health sciences/heatlhcare (research, non profit, public health)

Blood Testing Problem

NYS Public Health mandates that children at 1 yo test for blood lead level and again at 2 years- in Broome testing rate is around 50%

How can anthro help answer this question?

• Applied Anthropology

• Application of anthropological theories, methods, and practices to the analysis and solution of real-world problems, all subfields do applied anthropology

• Medical Anthropology (a sub-field)

• Study of factors that contribute to variability in health and disease in past and present populations

Diseases and their Causes

• Do diseases affect all human groups equally?

• Not everyone is equally likely to end up with diseases- like Type II diabetes

• What determines the distribution and severity of human disease?

Lead Poisoning

• Lead poisoning occurs when a person eats or breathes lead in the environment
  Lead is very toxic to humans, especially humans

• There is no "safe" blood lead level
  In the U.S., childhood lead poisoning is an entirely preventable environmental health problem

• Blood lead at the low levels can cause permanent changes in a child's brain, including loss of IQ, learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other serious health issues

• Very high blood lead levels can lead to seizures, coma, and death

Who is at the most risk?

• Very young children

• Children living in poverty

• Children living in older housing (especially if it is poorly maintained)

• Children exposed to lead dust during home renovation

• Children coming to the US from other countries

• Children who live with adults who may have occupational lead exposures

Lead Poisoning can be hard to recognize in children

• Can be asymptomatic but can lead to
  Learning disabilities

• Physical problems (including hearing, growth, kidney)

• Behavioral problem, including ADHD

• Violent behavior

• Even though there is that testing law, the testing rate is low

• Main source of childhood lead poisoning in New York state is paint (most of the northeast too)

Residential Lead Hazards

• Lead paint was used commercially for decades

• Lead in dust and deteriorated household paint are the most important sources of lead exposure for US children

• 86% of all homes in Broome County were built before 1978 and may contain some lead-based paint

• The older the home, the more likely that it includes a significant amount of lead

Where to look for lead paint

• Old windows

• Interior trim and friction surfaces

• accessible mouthable surfaces

Why are young children at the greatest risk?

• They spend more time on the floor

• They tend to explore by putting hands, toys, and other things in their mouths

• Their brains and bodies are developing rapidly

• This is the vulnerability with lead as a neurotoxin

• Lead hazards have a greater impact on small children because of their weight and their rate of growth

Additional Info

• Window sills are considered mouthable surfaces

• Even when intact, they have the potential to become hazardous quickly

• The height is optimal for curious kids

• Lead in US children ages 1-5 years: Median concentrations in blood by race/ethnicity and family income

• Shows that it's not random of which kids become exposed to lead

• Poverty level & race/ethnicity in connection to risk of being exposed to lead poisoning

Health Disparity

Preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations

Health in a Social Context

• Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions in the enviornments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health functioning, and quality of life outcomes and risks

• Helps us understand who is healthy and who is not

Study of the BC Pediatricians and PCP’s

• How can an anthropological approach address this problem?

• Approaching health care is culture, understanding that health care is a culture

• Understanding the issue of medical errors- why?

• Checklists are meant to prevent errors, and one of the most basic things is you have to wash your hands, and he found that many do not wash their hands because of different cultures regarding valuing that part of that checklist- Howard Chiou, MD, PhD

• Culture: patterns of behavior that are shared or common to a group (e.g. beliefs, practices, values, traditions)

Research Method

Developed a survey to understand why doctors do or do not order blood lead level tests for their pediatric patients

What questions would you ask doctors to understand their behavior around lead testing practices?

• What kind of rapport do you have with the patient? Do they trust you?

• Do the tests take a lot of time and effort?

• Were you aware of the law requiring testing?

• Culture of the appointment of childhood doctor visits?

