All posts by Samuel Rolfe

Alex DeCasien’s Research Garners Media Attention

Congratulations to Ph.D candidate Alex DeCasien! Her 2nd year qualification paper was recently published, with Professors James Higham and Scott Williams as co-authors. The paper’s research found that “those [non human primates] who munched on fruit instead of leaves had 25 percent more brain tissue, even when controlling for body size and species relatedness” (NPR).

The research generated quite a bit of media attention in publications including Science, the BBC, Scientific American, New Scientist, The Guardian, and The Smithsonian.

Anthropology in Color

The Department recently hosted, ‘Anthropology in Color’ an all day pipeline workshop sponsored by GSAS.  We received more than 40 applications and brought in 20 undergraduates from area schools as well as DC, CT, Texas and South Carolina.  The day featured a workshop and networking event on grad school, the application process, departmental research and more!  Thanks to all the Faculty, Staff and Students who participated.

Data Rescue Event a Massive Success

On Saturday, February 4th, 2017, several students from the Department led by Professor Jerome Whitington, participated in a Data Rescue event designed to archive and protect several websites on climate change, environmental data, and energy usage that could be threatened by our current Trump administration. Below is a statement from Professor Whitington detailing the success of the event:

“[The event] went off extremely well – about 160 people were involved, we archived a lot of federal websites and data especially from the Dept of Energy and Dept of Interior, and some other important work as well.It’s pretty heartening to see so many people engaged with environmental information and regulatory systems to such a degree of detail. Notably, we hosted a meeting among some key librarians around the country. It seems university librarians have been discussing a plan to systematically archive government data for about two decades, and some work has been done but there has never been a push to actually get it running. Due to the popular demand for this, there is now a movement for big libraries to create trusted data reserves linked in with their indexing systems. If this comes online it will be a very big win for us.”

The event was also covered extensively in the press. You can read articles about it here, here, here, and here.

Anthropologists Uncover 38,000 Year-Old Engravings

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“An international team of anthropologists has uncovered a 38,000-year-old engraved image in a southwestern French rockshelter—a finding that marks some of the earliest known graphic imagery found in Western Eurasia.” Professor Randall White, of the NYU Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Human Origins, contributed to the findings. You can read more about the discoveries, here.