Modern workplaces function as tribal communities

Modern working relationships on construction sites do not only rely on designs, drawings and schedules. Problems and disagreements are solved using the same unwritten rules that tribal communities use for creating harmony.

When workers from different professions try to reach agreement on unexpected problems on construction sites, they use the same underlying dynamics as tribal communities in Indonesia.

This became clear to Martin Pedersen, a PhD student of psychology at Aarhus University, during his two years of fieldwork at a Danish construction site.

In short, the principle from the tribal communities says that when you receive a gift from another tribe, you assume the obligation not only to receive it, but also to reciprocate with an equivalent gift if you want to maintain the friendship and the good working relationship.

Whereas the tribal communities exchanged materials such as shells and wood, the workers at the construction site exchanged services and solutions.

You give what you get

”I discovered that the co-operation is negotiated and regulated based on what I call ’give and take’ relations. These negotiations came as a surprise to me. I noticed an obligation to give and receive. And people are obliged to reciprocate with a gift of the same value as the one they receive,” explains Pedersen.

“If one group has its solution approved, this group is obliged to consider the other group’s solution at a later time. Otherwise the collaboration may end up in a conflict.”

A general principle in interdisciplinary teamwork

This form of problem solving is not limited to construction sites, as similar studies have pointed toward the same trend:

”This indicates that this is a general principle in all interdisciplinary co-operation.”

Disagreements between workers from different professions often arise as a result of different perspectives, values and interests within the group when problems need to be solved, he explains, mentioning an example:

An architect at the construction site had sketched large windows so the rooms would be filled with light. But the engineer argued that large windows would result great expenses for heating.

The unwritten rules for gift exchange implied that if the architects decided to go for the engineers’ solution, the engineers had to reciprocate with an equivalent contribution at a later point in the work process.

Gift exchange creates harmony

This exchange of gifts creates a balance among people from different professions and thus also creates harmony.

One day on the construction site, an electrician had mistakenly drilled through an iron pipe that had been installed by a plumber. This left the electrician with an obligation.

The following day, the electrician rearranged the cables so that the plumber no longer needed to bend the pipes. This was a ‘gift’ to the plumber to balance the accounts. If these norms had been broken, it would lead to conflicts between the different groups of professions.

Building design affected by gift exchange

We normally imagine that all work processes at a construction site run according to drawings and schedules. So the researcher was surprised to observe how the negotiations led to changes in the ongoing construction work.

”I had certainly not expected to see that. To the naked eye the building still appears as it did in the drawings. But if you take a closer look, you’ll see that a wall may have been repositioned, a pillar has been moved or the lamps are hanging a bit differently.”

In this way the gift exchange makes a visible difference to the finished construction.

Do like tribal people and avoid conflicts

Based on his findings, Pedersen believes it is important to exchange gifts in order to achieve trouble-free co-operation between workers from different professions. Gift exchange is about recognition and identity, and there needs to be a balance between what you give and what you take.

”If you simply refuse to consider an alternative perspective on things, then you’re not giving anything back – and that can result in conflicts,” he says.

So to achieve a smooth working relationship, it may be a good idea to take a look at how tribal people create harmony among the various tribes.

The key is to compromise and accept that sometimes you need to give and sometimes you need to take.
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References:

Poulsen, Peter Andreas Aagaard. 2013. “Modern workplaces function as tribal communities”. Science Nordic. Posted: May 8, 2013. Available online: http://sciencenordic.com/modern-workplaces-function-tribal-communities

From Appearance to Identity: How Census Data Collection Changed Race in America

What happens when you let everyone self-identify?

Publicizing the release of the 1940 U.S. census data, LIFE magazine released photographs of census enumerators collecting data from household members. Yep, census enumerators. For almost 200 years the U.S. counted people and recorded information about them in person by sending out a representative of the U.S. government to evaluate them directly.

By 1970 the government was collecting census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one census category: race.

Before the shift, census enumerators categorized people into racial groups based on their appearance. They did not ask respondents how they characterized themselves. Instead, they made a judgment call, drawing on explicit instructions given to the census takers.

On a mail-in survey, however, the individual self-identified. They got to tell the government what race they were instead of letting the government decide. There were at least two striking shifts as a result of this change:

First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110 percent. People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.

Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80 percent of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40 percent of them had been identified as white in the previous census). The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.