Her Research

• Her research - the majority of my patients aged 2 years and younger are likely to be at risk of lead exposure in their homes

• Not all providers view it as a risk, but it is, 86% of the homes statistics

• Again, what doctors know to a certain extent is a culture- shared knowledge, all of this information can guide their decision making, some even said we don't know what the health effects of lead poisoning are

Examples of what happens during an appointment

• Check growth

• Perform physical exam

• Update immunization

• Ask questions about development

• Order Tests

• Asked what barriers, if any, do you face when it comes to ordering blood lead level tests?

• Time constraints

• Competing patient care demands results in lead testing being a lower priority

• No follow-up from patients

• Patients entering and leaving my practice

• The trauma of subjecting a child or caregiver to a venipuncture test

• Lack of resources

Takeaways from Prof. Schechter

• No safe level of lead in body

• Childhood lead-poisoning is a health disparity

• Through leveraging the tools of anthropology, we can better understand the causes of diseases and work towards solutions (understanding the culture that leads to a doctor not ordering a test and why children may be affected more)

Race and Human Variation - Evolutionary, Ecological, and Cultural Perspectives

Professor Little (1)

Sensitive Problems in Discussing Race

• Race has a long history of prejudice, slavery, oppression, especially in the United States

• During US history, Native Americans were overwhelmed and in some cases exterminated

• African natives were brought to the US and enslaved
  Race in textbooks is almost always discussed along with racism

• Discussions of race are often highly emotional
  Many individuals in the US are still racist

The Age of Exploration (16th and 17th Century)

• European exploration led to discoveries of peoples from the New World and many other areas around the globe

• This stimulated theories about these peoples origins and who they were

During the 18th century, Age of Enlightenment, these peoples began to be classified according to "Race"

• The scientific meaning of race has changed through time from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries up to the present from fixed, unchanging groups of peoples with impenetrable borders (3,4,5, races) to highly modifiable, evolving, and mixed groups of people with multiple origins

• "The race concept is a best a crude first-order (intial) approximation to the geographically structured phenotypic variation in the human species" (John Relethford, 2009)

• Migration of Homo Sapiens out of Africa and to other parts of the globe

• Probably the origin of population variation, environments produced specific adaptations

Human Populations 2000 years ago

Incredible variation (Arctic Natives, Meso-American, Bantu, Nilotic, Eurasians, Aborigines, etc.)

Race as a Form of Classification

• All forms of classification tend to construct artificial clusters and fixed categories with boundaries

• Examples are: kinds of personalities (extroverted, introverted) social class (upper middle lower) stature (tall medium short) eye color (brown, hazel, blue, green) academic grades (A,B, C) etc.

• This is a form of mental simplification of complex, continous variation

• Racial classification falls into this category of clustering (only in a more complex way)

Car von Linne

• Swedish taxonomist who attempted to order and classify all organisms on Earth

• He published the Systema Naturae in 1735

• Established binomial nomenclature, and the place of humans in the same taxonomic order (primates) as apes and monkeys

• Established 4 varieties (races) of humans: Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Afar

• He fully accepted the concept of unchanging species, and simply was ordering what he believed were god's creatures into a logical arrangement

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

His 4-fold racial classfication followed Linnaeus closely in his 1776 De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, something else (didnt get everything). Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American

Franz Boas

• Boas was the founder of American anthropology and contributed substantially to biological anthropology

• He stoof virtually alone in objecting to the current (during his time) beliefs about race as unchanging and pure units
  In his early (late 1800s) writings he understood the influence of the environment on human (racial) groups

• His migrant study (1909-1912) showed that individuals has "plasticity", and that both genetics and the environment molded humans

• Cranial dimensions

• Height (children in well-off households were taller)
  Strong opponent of racism

Major Questions through 20th Century

• Whether races (populations) were equal and had an equal capacity for culture and intelligence (different abilities?)
  Whether miscegenation or population mixing or hybridization was harmful (Belief still persists)

• Whether various populations have very deep roots in time

• Whether skin color was a useful way to identify race

• Whether there were a given number of races

• False kind of question by trying to identify a finite number

• Whether races were biologically real- that is, whether races in fact existed.

