24
votes
Accepted
Do any people in South Africa traditionally spend two days together praising wrong-doers to help them?
The story in question was originally attributed not to an anthropologist, but to a childhood memory!
Consider the Babemba tribes of southern Africa, where the social structure includes only an ...
- 46.4k
18
votes
Accepted
Does swearing give people the impression that you are from a lower social class?
It's certainly not universal. In the UK, swearing is relatively common among the upper and lower classes and aversion to swearing is a primarily lower middle class trait. This has been studied ...
- 8,930
14
votes
Accepted
Were early hunter-gatherers monogamous?
It looks like there's no direct evidence from any pre-Neolithic culture about their sexual or marital arrangements. However, the proxy evidence is a bit more extensive:
In a comparative study of 190 ...
- 63.6k
11
votes
Are high temperatures the cause of nudity being not unusual amongst the Daasanach?
Other sources indicate a less innocent explanation: nudity is the penalty for not undergoing female genital mutilation. Amongst females, only those who've undergone it are allowed to wear clothing, ...
- 39.1k
10
votes
Did Margaret Mead say that a healed femur is the earliest sign of civilization?
(Posting this as a self-answer because it's too large for a comment, but not accepting it because it's conjecture)
Daniel R Hicks commented that he heard this "around 1980." Indeed, it ...
- 46.4k
10
votes
Of all humans ever born, did most men not become fathers?
This is not my area of scientific expertise. I cannot say if this study by Wilder et al is correct or not, but I can read the study and compare their conclusions to Baumeister's.
Wilder et al ...
- 12k
7
votes
Accepted
Are high temperatures the cause of nudity being not unusual amongst the Daasanach?
See Women’s Worlds in Dassanetch,
Southern Ethiopia, Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (2005).
Unlike boys Dassanetch girls start wearing clothes from ...
- 108k
6
votes
Do any people in South Africa traditionally spend two days together praising wrong-doers to help them?
Short answer: This is most likely nonsense. Ubuntu roughly denotes "a quality that includes the essential human virtues: compassion and humanity"(1), and while it is sometimes opposed to victimisation ...
- 1,176
5
votes
Is the hominid skull discovered in Petralona 700,000 years old?
According to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History the skull is "Between 350,000 and 150,000 years" old
Some further notes on the morphology and dating of the Petralona hominid Journal of Human ...
- 108k
5
votes
Were hunter-gatherers peaceful egalitarians?
To expand on my comment, the 'egalitarian' part of the question has been mostly dealt with on hist.SE, and the answer depends on your definition of egalitarian as well as the hunter-gatherers involved....
- 63.6k
4
votes
Is the story of a divine miracle at Mt. Sinai, witnessed by a national audience, unique among cultures or religions?
Christianity points to its founding on the Day of Pentecost, described in Acts 2, when an entire group not only observed a miracle but each one personally participated in it. The event is ...
- 141
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