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Making a movement from #MeToo
Panelists at the "Grassroots Organizing in the MeToo Era" at Perry World House

Joanne N. Smith, Veronica Avila, Nadeen Spence, Veronica Gago, and Penn professor Deborah A. Thomas spoke to a packed room at Perry World House. 

Making a movement from #MeToo

At Perry World House Monday, activists from around the world talked about how they’re working to make sure the stories of women and girls are told—and heard.

Gwyneth K. Shaw

A tour of the ancient world—in Mandarin
Susan Radov leads a tour of the China Gallery with sculptures in the background Susan Radov, an undergraduate cultural anthropology student, leads a tour of the China Gallery at Penn Museum.

A tour of the ancient world—in Mandarin

The Penn Museum offers tours of its exhibits in Mandarin, increasing cross-cultural access to its invaluable assemblage of objects on display, the only known museum in Philadelphia with regularly scheduled tours in the language.
A shared past for East Africa’s hunter-gatherers
A few people stand in front of a building talking to a larger group of gathered people listening.

With the help of a local translator, Simon Thompson (in blue plaid shirt) from Sarah Tishkoff’s lab and Dawit Wolde-Meskel (in yellow shirt), a collaborator from Addis Ababa University, explain the research project on African population genetics to the Argobba population, Ethiopia. After the project is presented, the researchers answer any questions. (Credit: Tishkoff lab)

A shared past for East Africa’s hunter-gatherers

PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff, Laura Scheinfeldt, and Sameer Soi use data from 50 populations to study African genetic diversity. Their analysis suggests that geographically far-flung hunter-gatherer groups share a common ancestry.

Katherine Unger Baillie

The diversity of rural African populations extends to their microbiomes
A group of people, some holding sacks, next to a small rustic house and under trees

Hadza people gather to receive a government-provided food supply of beans and maize. (Photo: Alessia Ranciaro/Tishkoff Lab)

The diversity of rural African populations extends to their microbiomes

In the largest study of its kind, researchers led by PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff, Matthew Hansen, and Meagan Rubel investigated the gut microbiomes of people from Botswana and Tanzania, and illuminate the impact of lifestyle, geography, and genetics in shaping the microbiome.

Katherine Unger Baillie

The surprising reason why some Latin Americans have light skin
Science

The surprising reason why some Latin Americans have light skin

The Perelman School of Medicine’s Sarah Tishkoff offered commentary on a recent study on skin pigmentation in Latin American people. Previous research on pigmentation “has been done on Europeans, where ironically we don’t see a lot of variation,” she said. “One of the last frontiers has been, ‘What about East Asians and Native Americans?’”

State Department awards Penn $2 million to preserve cultural heritage in northern Iraq
A brown brick building in the background with gravestones and bushes in the foreground.

The cemetery of the Church of St. Thomas (above) in Mosul, Iraq, was badly damaged by Islamic State militants. The new grant awarded to the University of Pennsylvania will go toward stabilization and conservation of such culturally important sites.

State Department awards Penn $2 million to preserve cultural heritage in northern Iraq

The two-phase, three-year project aims to revitalize the city and its culture.
Marking the winter solstice, from Neolithic times to today
A prehistoric city with homes, earthen mounds, and pathways

Archaeological evidence for solstice celebrations abounds in the ancient North American city of Cahokia, located in what is now Illinois. (Illustration: Steven Patricia/Art Institute of Chicago)

Marking the winter solstice, from Neolithic times to today

For millennia, people have marked the winter solstice with rituals and celebrations—and they continue to do so today. Penn Museum anthropologists Lucy Fowler Williams and Megan Kassabaum discuss both ancient and contemporary customs associated with attending to the shortest day of the year.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Digging for the life stories of long-forgotten slaves
National Geographic

Digging for the life stories of long-forgotten slaves

Penn researchers, including visiting student Adeyemi Oduwole, are analyzing mitochondrial DNA from bodies discovered in Charleston, S.C. All of the people found were of African ancestry, making the site the oldest known graveyard of enslaved Africans in the city. “Both of my parents grew up in Nigeria,” said Oduwole. “Those could be my ancestors down there.”

Why did humans lose their fur?
Smithsonian Magazine

Why did humans lose their fur?

The Perelman School of Medicine’s Sarah Millar discussed human hair growth patterns. Millar said, of a recently discovered inhibitor protein, “Dkk2 is enough to prevent hair from growing but not to get rid of all control mechanisms. There’s a lot more to look at.”

Making campuses more inclusive of Native ideology
five-peope-at-a-table-in-a-panel-discussion

From left to right: Maggie McKinley, an assistant professor in Penn’s School of Law; Ben Ototivo, a staff clinician at Penn’s Counseling and Psychological Services; anthropologist Tiffany Cain, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology and in the Latin American and Latino
Studies Program; Margaret Bruchac, an assistant professor of Anthropology and the coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Penn; and graduate student Li San Goh. 
 

Making campuses more inclusive of Native ideology

A recent panel considered how to transform the worldview on university campuses to be more inclusive of Native ideology and more intentional about indigenization.