• Is race a social construct? In some instances, the idea that it is a social constructs there are no differences in human variations, but there is

Human Variation and Diversity

• In human evolutionary history, important factors have been and continue to be

• Natural selection (leading to adaptation)

• Isolation (groups separated from other groups)

• Human movement and migration (physical movement)
  Interbreeding (exchanging genes within and between groups)

• In addition to selection, human movement (migration) and interbreeding have been important in producing variation in humans

• Migration can occur through: searching for food or better resources of conditions, warfare and conquest, slavery (and other forced movement), drought or catastrophe, exploration, etc.

• Clustering and movement out

A Basis for Human Population Variation

Centripetal Forces (inward, clustering → human societies and the formation of cultures, isolation of cultures) & Centrifugal (outward and diffusion → migration of people(gene flow, interbreeding, spread of ideas/culture) → Human Population Variation

Some Examples of Human Variation with Genetic Causes

• Sickle-Cell Anemia and Malaria

• Hemoglobin Variants

• Malaria is causes by a parasite carried by mosquitoes

• Disease

• Bubonic Plague

• Requires immune response to survive

• Candidate gene provides protection against plague

• Disease

• Lactase Persistence

• Lactase allows digestion of milk in adults

• Nutrition

• High Altitude Adaptation

• O2

• Body size/physique and climatic variation

• Climate

• Melanin skin pigmentation and solar radiation

• Climate

Each of these examples has an environmental factor that selects for certain phenotypes and their underlying genes

• These sleective pressures produce clinical variation (gradients) in characteristics

• Most of these selective pressures involve geography and culture

• Like melanin → solar radiation damage, UV radiation impact on skin

• Body size → Cold and hot temperature, maintaing body temperature

Bubonic Plague

• Plague during 14th century killed 30% to 40% of the European population

• It was transmitted through flea bites (bubonic) or by aerosol (pneumonic)

• There were earlier epidemics date to 5th century Asia and the Near East

Genetics of Plague Immunity

• Bone ancient DNA was conducted from graves exhumed in the East Smithfield Cemetery in London

• DNA was compared from those born before, during, and after the plague epidemic of 1348-1349 in England

• They found that the gene ERAP2, which codes for immune cells to fight infection, increased in frequency in plague survivors

• Before plague struck England, only 35% of Londoners carried the ERAP2 gene, after the plague epidemic had left England 50% of Londoners were found to carry the gene

• This showed positive selection for the gene

Lactase Persistence, Dairying, and Milk Consumption

• Early domesticated animals were probably kept for their meat and hides. Domestication began about 11,000 years ago

• About 7,000 to 9,000 years ago in Egypt, domestic animals began to be used for milk and wool production in addition to meat. This event is known as the secondary products revolution

• A significant problem with milk production for food at that time was the inability...(didnt get everything)

Evolution of Adult Milk Consumption

• The gene for lactase production probably arose in the NEar East or Egypt and spread to Europe. East Africa has alternate genes

• A single gene in Europeans and three separate genes in East Africans were found that are associated with Lactase Persistence

• 1st animal domestication(most are lactase deficient) , 1st use of milk (selection in favor of gene), continue dairying (continue eselection to maintain the gene in high frequency)

Selective Factors and UV Radiation

• Short-term Skin Injury → suburn, finection, damage to the sweat glands

• Long-term Skin Injury → cancer

• Body temperature

• Energy cost of Melanin Synthesis

• Vitam D Synthesis in Skin

• Sexual Selection

• Folic Acid Photolysis (spina bifida)

High Altitude Adaptation in the Peruvian Andes

Professor Little (2)

Adaptation

• Adaptation refers to an adjustment to the environment done by an individual or population

• Altitude stress → climatic stress such as reduced oxygen content that affects the body for living beings