To the Best of Our Knowledge: Caveman

Caveman
To the Best of Our Knowledge (Wisconsin Public Radio)

SEGMENT 1:



A recent study of DNA from Neanderthal bones changed everything we thought we knew. Paleo Anthropologist John Hawks tells Steve Paulson the new information reveals that modern humans are one to four percent Neanderthal. And Brian Fagan tells Jim Fleming the rest of us is something else - Cro-Magnon. In his book "Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans," he argues that they were just like us - anatomically modern humans.

SEGMENT 2:



Sir Ian McKellen is heard first, reading from the novel "Wolf Brother" by Michelle Paver. It's part of her "Chronicles of Ancient Darkness" series, set 6000 years ago. She tells Anne Strainchamps how she got interested in the Stone Age.

SEGMENT 3:



Not all cavemen are in the past. The Modern Caveman Movement involves men in urban gyms, grunting and sprinting on all fours, lifting heavy stones, and running barefoot. They're eating a Paleolithic diet of meat, often raw, with no grains or beans or bread or dairy. 72 year-old Arthur De Vany is an economics professor whose physical accomplishments could awe a 20 year-old. He tells Anne Strainchamps it's all about mimicking what our cavemen ancestors would have done. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham says the big question is WHEN did we become human? He tells Steve Paulson it's clearly when we started cooking. Otherwise we would never have survived.

To Listen to the Episode

Gabriella Coleman: The Anthropology of Hackers

The Anthropology of Hackers
by Gabriella Coleman
The Atlantic

A "hacker" is a technologist with a love for computing and a "hack" is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn't mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But once one confronts hacking empirically, some similarities melt into a sea of differences; some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant thinking about hacking in terms of genres or genealogies of hacking -- and we compare and contrast various of these genealogies in the class, such as free and open source software hacking and the hacker underground.

Since 2007, I have taught an undergraduate class on computer hackers at New York University where I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication. The class opens a window into the esoteric facets of hacking: its complicated ethical codes and the multifaceted experiences of pleasures and frustrations in making, breaking, and especially dwelling in technology. Hacking, however, is as much a gateway into familiar cultural and political territory. For instance, hacker commitments to freedom, meritocracy, privacy and free speech are not theirs alone, nor are they hitched solely to the contemporary moment. Indeed, hacker ethical principles hearken back to sensibilities and conundrums that precipitated out of the Enlightenment's political ferment; hackers have refashioned many political concerns -- such as a commitments to free speech -- through technological and legal artifacts, thus providing a particularly compelling angle by which to view the continued salience of liberal principles in the context of the digital present.

To Read the Description/Outline of the Course

Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic

Please join us for a showing of the acclaimed, award-winning documentary, Human Terrain, on Friday, March 11th in the central UK Student amphitheater at 2:30pm. Sponsored by the UK Department of Anthropology, this film critically interrogates the use of social scientists to collect "cultural intelligence" for the counterinsurgency campaigns in the Iraq and Afghanistan. The film is directed by James Der Derian (International Relations, Brown University) and David and Michael Udris.

Website: http://humanterrainmovie.com/

Synopsis: ‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates ‘Human Terrain Systems’, a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb.

War becomes academic, academics go to war, and the personal tragically merges with the political, raising new questions about the ethics, effectiveness, and high costs of counterinsurgency.See More