I like this story. Switching from enumerators to surveys meant literally shifting our definition of what race is from a matter of appearance to a matter of identity. And it wasn’t a strategic or philosophical decision. Instead, the very demographics of the population underwent a fundamental unsettling because of the logistical difficulties in collecting information from a large number of people. Nevertheless, this change would have a profound impact on who we think Americans are, what research about race finds, and how we think about race today.

See also the “U.S. Census and the Social Construction of Race” and “Race and Censuses From Around the World.” To look at the questionnaires and their instructions for any decade, visit the Minnesota Population Center.
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References:

Wade, Lisa. 2013. “From Appearance to Identity: How Census Data Collection Changed Race in America”. Pacific Standard. Posted: May 8, 2013. Available online: http://www.psmag.com/culture/census-data-collection-changed-race-in-america-57221/

In ancient China, sago palms were major plant food prior to rice cultivation

Starch granules on Neolithic tools resemble those of sago palms, bananas, tubers

Before rice cultivation became prevalent, ancient populations on the southern coast of China likely relied on sago palms as staple plant foods, according to research published May 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Xiaoyan Yang and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China.

Little is known about prehistoric diets of those who lived in southern subtropical China, as the acidic soils and humid climate of the region cause poor preservation of plant remains. Though literature and archaeological discoveries have suggested that roots and tubers were the staple foods in this region, no direct evidence has so far been found. In this study, researchers analyzed starch granules recovered from Neolithic stone tools used approximately 3,350-2,470 BC, and found these to resemble starches typically found in sago-type palms. They found that people at this time also likely relied on bananas, acorns and freshwater roots and tubers as important plant foods prior to the cultivation of rice.

See the whole article at PLOS ONE
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “In ancient China, sago palms were major plant food prior to rice cultivation”. EurekAlert. Posted: May 8, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-05/plos-iac050113.php

Europeans All Closely Related, Gene Study Shows

Europeans all shared a common ancestor just 1,000 years ago, new genetic research reveals.

Scientists drew this conclusion, detailed today (May 7) in the journal PLOS Biology, by calculating the length of regions of shared DNA from 2,000 Europeans.

The same technique hasn't been applied to other continents, but people in other parts of the world are just as likely to be closely related, the researchers said.

"In fact, it's likely that everyone in the world is related over just the past few thousand years," said study co-author Graham Coop, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis.

All in the family

For more than a decade, researchers calculated theoretically that all people shared common ancestors fairly recently.

To test that theory, Coop and his colleagues analyzed 500,000 spots on the genome of Europeans, from Turkey to the United Kingdom. To untangle European ancestry, they calculated the length of shared segments of DNA, or the molecules that contain the genetic instructions for life. When two people share a longer stretch of identical DNA, they are likely to share a more recent common ancestor, since over time those gene segments evolve and diversify.

The researchers found that all Europeans shared a common ancestor just 1,000 years ago.

here were also some regional surprises.

For instance, Italians are slightly less related to one another than people from other European countries are to one another, perhaps because Italians have had a large, fairly stable population for a few thousand years.

In addition, people from the United Kingdom are more related to people from Ireland than they are to other people from the United Kingdom. That's possibly because many people have migrated from the smaller country of Ireland to the bigger United Kingdom in the past several hundred years, Coop told LiveScience.

The researchers also showed that people in Eastern Europe were slightly more related to each other than were those in Western Europe.

Recent history

That may be he signature of Slavic expansion and migrations, such as those of the Huns and the Goths, about 1,000 years ago, said John Novembre, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the study.

The new findings are exciting because they allow researchers to trace much more recent human history.

"In the past human geneticists have been able to focus on the types of population movement that have taken place over tens of thousands of years — like moving out of Africa and into Eurasia," Novembre told LiveScience. "They're starting to see population movements that have taken place in the middle ages."
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References:

Ghose, Tia. 2013. “Europeans All Closely Related, Gene Study Shows”. Live Science. Posted: May 7, 2013. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/29390-all-europeans-share-recent-ancestors.html

Ice Age Ancestors Might Have Used Words in Common With Us

New research from the University of Reading shows that Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might have used forms of some common words including I, you, we, man and bark, that in some cases could still be recognized today.

