40 research outputs found
Ochre, ground stone and wrapping the dead in the Late Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) Levant: revealing the funerary practices at Shubayqa 1, Jordan
The appearance of rich and diverse funerary practices is one of the hallmarks of the Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian in the Levant. Numerous burials at a number of sites excavated mostly in the Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant have fed into the interpretation of the Natufian as a sedentary society of complex hunter-gatherers. Here, we report on the human remains recovered from Shubayqa 1, a well-dated early to late Natufian site in northeast Jordan. The majority of the minimum of 23 individuals that are represented are perinates and infants, which represents an atypical population profile. Ground stone artifacts and traces of colourants are associated with some of these individuals, providing a rare insight into funerary treatment of subadults in Natufian contexts. We interpret the Shubayqa 1 evidence in the light of current and ongoing debates concerning Natufian burial practices and the issue of social complexity
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Semantic disturbance in schizophrenia and its relationship to the cognitive neuroscience of attention
We view schizophrenia as producing a failure of attentional modulation that leads to a breakdown in the selective enhancement or inhibition of semantic/lexical representations whose biological substrata are widely distributed across left (dominant) temporal and frontal lobes. Supporting behavioral evidence includes word recall studies that have pointed to a disturbance in connectivity (associative strength) but not network size (number of associates) in patients with schizophrenia. Paralleling these findings are recent neural network simulation studies of the abnormal connectivity effect in schizophrenia through ‘lesioning’ network connection weights while holding constant network size. Supporting evidence at the level of biology are in vitro studies examining N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists on recurrent inhibition; simulations in neural populations with realistically modeled biophysical properties show NMDA antagonists produce a schizophrenia-like disturbance in pattern association. We propose a similar failure of NMDA-mediated recurrent inhibition as a candidate biological substrate for attention and semantic anomalies of schizophrenia