Race, Social Construction and Mortality

Thanks to many of the posts examining race over at Living Anthropologically , I got turned onto Lance Gravlee’s 2009 article, “Race Becomes Biology.” There are a lot of reasons to like the article, but in particular, he brings attention to a recurrent problem I have when talking about race to students. Students definitely do usually interpret the traditional anthropological critique of race as “oh, anthropologists say race doesn’t exist, so it’s not important.” And while that’s clearly not what I’m arguing in class, it’s painstakingly difficult to clearly articulate the nuance.

Old Fire

Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa

Thanks to Molly for the initial heads up on this.  News in the archaeological world is all about a site in South Africa that seems to show convincing evidence for the use of fire by about one million years ago.  This is about 300,000 years earlier than we had discussed in the archaeology class.  As the linked article describes, the antiquity of the use of fire illustrates even more the long history of biological and cultural change that has characterized the story of our species.