It seems chimps can have a common culture yet also their own local traditions. Does this mean chimpanzees in Asia would learn to use chopsticks?

Yes, says a study released today, if they saw other groups doing it.

The study confirms captive chimpanzees have the capacity to sustain the same kind of multiple-tradition cultures many researchers believe exist in the wild, providing further evidence chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor five to six million years ago who had a similar level of cultural complexity.

It might be time to change some history books.

Prehistoric Polynesians, not European voyagers, may have brought chickens to the Americas, according to new research from The University of Auckland’s Department of Anthropology.

Fancy artwork courtesy of University of Auckland

What you buy says a lot about you, according to a new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Consider this goal: to spend more time with your family. If you seek out products that expand the amount of quality time you have to share – say, a football to throw around in the yard – you’re a “promotion-focused” consumer. Alternatively, if you are “prevention-focused,” you’ll seek out timesavers, like a new dishwasher, that don’t reduce the amount of time you have to spend with your family.

“We extend this line of research by identifying for the first time the cognitive process that appears to underlie these regulatory focus effects.

It seems almost certain that San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds will pass Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home-run king sometime this summer, but his pursuit has generated little public interest.

There may be several reasons for this, ranging from Bonds’ prickly personality to the suspicion that he may have used performance-enhancing drugs later in his career, say two Duke University professors.

Courtesy Orange County Register

A project which is using robots to help children with developmental or cognitive impairments to interact more effectively has just started at the University of Hertfordshire.

Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, Dr. Ben Robins and Dr. Ester Ferrari at the University’s School of Computer Science are partners in the European Sixth Framework funded, €3.22 million Interactive Robotic Social Mediators as Companions (IROMEC) project which is investigating the use of robotic toys to enable children with disabilities to develop social skills.

KASPAR is a child-sized humanoid robot developed by the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire.

mages of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a culture based on the southern coast of Peru from AD 1 to AD 750. But despite this evidence and large numbers of trophy heads in the region’s archaeological record, only eight headless bodies have been recovered with evidence of decapitation, explains Christina A. Conlee (Texas State University).

Conlee’s analysis of a newly excavated headless body from the site of La Tiza provides important new data on decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and regeneration.

Nasca carved Spondylus fragment, length 4.5 cm. National Museum Collection.

A fascinating new paper from the June issue of Current Anthropology explores ancient multiple graves and raises the possibility that hunter gatherers in what is now Europe may have practiced ritual human sacrifice.

This practice – well-known in large, stratified societies – supports data emerging from different lines of research that the level of social complexity reached in the distant past by groups of hunter gatherers was well beyond that of many more recent small bands of modern foragers.

Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G.

How much money would it take to get you to stick a pin into your palm? How much to stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know? How much to slap a friend in the face (with his or her permission) as part of a comedy skit? Well, what about slapping you father (with his permission) as part of a skit? How you answer questions such as these may reveal something about your morality, and even your politics — conservatives, for example, tend to care more about issues of hierarchy and respect, while liberals concentrate on caring and fairness.

Urbanization changes landscapes and local environments, which can alter the life histories and traits of the creatures living in and around these areas. Studying European blackbirds (Turdus merula), Jesko Partecke and Eberhard Gwinner (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology) discovered certain adaptive traits, that in the long run, could lead to more offspring. The study, "Increased sedentariness in European Blackbirds following urbanization: a consequence of local adaptation?," appears in the April issue of Ecology.