Big Data and Research Opportunities Using HRAF Databases

The HRAF databases, eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology, each containing large corpora of curated text subject-indexed at the paragraph-level by anthropologists, were designed to facilitate rapid retrieval of information. The texts describe social and cultural life in past and present societies around the world. As of the spring of 2017, eHRAF contains almost 3 million indexed “paragraph” units from over 8,000 documents describing over 400 societies and archaeological traditions. This chapter first discusses concrete problems of scale resulting from large numbers of complex elements retrieved by any given search. Second, we discuss potential and partial solutions that resolve these problems to advance research, whether based on specific hypotheses, classification or identifying and evaluating embedded patterns of relationships. Third, we discuss new kinds of research possibilities that can be further advanced, have not yet been successfully attempted, or have not even been considered using anthropological data because of scale and complexity of achieving a result

Chimpanzees modify intentional gestures to coordinate a search for hidden food

Humans routinely communicate to coordinate their activities, persisting and elaborating signals to pursue goals that cannot be accomplished individually. Communicative persistence is associated with complex cognitive skills such as intentionality, because interactants modify their communication in response to another's understanding of their meaning. Here we show that two language-trained chimpanzees effectively use intentional gestures to coordinate with an experimentally naive human to retrieve hidden food, providing some of the most compelling evidence to date for the role of communicative flexibility in successful coordination in nonhumans. Both chimpanzees (named Panzee and Sherman) increase the rate of nonindicative gestures when the experimenter approaches the location of the hidden food. Panzee also elaborates her gestures in relation to the experimenter's pointing, which enables her to find food more effectively than Sherman. Communicative persistence facilitates effective communication during behavioural coordination and is likely to have been important in shaping language evolution

Does co-residence with grandparents reduce the negative association between sibship size and reading test scores? Evidence from 40 countries.

This paper investigates the effect of coresidence with grandparents in three-generation households on the nature and size of the association between sibship size and reading test scores. It also explores whether this interaction changes with the level of socioeconomic development of a society. We argue that coresidence in traditional three-generation households has a protective effect against resource dilution and thus decreases the magnitude of the negative association between family size and test scores. We also suggest that coresidence in more modern contexts magnifies the degree of this negative association, since modern families form three-generation households only when severely destabilized. We apply 3-level regression models to the PISA 2000 data to examine our hypotheses and use the Human Development Index as a measure of development. We find that the negative association between family size and test scores increases at higher levels of development and does so more strongly when students coreside with grandparents. We, however, find no context, in which coresidence would erase the negative consequences of having many brothers and sisters on one’s own school test scores. These findings hold even when controlling statistically for the effects of public expenditure on education, public social security expenditure, and crude divorce rate as well as for the interactions of these variables with sibship size.This paper investigates the effect of coresidence with grandparents in three-generation households on the nature and size of the association between sibship size and reading test scores. It also explores whether this interaction changes with the level of socioeconomic development of a society. We argue that coresidence in traditional three-generation households has a protective effect against resource dilution and thus decreases the magnitude of the negative association between family size and test scores. We also suggest that coresidence in more modern contexts magnifies the degree of this negative association, since modern families form three-generation households only when severely destabilized. We apply 3-level regression models to the PISA 2000 data to examine our hypotheses and use the Human Development Index as a measure of development. We find that the negative association between family size and test scores increases at higher levels of development and does so more strongly when students coreside with grandparents. We, however, find no context, in which coresidence would erase the negative consequences of having many brothers and sisters on one’s own school test scores. These findings hold even when controlling statistically for the effects of public expenditure on education, public social security expenditure, and crude divorce rate as well as for the interactions of these variables with sibship size

The adaptive significance of cultural behavior

In this article, I argue that human social behavior is a product of the coevolution of human biology and culture. While critical of attempts by anthropologists to explain cultural practices as if they were independent of the ability of individual human beings to survive and reproduce, I am also leery of attempts by biologists to explain the consistencies between neo-Darwinian theory and cultural behavior as the result of natural selection for that behavior. Instead, I propose that both biological and cultural attributes of human beings result to a large degree from the selective retention of traits that enhance the inclusive fitnesses of individuals in their environments. Aspects of human biology and culture may be adaptive in the same sense despite differences between the mechanisms of selection and regardless of their relative importance in the evolution of a trait. The old idea that organic and cultural evolution are complementary can thus be used to provide new explanations for why people do what they do .Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44491/1/10745_2005_Article_BF01531215.pd