Small Human Groups Research Articles

The Eco-Cathedric City: Rethinking the Human–Nature Relation in Urbanism

Current planning of urban landscapes is dominated by a human-centric view. This leads to short-term orientation, predictable planning outcomes, and decisions being taken by a small group of humans. Alternatively, a symbiotic human–nature relationship could be a prelude to a balanced future in which sustaining all living organisms prevails. In this article, a novel approach to designing such an urban landscape is presented: the Eco-cathedric City. In this proposition, the design process thrives on high complexity, deep uncertainty, contingent nature–human relations, slow urbanism, and imaginability. It is concluded that three mechanisms should be core to this approach: (eco-)cathedral thinking, considering the impact of current decisions on seven future generations; (eco-)acupuncturist design, which plans for the process by igniting a single small intervention; and (eco-)cracy, in which a variety of actors, human and non-human organisms, co-decide. In a practical sense, the Eco-cathedric City finds its foundation in understanding local ecosystems and using this knowledge to design a self-organizing ecosystem in which regenerative resource management is prioritized, after which social constructs are formed to support this design and to fit human uses within the boundaries of this framework to conclude with an evolving belief system in which reciprocity and symbiocity are the core values.

Late Mesolithic Individuals of the Danube Iron Gates Origin on the Dnipro River Rapids (Ukraine)? Archaeological and Bioarchaeological Records

Abstract In contrast to large-scale prehistoric migrations, associated with massive population shifts and changes in material culture, movements of small human groups or single individuals are barely visible but no less important. In publications of the 1960s–2000s, specificity of craniological, odontological, and metrical characteristics as well as stable isotope values of some individuals distinguishing the Late Mesolithic cemetery of Vasylivka II among other Mesolithic and Neolithic burial sites in the Dnipro River basin was explained by some gene flows. However, archaeologists could not develop these views since the original excavation report of 1953 and all grave goods from Vasylivka II were considered lost. Another old field document, where pendants of the pharyngeal teeth of fish, and the shells of spiral, probably Mediterranean, molluscs found there were mentioned, allowed the recent suggestion of the author of the current article that several individuals from the Danube Iron Gates region were interred in the cemetery. Previous arguments along with new evidence are presented here to develop this hypothesis. Re-found personal ornaments from one burial, the only available grave goods from Vasylivka II, are published here for the first time. The established regularity that most relatively young men and women from the graveyard have conditional “Danubian” δ13C values in the range from −20 to −21‰ assumes the mutual exchange of marriage partners born in the Iron Gates and the Dnipro Rapids. A waterborne route is discussed as a more probable mode of communication between these regions.

New Complex Investigations of the Novhorod-Siverskyi Upper Palaeolithic Site

In the article the materials of the Novhorod-Siverskyi site research both in the 1930's, and relatively recently, are analyzed. First of all, attention is paid to the faunal collection. The faunal associations from old excavations are coherent, typical of a cold steppe environment from the glacial period, near a riparian forest. However, it seems to result to a mix between natural taphonomic complexes and animal remains associated with human activity. Judging by the flint collection from the old excavations, the site was inhabited by representatives of the Pushkari type. New research yielded two archaeological layers that are very poor in flint artefacts. Concerning fauna, the faunal spectrum is restricted in both layers, with the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the horse and the reindeer in the lower and upper layers. In the upper layer there are also the bison, the fox and the hare. According to taphonomic observations, the bones had remained for a long time at an open air before being buried, in subsurface in a wet environment but few submitted to precipitations in link with permafrost activities. Particularly in the lower layer (2) some remains appear to be in place, while others seem to have been imported by hydraulic phenomena, either from the top of the promontory or from the Desna River. In the upper layer (1), some bones show possible anthropogenic impacts of breakage, linked to marrow recovery. In both layers we have some cranial and postcranial elements, mainly from adults sensu lato which could correspond to human predation. They could correspond to temporary camps of quite small human groups, potentially occupied at the end of the cold season/beginning of the warm season.