Using statistical models, Professor of Evolutionary Biology Mark Pagel and his team predicted that certain words would have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to ten thousand or more years. These words point to the existence of a linguistic super-family tree that unites seven major language families of Eurasia (seven language families: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut).

Previously linguists have relied solely on studying shared sounds among words to identify those that are likely to be derived from common ancestral words, such as the Latin pater and the English father. A difficulty with this approach is that two words might have similar sounds just by accident, such as the words team and cream.

To combat this problem, Professor Pagel's team showed that a subset of words used frequently in everyday speech, are more likely to be retained over long periods of time. The team used this method to predict words likely to have shared sounds, giving greater confidence that when such sound similarities are discovered they do not merely reflect the workings of chance.

Professor Pagel, from the University of Reading's School of Biological Sciences, said: "The way in which we use a certain set of words in everyday speech is something common to all human languages. We discovered numerals, pronouns and special adverbs are replaced far more slowly, with linguistic half-lives of once every 10,000 or even more years. As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per thousand in everyday speech were seven to ten times more likely to show deep ancestry in the Eurasian super-family."

Professor Pagel's previous research on the evolution of human languages has built up a picture of how our 7,000 living human languages have evolved. Professor Pagel and his research team have documented the shared patterns in the way we use language and researched why some words succeed and others have become obsolete over time. This is done by using statistical estimates of rates of lexical replacement for a range of vocabulary items in the Indo-European languages. The variation in replacement rates makes the most common vocabulary items in these languages promising candidates for estimating the divergence between pairs of languages.

"Ultra-conserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia" is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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References:

Science Daily. 2013. “Ice Age Ancestors Might Have Used Words in Common With Us”. Science Daily. Posted: May 7, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130507074657.htm

Babylon's hanging garden: ancient scripts give clue to missing wonder

A British academic has gathered evidence suggesting garden was created at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon

The whereabouts of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the fabled Hanging Garden of Babylon – has been one of the great mysteries from antiquity. The inability of archaeologists to find traces of it among Babylon's ancient remains led some even to doubt its existence.

Now a British academic has amassed a wealth of textual evidence to show that the garden was instead created at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon, in the early 7th century BC.

After 18 years of study, Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University has concluded that the garden was built by the Assyrians in the north of Mesopotamia – in modern Iraq – rather than by their great enemies the Babylonians in the south.

She believes her research shows that the feat of engineering and artistry was achieved by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, rather than the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.

The evidence presented by Dalley, an expert in ancient Middle Eastern languages, emerged from deciphering Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform scripts and reinterpreting later Greek and Roman texts. They included a 7th-century BC Assyrian inscription that, she discovered, had been mistranslated in the 1920s, reducing passages to "absolute nonsense".

She was astonished to find Sennacherib's own description of an "unrivalled palace" and a "wonder for all peoples". He describes the marvel of a water-raising screw made using a new method of casting bronze – and predating the invention of Archimedes' screw by some four centuries.

Dalley said this was part of a complex system of canals, dams and aqueducts to bring mountain water from streams 50 miles away to the citadel of Nineveh and the hanging garden. The script records water being drawn up "all day".

Recent excavations have found traces of aqueducts. One near Nineveh was so vast that Dalley said its remains looked like a stretch of motorway from the air, and it bore a crucial inscription: "Sennacherib king of the world … Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed to the environs of Nineveh …"

Having first broached her theory in 1992, Dalley is now presenting a mass of evidence in a book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, which Oxford University Press publishes on 23 May. She expects to divide academic opinion, but the evidence convinces her that Sennacherib's garden fulfils the criteria for a wonder of the world – "magnificent in conception, spectacular in engineering, and brilliant in artistry".

Dalley said: "That the Hanging Garden was built in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar the Great is a fact learned at school and … 'verified' in encyclopaedias … To challenge such a universally accepted truth might seem the height of arrogance, revisionist scholarship ... But Assyriology is a relatively recent discipline … Facts that once seemed secure become redundant."

Sennacherib's palace, with steps of semi-precious stone and an entrance guarded by colossal copper lions, was magnificent. Dalley pieced together ancient texts to reveal a garden that recreated a mountain landscape. It boasted terraces, pillared walkways, exotic plants and trees, and rippling streams.

The seven wonders appear in classical texts written centuries after the garden was created, but the 1st-century historian Josephus was the only author to name Nebuchadnezzar as creator of the Hanging Garden, Dalley said. She found extensive confusion over names and places in ancient texts, including the Book of Judith, muddling the two kings.

