Prehistory of Kinship Bentley, R. Alexander
Annual review of anthropology,
10/2022, Volume:
51, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
As observed in recent centuries, the contemporary variety of kinship systems reflects millennia of human migration, cultural inheritance, adaptation, and diversification. This review describes key ...developments in prehistoric kinship, from matricentric hominin evolution to the Neolithic transition to agriculture and the heterogeneous resilience of matriliny. Starting with our hominin ancestors, kinship evolved among a cooperative breeding species to multilevel group structure among human hunter-gatherers, to substantial kinship changes brought on by the origins of intensified farming, to permanent settlements and unequal resource access. This review takes the approach that new forms of subsistence facilitated new equations of reproductive success, which changed cultural norms of kinship systems and heritable wealth. Subsequently, the formation of complex societies diminished kinship as the primary organizing principle of society. The article describes new methodologies and theoretical developments, along with critiques of bioarchaeological interpretations of prehistoric kinship.
Strontium isotope analysis of archaeological skeletons has provided useful and exciting results in archaeology in the last 20 years, particularly by characterizing past human migration and mobility. ...This review covers the biogeochemical background, including the origin of strontium isotope compositions in rocks, weathering and hydrologic cycles that transport strontium, and biopurification of strontium from to soils, to plants, to animals and finally into the human skeleton, which is subject to diagenesis after burial. Spatial heterogeneity and mixing relations must often be accounted for, rather than simply "matching" a measured strontium isotope value to a presumed single-valued geologic source. The successes, limitations and future potential of the strontium isotope technique are illustrated through case studies from geochemistry, biogeochemistry, ecology and archaeology.
We report here trends in the usage of "mood" words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word ...frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more "emotional" than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.
The global pandemic of COVID-19 revealed the dynamic heterogeneity in how individuals respond to infection risks, government orders, and community-specific social norms. Here we demonstrate how both ...individual observation and social learning are likely to shape behavioral, and therefore epidemiological, dynamics over time. Efforts to delay and reduce infections can compromise their own success, especially when disease risk and social learning interact within sub-populations, as when people observe others who are (a) infected and/or (b) socially distancing to protect themselves from infection. Simulating socially-learning agents who observe effects of a contagious virus, our modelling results are consistent with with 2020 data on mask-wearing in the U.S. and also concur with general observations of cohort induced differences in reactions to public health recommendations. We show how shifting reliance on types of learning affect the course of an outbreak, and could therefore factor into policy-based interventions incorporating age-based cohort differences in response behavior.
Abstract The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that copying is unbiased, provides precise predictions regarding frequency distributions of traits and the turnover within a ...popularity-ranked list. Here we study turnover in ranked lists and identify where the turnover departs from neutral model predictions to detect transmission biases in three different domains: color terms usage in English language 20th century books, popularity of early (1880–1930) and recent (1960–2010) USA baby names, and musical preferences of users of the Web site Last.fm. To help characterize the type of transmission bias, we modify the neutral model to include a content-based bias and two context-based biases (conformity and anti-conformity). How these modified models match real data helps us to infer, from population scale observations, when cultural transmission is biased, and, to some extent, what kind of biases are operating at individual level.
•Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features of brain tumors from dogs are described.•Groups include meningeal or ventricular masses, intra-axial enhancing to non-enhancing lesions, and multifocal ...lesions.•Guidance for differential diagnoses is provided.•MRI features need to be interpreted with available clinical information.
A great deal of information is now available regarding the range of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features of many primary and secondary brain tumors from dogs. In this review, these canine neoplasms are grouped into meningeal masses, ventricular masses, intra-axial enhancing lesions, intra-axial mildly to non-enhancing lesions, and multifocal lesions. For each of these patterns, the major and sporadic neoplastic differential diagnoses are provided, and guidance on how to rank differential diagnoses for each individual patient is presented. The implication of MRI features such as contrast-enhancement, signal intensities and location is discussed. However, the information garnered from MRI must be correlated with all available clinical information and with epidemiological data before creating a differential diagnosis.
U.S. obesity as delayed effect of excess sugar Alexander Bentley, R.; Ruck, Damian J.; Fouts, Hillary N.
Economics and human biology,
January 2020, 2020-01-00, 20200101, Volume:
36
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
•While many population health studies have invoked sugar as a major causal factor in the obesity epidemic, few have explicitly explored the temporal delay between increased sugar consumption and ...rising obesity rates.•We model the increase of U.S. adult obesity since the 1990s as a legacy of increased consumption of excess sugars among children of the 1970s and 1980s.•The model captures the generational time lag through a stochastic process of superfluous sugar calories increasing obesity rates over the lifespan of each birthyear cohort.•Driven by annual USDA sugar consumption figures, the two-parameter model replicates three aspects of the data: Delayed timing and magnitude of the national rise in obesity since 1970.•Profile of obesity rates by age group for a recent year.•Change in obesity rates by age group among pre-adults.•Our results indicate that past U.S. sugar consumption is at least sufficient to explain adult obesity change in the past 30 years.