Zooarchaeological analysis of the Raşcov 8 Upper Palaeolithic site (Republic of Moldova)

The Palaeolithic site of Raşcov 8, discovered in the 1950's, was recently subjected to new investigations. It yielded archaeological layers from the Upper Pleniglacial. We used zooarchaeological methods to deepen knowledge about this site. We focused on the taphonomy, the anatomical representation of the different species and the anthropogenic activities to better determine the use of natural resources by humans, in particular of animal origin, to understand which strategies were used, the technocultural practices and territory occupation. The taphonomic observations are quite typical of a dry and cold environment. They also suggest that the 3 and 3a layers result from the same or chronogically closely occupations, affected by soil movements. Concerning the anthropogenic features, repeated short-term occupations, on a seasonal basis, mainly hunting and butchering activities of one or several small human groups have been highlighted. Whereas in the older layer humans exploited the carcass of a mammoth, in the other layers they hunted reindeer and horses and butchered the carcasses on the site, probably transporting some parts elsewhere. Whereas the lithic industries are different between layers 4/3-3a (Epiaurignacian) and 2/1 (Epigravettian), the subsistence behavior is similar and quite typical of Molodovian.

The Cultural Transmission of Prestige and Dominance Social Rank Cues: an Experimental Simulation

Informal social hierarchies within small human groups are argued to be based on prestige, dominance, or a combination of the two (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Prestige-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by the admiration and respect they receive from others due to their competence within valued domains. This type of hierarchy provides benefits for subordinates such as social learning opportunities and both private and public goods. In contrast, dominance-based hierarchies entail the ordering of individuals by their capacity to win fights, and coerce or intimidate others. This type of hierarchy produces costs in subordinates due to its aggressive and intimidating nature. Given the benefits and costs associated with these types of social hierarchies for subordinates, we hypothesised that prestige and dominance cues are better recalled and transmitted than social rank cues that do not elicit high prestige or dominance associations (i.e. medium social rank cues). Assuming that for the majority of the population who are not already at the top of the social hierarchy it is more important to avoid the costs of dominance-based hierarchies than to obtain the benefits of prestige-based hierarchies, we further hypothesised that dominance cues are better transmitted than prestige cues. We conducted a recall-based transmission chain experiment with 30 chains of four generations each (N = 120). Participants read and recalled descriptions of prestigious, dominant, and medium social rank footballers, and their recall was passed to the next participant within their chain. As predicted, we found that both prestige cues and dominance cues were better transmitted than medium social rank cues. However, we did not find support for our prediction of the better transmission of dominance cues than prestige cues. We discuss whether the results might be explained by a specific social-rank content transmission bias or by a more general emotional content transmission bias.

Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans

Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich ethnographic methods. Here, we demonstrate that massive online social networks can advance the study of human culture by providing quantitative, scalable, and high-resolution measurement of behaviorally revealed cultural values and preferences. We employ publicly available data across nearly 60,000 topic dimensions drawn from two billion Facebook users across 225 countries and territories. The data capture preferences inferred by Facebook from online behaviours on the platform, behaviors on external websites and apps, and offline behaviours captured by smartphones and other devices. We first validate that cultural distances calculated from this measurement instrument correspond to survey-based and objective measures of cultural differences. We then demonstrate that this measure enables insight into the cultural landscape globally at previously impossible resolution. We analyze the importance of national borders in shaping culture and explore unique cultural markers that identify subnational population groups. The global collection of massive data on human behavior provides a high-dimensional complement to traditional cultural metrics, potentially enabling novel insight into fundamental questions in the social sciences. The measure enables detailed investigation into the countries’ geopolitical stability, social cleavages within both small and large-scale human groups, the integration of migrant populations, and the disaffection of certain population groups from the political process, among myriad other potential future applications.

Small Human Group Detection and Validation using Pyramidal Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Gray Level Run Length Method

Over the decade’s human detection in security and surveillance system became dynamic research part in computer vision. This concern is focused by wide functions in several areas such as smart surveillance, multiple human interface, human pose characterization, person counting and person identification etc. Video surveillance organism mainly deals with recognition plus classification of moving objects with respect to several actions like walking, talking and hand shaking etc. The specific processing stages of small human group detection and validation includes frame generation, segmentation using hierarchical clustering, To achieve accurate classification feature descriptors namely Multi-Scale Completed Local Binary Pattern (MS-CLBP) and Pyramidal Histogram Of Oriented Gradients (PHOG) are employed to extract the features efficiently, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifier helps to classify the features into human and group in a crowd, To extract statistical features Gray Level Run Length Method (GLRLM) is incorporated which helps in group validation.

