The 2014 Conference

January 28–31, 2014, in Montpellier

Theme 1: Diversity and changes in diets across different spatial and temporal scales

Dietary diversity and dietary change at different scales of space and time

Invited speaker: M. Van Der Veen, Food in a changing world – Spices, globalisation and the archaeology of Roman and Islamic ports in Egypt

The extraction and production of food resources are at the heart of the relationship between humans and their environment. Access to resources and nutrition have exerted, and continue to exert today, both indirect (demography, migration routes…) and direct (adaptation / maladaptation) effects on the biological evolution of human populations. Diet also plays a central role in economic and social relations, as well as in health and well-being. Multiple technical chains are involved, from resource acquisition to culinary processing, involving numerous socio-environmental interactions. Through the interplay of taboos and symbolic representations, food products can serve as strong cultural markers and vectors for exchange and social status. Questions relating to diet can thus be addressed through multiple disciplinary approaches, including cultural anthropology and archaeology, biological anthropology, bioarchaeology, and paleoecology. This session will prioritize multidisciplinary research on changes in and the organization of dietary diversity across different spatial and temporal scales, taking into account social, biological, and seasonal complementarities between ecosystems, as well as responses to rapid or long-term socio-environmental changes.

Keywords: resources, cuisine, exchange, technical systems, processing, storage, meat, plants, hunting/gathering, agriculture, livestock farming, environment, adaptation, risk, health, seasonality, complementarities, hygiene, deficiencies, identity, social status, rapid changes, long term.

Theme 2: Male-female differences: Gender put to the test of evolutionary biology

Differences between men and women: Gender put to the test of evolutionary biology

Invited speaker: A. Fichard-Carroll, Female and male brains: unity, uniqueness, duality, multiplicity?

In the living world, male and female functions correspond to different reproductive strategies. Competition between individuals of the same sex for reproduction (sexual selection) leads to the exacerbation of these differences. In the human species, culture plays an important role in the differentiation of sexual roles, but what about biological differences? Given the societal desire to build equality between men and women at the social and political levels, is it necessary to take into account potential biological differences (including cognitive and psychological aspects)? From ancient societies to modern populations, including primates, what are the biological or cultural dimorphisms, or those resulting from the interaction between the two? This SAP scientific conference will seek to understand sex and gender through evolution, whether at the psychological, cognitive, hormonal, morphological, or skeletal levels, or within any type of social organization.

Keywords: Sexual selection, nature/culture, sexual dimorphism in the human lineage, social status, hormones, social organization.

Theme 3: Research News

Current research news