Little of Nineveh – near present-day Mosul – has so far been explored, because it has been judged too dangerous until now to conduct excavations.
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References:

Alberge, Dalya. 2013. “Babylon's hanging garden: ancient scripts give clue to missing wonder”. The Guardian. Posted: May 5, 2013. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/05/babylon-hanging-garden-wonder-nineveh

Robot Finds Mysterious Spheres in Ancient Temple

Hundreds of mysterious spheres lie beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, an ancient six-level step pyramid just 30 miles from Mexico City.

The enigmatic spheres were found during an archaeological dig using a camera-equipped robot at one of the most important buildings in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan.

"They look like yellow spheres, but we do not know their meaning. It's an unprecedented discovery," said Jorge Zavala, an archaeologist at Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute.

The Mesoamerican ruins of Teotihuacan, a World Heritage Site, represent one of the largest urban centers of the ancient world. Thought to have been established around 100 B.C., the pyramid-filled city had more than 100,000 inhabitants at its peak, but was abandoned for mysterious reasons around 700 A.D. -- long before the Aztecs arrived in the 1300s.

The excavation at the temple focused on a 330-foot-long tunnel which runs under the structure. The conduit was discovered in 2003 when heavy rain uncovered a hole a few feet from the pyramid.

Exploring the tunnel, which was deliberately filled with debris and ruins by the Teotihuacan people, required several years of preliminary work and planning.

"Finally, a few months ago we found two side chambers at 72 and 74 meters (236 and 242 feet) from the entrance. We called them North Chamber and South Chamber,” archaeologist Sergio Gómez Chávez, director of the Tlalocan Project, told Discovery News.

The archaeologists explored the tunnel with a remote-controlled robot called Tlaloc II-TC, which has an infrared camera and a laser scanner that generates 3D visualization of the spaces beneath the temple.

"The robot was able to enter in the part of the tunnel which has not yet been excavated yet and found three chambers between 100 and 110 meters (328 and 360 feet) from the entrance," Gómez Chávez said.

The mysterious spheres lay in both the north and south chambers. Ranging from 1.5 to 5 inches, the objects have a core of clay and are covered with a yellow material called jarosite.

"This material is formed by the oxidation of pyrite, which is a metallic ore," Gómez Chávez said. "It means that in pre-hispanic times they appeared as if they were metallic spheres. There are hundreds of these in the south chamber."

According to George Cowgill, professor emeritus at Arizona State University and the author of several publications on Teotihuacan, the spheres are a fascinating find.

"Pyrite was certainly used by the Teotihuacanos and other ancient Mesoamerican societies," Cowgill told Discovery News. "Originally the spheres would have shown brilliantly. They are indeed unique, but I have no idea what they mean."

Even the walls and ceiling of both chambers were covered with a mineral powder composed of magnetite, pyrite and hematite which provided a special brightness to the place.

"We believe that high-ranking people, priests or even rulers, went down to the tunnel to perform rituals," Gómez Chávez said.

Indeed the archaeologists found many offerings, including pottery and wooden masks covered with inlaid rock crystal, jade and quartz -- all dating from around 100 A.D.

Gómez Chávez and his team now look forward to the next phase of the project -- exploring the last part of the tunnel and three chambers which archaeologists have seen through the robot cameras.

"The tunnel is in pristine condition, untouched for almost two millennia," said Ng “TC” Tze Chuen, an independent researcher who worked on the design of the Tláloc II-TC robot. "Can you can imagine what can be found inside?"

Ng, who helped create the Djedi robot that explored Egypt's Great Pyramid in 2010, believes the Mexican tunnel might lead to one of the most significant archaeological finds in Teotihuacan.

"The results are very encouraging indeed," he said.

According to Gómez Chávez, the tunnel was sealed twice by the Teotihuacan people. Thick walls, erected to block access, were demolished about 1,800 years ago in order to deposit something very important in the central chamber at the end of the tunnel.

"Maybe in this place," Gómez Chávez said, "we will find the remains of those who ruled Teotihuacan.”
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2013. “Robot Finds Mysterious Spheres in Ancient Temple”. Discovery News. Posted: April 29, 2013. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/mysterious-spheres-emerge-from-ancient-temple-130429.htm