The genetics of kinship in remote human groups

For fifteen years, part of the work of our research team has been focused on the study of parental links between individuals living hundreds or thousands of years ago, whose remains have been found in single graves or large funerary complexes. These studies have been undertaken using methods developed by forensic genetics to identify individuals, mainly based on the genotyping of autosomal STR (Short Tandem Repeats). Issues arose from this work, namely the limits of studying small numbers of subjects, originating from groups of finite sizes where kinships cannot be inferred a priori and for which reference allelic frequencies do not exist. Although ideal human populations are rare when undertaking such studies, the Yakuts of Eastern Siberia constitute a very advantageous model, with large numbers of small pastoral communities and well-preserved archaeological material. The study of kinship in the ancient Yakuts allowed us to highlight the difficulties in analysing genetic data from small ancient human groups and to develop a strategy to improve the accuracy of statistical computations. This work describes this strategy and possible solutions to the study of populations outside of the frame of reference of global meta-populations, due either to isolation, remoteness or antiquity.

Faunal dynamics during the Mid–Pleistocene revolution: What implications, if any, does this have for the appearance of the Acheulean in southwestern Europe?

New data from Europe, putting back the appearance of tools showing affinities or belonging to the Acheulean technocomplex to the late Early Pleistocene, open new questions about the onset of handaxe-making behaviour in the North Mediterranean region. This research aims to provide some clues to the debate by analysing at regional and local scale the main characteristics of the large mammalian fauna before and around the time of the first appearance of Large Cutting Tools in SW Europe. The database consists of 110 large mammal taxa from 58 local faunal assemblages (LFAs), ranging in age from about 1.6 to 0.5 Ma. Results obtained indicate that at the time of the Mid–Pleistocene Revolution the dynamics of large mammal fauna was mainly regulated by discrete dispersal events triggered by major climate changes. The environmental changes, removing keystone species and merging previously independently evolved taxa into new palaeo-communities, altered their internal equilibrium, giving rise to new inter-guild and intra-guild dynamics. The Lower local Stratigraphical Occurrence (LlSO) of various large mammals in key European Early and early Middle Pleistocene sites indicates that the change in taxonomical composition and structure of the fauna was a gradual process, caused by neither “turnover pulse” nor “migratory wave” events. Nonetheless, the evidence of multiple, discrete dispersals of large mammals may support the hypothesis that a few, poorly recorded dispersal events involving small human groups carrying a new technology led culturally different populations to coexist for a while in Europe during the late Early Pleistocene. The similarity degree among the ecological structure of LFAs, bearing or not evidence of human presence, shows on one hand that LFAs sharing a similar functional diversity were sparsely distributed over time, sometimes irrespectively of the age of sites and poorly affected by their geographic position. On the other, results obtained suggest that the relative amount of ecological groups related to the habitat preference and trophic behaviour of species, and the prey/predator relationships were among the factors that mainly controlled the human presence/absence at any site. Conversely, the presence of large predators does not seem to have had any particular relevance in controlling human dispersal and settlement. Based on available data, the hypothesis that the appearance of large cutting tools in Spain may more likely represent either the result of a local technological evolution or a different activity facies than a technological behaviour brought by newcomer populations seems to be the most parsimonious.

Resilient help to switch and overlap hierarchical subsystems in a small human group.

Groups of social organisms in nature are resilient systems that can overcome unpredicted threats by helping its members. These social organisms are assumed to behave both autonomously and cooperatively as individuals, the helper, the helped and other part of a group depending on the context such as emergencies. However, the structure and function of these resilient actions, such as how helpers help colleagues and how the helper’s action is effective at multiple subsystem scales remain unclear. Here we investigated the behaviour of organised and efficient small human groups in a ballgame defence, and identified three principles of hierarchical resilient help when under attack. First, at a present high emergency level, the helper simply switched the local roles in the attacked subsystem with the helped. Second, at an intermediate emergency level, the helpers effectively acted in overlapping subsystems. Third, for the most critical emergency, the helpers globally switched the action on the overall system. These resilient actions to the benefit of the system were assumed to be observed in only humans, which help colleagues at flexibly switched and overlapped hierarchical subsystem. We suggest that these multi-layered helping behaviours can help to understand resilient cooperation in social organisms and human groups.

