Anthropology | Penn Today

Philadelphia Inquirer

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test: How reliable is it? A Penn prof explains

Theodore Schurr of the School of Arts and Sciences said U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s genetic analysis, which used indigenous DNA samples from Peru, Mexico, and Colombia as reference points, was legitimate due to historical migration patterns.

The Healing Word

Deborah Thomas embeds herself in communities stricken by violence to chronicle the humanity revealed during the aftermath.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Unlocking the mystery of a 2,000-year-old child mummy

The Penn Museum, in collaboration with CHOP, conducted a CT scan on an Egyptian child mummy with hopes of learning more about the ancient remains. “She looks like she's the size of a 2-year-old, but her skeletal development, the growth of her teeth and bones, is more like a 5-year-old,” the Museum’s Samantha Cox said. “Maybe a type of dwarfism.”

A new take on the 19th-century skull collection of Samuel Morton

After unearthing and analyzing handwritten documentation from scientist Samuel Morton, doctoral candidate Paul Wolff Mitchell drew a new conclusion about the infamous 19th-century collection: Though Morton accurately measured the brain size of hundreds of human skulls, racist bias still plagued his science.

ARS Technica

There’s new evidence confirming bias of the ‘father of scientific racism’

Paul Wolff Mitchell, a graduate student in the School of Arts and Sciences, further analyzed the work of 19th-century doctor Samuel Morton, whose work attempted to link cranial capacity to a racial hierarchy.

Invisible partners: Recovering relationships in early anthropological research

Margaret Bruchac, an assistant professor of anthropology, examines the social relationships between early 20th-century anthropological collectors and Indigenous collaborators.

The Atlantic

The cultural convictions that land some animals on the menu

The School of Arts and Sciences’ Paul Rozin joined a panel of experts on a podcast exploring the culturally-specific logic behind which species are considered food.

Exploring the human propensity to cooperate

Working with a nomadic group in Tanzania, one of the last remaining nomadic hunter-gatherer populations, Penn psychologists show that cooperation is flexible, not fixed.

Fire at the National Museum of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, on September 2, 2018. Photo by Felipe Milanez

Collective grief over loss from Brazil’s National Museum fire

Members of the Penn Museum’s archeological community discuss the devastation felt over the destruction of an invaluable piece of world history.

Piecing together an ancient biblical site, bone by bone

In the lab of Penn Museum’s Janet Monge, rising senior Fiona Jensen-Hitch is sorting and photographing ancient human remains to shed light on the people of ancient city of Gibeon.

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