In the last century, U.S. diets were transformed, including the addition of sugars to industrially-processed foods. While excess sugar has often been implicated in the dramatic increase in U.S. adult obesity over the past 30 years, an unexplained question is why the increase in obesity took place many years after the increases in U.S. sugar consumption. To address this, here we explain adult obesity increase as the cumulative effect of increased sugar calories consumed over time. In our model, which uses annual data on U.S. sugar consumption as the input variable, each age cohort inherits the obesity rate in the previous year plus a simple function of the mean excess sugar consumed in the current year. This simple model replicates three aspects of the data: (a) the delayed timing and magnitude of the increase in average U.S. adult obesity (from about 15% in 1970 to almost 40% by 2015); (b) the increase of obesity rates by age group (reaching 47% obesity by age 50) for the year 2015 in a well-documented U.S. state; and (c) the pre-adult increase of obesity rates by several percent from 1988 to the mid-2000s, and subsequent modest decline in obesity rates among younger children since the mid-2000s. Under this model, the sharp rise in adult obesity after 1990 reflects the delayed effects of added sugar calories consumed among children of the 1970s and 1980s.
The cancer stem cell hypothesis posits that malignant growth arises from a rare population of progenitor cells within a tumor that provide it with unlimited regenerative capacity. Such cells also ...possess increased resistance to chemotherapeutic agents. Resurgence of chemoresistant disease after primary therapy typifies epithelial ovarian cancer and may be attributable to residual cancer stem cells, or cancer-initiating cells, that survive initial treatment. As the cell surface marker CD133 identifies cancer-initiating cells in a number of other malignancies, we sought to determine the potential role of CD133+ cells in epithelial ovarian cancer. We detected CD133 on ovarian cancer cell lines, in primary cancers and on purified epithelial cells from ascitic fluid of ovarian cancer patients. We found CD133+ ovarian cancer cells generate both CD133+ and CD133- daughter cells, whereas CD133- cells divide symmetrically. CD133+ cells exhibit enhanced resistance to platinum-based therapy, drugs commonly used as first-line agents for the treatment of ovarian cancer. Sorted CD133+ ovarian cancer cells also form more aggressive tumor xenografts at a lower inoculum than their CD133- progeny. Epigenetic changes may be integral to the behavior of cancer progenitor cells and their progeny. In this regard, we found that CD133 transcription is controlled by both histone modifications and promoter methylation. Sorted CD133- ovarian cancer cells treated with DNA methyltransferase and histone deacetylase inhibitors show a synergistic increase in cell surface CD133 expression. Moreover, DNA methylation at the ovarian tissue active P2 promoter is inversely correlated with CD133 transcription. We also found that promoter methylation increases in CD133- progeny of CD133+ cells, with CD133+ cells retaining a less methylated or unmethylated state. Taken together, our results show that CD133 expression in ovarian cancer is directly regulated by epigenetic modifications and support the idea that CD133 demarcates an ovarian cancer-initiating cell population. The activity of these cells may be epigenetically detected and such cells might serve as pertinent chemotherapeutic targets for reducing disease recurrence.
Abstract Introduction During a pregnancy complicated by diabetes, the human placenta undergoes a number of functional and structural pathologic changes, such as increased placental weight and ...increased incidence of placental lesions including villous maturational defects and fibrinoid necrosis. The pathologic findings reported have differed among studies, potentially reflecting differences in type of diabetes, study methodology, or glycemic control of study participants. Alternatively, these discrepancies may represent different biologic adaptations to distinct metabolic diseases. Methods We conducted a comprehensive review of English language citations in Pubmed and Embase using the keywords “diabetes”, “placenta”, AND “pathology”. Abstracts were reviewed for relevance then full-text articles were reviewed in order to extract a comprehensive summary of current pathological findings associated with pregestational and gestational diabetes mellitus, as well as an understanding of the impact of glycemic control on placental pathology. Results Placental abnormalities most consistently associated with maternal diabetes are an increased incidence of villous immaturity, increased measures of angiogenesis, and increased placental weight. Conclusions The literature suggests that, despite similarities in placental abnormalities, differences in placental pathology may reflect differences in pathophysiology among different types of diabetes. Consequently, standardization of terminology used to define placental lesions is warranted. Moreover, further research is needed to investigate the impact of pathophysiology, glycemic control and clinical factors, such as infant sex, weight and race, on placental structure and function.
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