A resilient landscape at Teixoneres Cave (MIS 3; Moià, Barcelona, Spain): The Neanderthals as disrupting agent

Abstract The debate over hominid–carnivore interactions during the Pleistocene has been mainly approached from a human perspective, with the aim of contributing to the knowledge of the evolution of human cultural capabilities in the different periods. Regarding the European Middle Palaeolithic, it is most commonly concluded that Neanderthals were clearly superior to carnivores in the context of competitive relationships, with respect to both prey and the occupied space. Therefore, the presence of some human groups in the environments usually inhabited by carnivores could be perceived, from an ecological point of view, as a disturbance in the balance of the ecosystems. In order to assess the ecological impact of these human groups, the present study analyses the Unit III of Teixoneres Cave (MIS 3; Moia, Barcelona, Spain) through a comparison of palaeoecological and archaeological data. The site is located in the highlands between the two main rivers connecting the central region of Catalonia with the Mediterranean coast: the Llobregat and the Ter. Palynological and paleontological data indicate a cold landscape dominated by woodlands and some wet meadows. The high vertebrate diversity recorded in this stratigraphic unit suggests an environment marked by a balanced predator–prey dynamic, which may have been interrupted by the occasional presence of small human groups. According to the archaeological data, these human groups tended to predate the same prey as did carnivores, which may have generated a certain perturbation in the system. However, the small size of the groups and the brevity of their visits to Teixoneres Cave seem to have minimised the perturbation, allowing the environment to recover its original balance.

A Life-Cycle Model of Human Social Groups Produces a U-Shaped Distribution in Group Size.

One of the central puzzles in the study of sociocultural evolution is how and why transitions from small-scale human groups to large-scale, hierarchically more complex ones occurred. Here we develop a spatially explicit agent-based model as a first step towards understanding the ecological dynamics of small and large-scale human groups. By analogy with the interactions between single-celled and multicellular organisms, we build a theory of group lifecycles as an emergent property of single cell demographic and expansion behaviours. We find that once the transition from small-scale to large-scale groups occurs, a few large-scale groups continue expanding while small-scale groups gradually become scarcer, and large-scale groups become larger in size and fewer in number over time. Demographic and expansion behaviours of groups are largely influenced by the distribution and availability of resources. Our results conform to a pattern of human political change in which religions and nation states come to be represented by a few large units and many smaller ones. Future enhancements of the model should include decision-making rules and probabilities of fragmentation for large-scale societies. We suggest that the synthesis of population ecology and social evolution will generate increasingly plausible models of human group dynamics.

Trust as a Key Variable of Sustainable Development and Public Happiness: A Historical and Theoretical Example Regarding the Creation of Money

This article purports to trace the origin of money on the basis of factors in interpersonal relationships, affecting a sustainable development and public happiness, namely trust, reciprocity and the concept of we-rationality. Both the historical approach and the one based on traditional economic theory have been found inadequate mainly because they did not take into account these factors. The hypothesis expounded in the paper is that these values underlay the beginning of economic activity. Initially economic activity was carried out within small human groups. In such groups interpersonal relations were not based on individual self-interest. As a matter of fact, there is historical evidence supporting the notion that the first exchanges were gift-giving and were made possible by trust and reciprocity as expounded by Polanyi (1957) and Sudgen (2000) among others. When the exchanges strengthened between elements of various groups all with the same values and moral characteristics the process to the creation of money started, without any intrinsic value and the presence of any superior authority. In the paper it is also hypothesized that the creation of money is one of the basic factors in the progress of economic and social activity, together with the ancient phenomena as language ad writing. Finally, the paper advocates that in future the economic activity be permeated by those moral values on which a sustainable development can be based. This will, in turn, increase the rate of economic and social growth.

Deslumbramento e preservação ante a sacralidade da vida: despertar para a religiosidade holística

The article discusses the relevance of the fascination before the mystery of life and the preservationist attitude toward nature, as the means and evidence, respectively, of experiencing the sacred. In light of ancient global flood stories, such as the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek myth of Deucalion and Poseidon and the biblical account of Noah, describers of some vast flood in which a small group of humans and numerous animal species are kept alive, see among them as common elements the divine initiative of preservation and some kind of sacred pact with nature. In both eras, the prehistoric, when humans might even have received animals in a large barge, and contemporary, when several individual actions and organizational green policies unfold worldwide, the preservation attitudes seem to reveal the vivacity of minds capable of fascination before the mystery and sacredness of life, and a consequent self-accountability for the continuation of this. Under this bias, life as a sacrament, full religiosity emerges. Based on literature, this communication therefore aims to contribute to the debate about holistic spirituality, one that, faced with the creation, is fascinated and takes responsibility.

치아 윤곽선 정보를 이용한 신경회로망 기반 신원 확인 방안

Received 24 March, 2013; received in revised form 6 May, 2013; accepted 8 May, 2013ABSTRACTThis paper proposes a method for human identification using teeth contours extracted from den-tal images that are captured from the frontal views of subjects each of who opens his or hermouth slightly. Each dental image has a black-colored region containing the subject's teeth con-tours which are usually different from subject to subject. This means that this black-coloredregion has bio-mimetic information useful for human identification. The basic idea of themethod is to extract the upper and lower teeth contours from the dental image of each subjectand to encode their geometric patterns using a back-propagation neural network model. Afteracquiring 400 teeth images form 10 university students, we used 300 images for the trainingdata of the neural network model and 100 images for its verification. Experimental results haveshown that the proposed neural network-based method can be used as an alternative solution foridentification among a small group of humans with a low cost and simple setup.Key Words:Artificial neural networks, Back propagation, Dental images, Human identification,Teeth contour extraction

Whatʼs in a name?: Comment on “Surname distribution in population genetics and in statistical physics”

The practice of naming human individuals is probably as old as spoken language. In ancient, small human groups, the given name may have been enough to distinguish one individual from another and facilitate social gossip—thus social cohesion [1]. As groups grew larger and social organization became more complex, the addition of family names to given names was a convenient way to signal social status or to protect a legacy. The use of family names became prominent in different cultures at different times. However, despite significant differences in the historical acquisition of this habit and in the fidelity of inheritance of family names, the current distribution of surnames presents remarkable similarities all over the world, to the point of having systematically attracted the attention of scientists from quantitative disciplines in the last century and a half. In a comprehensive revision [2], Paolo Rossi goes over the many models, mostly similar in spirit, that have attempted to capture the universal features of surname distributions. Common patterns in surname abundance arise from a few simple dominating mechanisms (demography, vertical inheritance, and occasional introduction of new surnames) which form the core of most modelling attempts. Nowadays, however, the field is ripe enough to shift attention from the commonalities to the dissimilarities. The abundance of surnames in cultures with a small genealogical depth, for instance, still keeps memory of the historical situation when the inheritance of surnames was adopted. An example is Japan, with a genealogical depth of 4–5 generations (patrilineal inheritance of surnames began in year 1870) that yields a relatively narrow distribution of surname abundances [3], the large number of different surnames notwithstanding (over 290 000). The opposite situation is that of China and other neighbouring countries, which have the largest genealogical depth and a very high fidelity of transmission due to its writing system [4]. As a consequence, there are as few as 7000 different surnames at present, with a distribution of abundances depleted in rare surnames and clearly departing from a power-law. To compensate for this lack of diversity, individuals in the Chinese culture are distinguished thanks to a remarkable variety of given names [5]. The introduction of the spatial structure of surnames abundance speaks for inbreeding habits and reveals migratory phenomena thanks to its relation with the Y chromosome. However, few studies have related patterns of surname abundance and genetic markers. There seems to be a tacit agreement that genetic signals should be more reliable than cultural traits. Still, in groups where their cultural identity has been preserved in the face of foreign contributions,

Resequencing Data Provide No Evidence for a Human Bottleneck in Africa during the Penultimate Glacial Period

Based on the accumulation of genetic, climatic, and fossil evidence, a central theory in paleoanthropology stipulates that a demographic bottleneck coincided with the origin of our species Homo Sapiens. This theory proposes that anatomically modern humans--which were only present in Africa at the time--experienced a drastic bottleneck during the penultimate glacial age (130-190 kya) when a cold and dry climate prevailed. Two scenarios have been proposed to describe the bottleneck, which involve either a fragmentation of the range occupied by humans or the survival of one small group of humans. Here, we analyze DNA sequence data from 61 nuclear loci sequenced in three African populations using Approximate Bayesian Computation and numerical simulations. In contrast to the bottleneck theory, we show that a simple model without any bottleneck during the penultimate ice age has the greatest statistical support compared with bottleneck models. Although the proposed bottleneck is ancient, occurring at least 130 kya, we can discard the possibility that it did not leave detectable footprints in the DNA sequence data except if the bottleneck involves a less than a 3-fold reduction in population size. Finally, we confirm that a simple model without a bottleneck is able to reproduce the main features of the observed patterns of genetic variation. We conclude that models of Pleistocene refugium for modern human origins now require substantial revision.

The Expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and out of Africa

Although fossil remains show that anatomically modern humans dispersed out of Africa into the Near East ∼100 to 130 ka, genetic evidence from extant populations has suggested that non-Africans descend primarily from a single successful later migration. Within the human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) tree, haplogroup L3 encompasses not only many sub-Saharan Africans but also all ancient non-African lineages, and its age therefore provides an upper bound for the dispersal out of Africa. An analysis of 369 complete African L3 sequences places this maximum at ∼70 ka, virtually ruling out a successful exit before 74 ka, the date of the Toba volcanic supereruption in Sumatra. The similarity of the age of L3 to its two non-African daughter haplogroups, M and N, suggests that the same process was likely responsible for both the L3 expansion in Eastern Africa and the dispersal of a small group of modern humans out of Africa to settle the rest of the world. The timing of the expansion of L3 suggests a link to improved climatic conditions after ∼70 ka in Eastern and Central Africa rather than to symbolically mediated behavior, which evidently arose considerably earlier. The L3 mtDNA pool within Africa suggests a migration from Eastern Africa to Central Africa ∼60 to 35 ka and major migrations in the immediate postglacial again linked to climate. The largest population size increase seen in the L3 data is 3-4 ka in Central Africa, corresponding to Bantu expansions, leading diverse L3 lineages to spread into Eastern and Southern Africa in the last 3-2 ka.

Social status, masculinity, and testosterone in young men

Among other things, sexual selection theory posits that in species with limited male parental investment, males should evolve biological mechanisms to competitively dominate or otherwise compete with one another. It is unclear whether such proposed mechanisms would influence status hierarchies in small human groups. We report the results of a study investigating possible effects of prenatal (index-to-ring finger length ratio or 2D:4D) and salivary testosterone, and masculine identification, on status among 71 male college students living in nine residential groups. The results indicate no role of either prenatal or salivary testosterone in maintaining status hierarchies in these groups. A possible explanation is that peer-assessed status in these groups was arrived at cooperatively rather than through dominance contests.

Leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans.

This paper reviews the literature on leadership in vertebrate groups, including recent work on human groups, before presenting the results of three new experiments looking at leadership and decision making in small and large human groups. In experiment 1, we find that both group size and the presence of uninformed individuals can affect the speed with which small human groups (eight people) decide between two opposing directional preferences and the likelihood of the group splitting. In experiment 2, we show that the spatial positioning of informed individuals within small human groups (10 people) can affect the speed and accuracy of group motion. We find that having a mixture of leaders positioned in the centre and on the edge of a group increases the speed and accuracy with which the group reaches their target. In experiment 3, we use large human crowds (100 and 200 people) to demonstrate that the trends observed from earlier work using small human groups can be applied to larger crowds. We find that only a small minority of informed individuals is needed to guide a large uninformed group. These studies build upon important theoretical and empirical work on leadership and decision making in animal groups.