Anthropologists

Anthropologists working in southern France have discovered what they believe to be the oldest known wall art in a rock shelter that collapsed 37,000 years ago. The inscribed and painted objects in the shelter are thought to be slightly older than the previous oldest art, found at Grotte Chauvet, also in southeastern France. Both caves are relics of the Aurignacian period, named after the Aurignac site in France where the first artifacts from the period were discovered. The Aurignacian period stretches from about 40,000 years ago to 28,000 years ago and is the source of the famous Venus figurines, such as the Venus of Willendorf, which are the first statuettes of humans, displaying exaggerated female characteristics.

BOGOTA, Colombia - The recent revelation of the secret Nazi past of one of Colombia's best-known anthropologists - and onetime visiting professor at UCLA - has shaken academic circles here to their core. To many scholars, the late Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was a charismatic Indiana Jones-like character, admired for his exploration of isolated Indian communities in the Andes, the jungles of the Panamanian isthmus and the northern Guajira Peninsula desert, places others had feared to tread.

One day before bearing her third child, Kim Chun Hwa made a small concession to maternity. She took a break from her grueling routine of diving in the frigid waters for sea urchin, octopus and abalone. She was back in her wet suit two weeks later, though, leaving her infant daughter at home to join other village women harvesting the fertile seabeds with primitive tools and lung power. That was 13 years ago, not long after the heyday of the henyo , literally the "women of the sea."

An international team of anthropologists has found human bones in a cave in France with clear markings indicating that the humans were butchered and eaten like wild animals by neolithic-period cave dwellers. The findings provide the first solid evidence that cannibalism may have existed at some time in the past as a culturally accepted practice.

When she was 28, Anna Roosevelt flew to a remote Venezuelan village with a worried sister, a sack full of shovels and a government permit to dig. The great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt was looking for carbonized corn. She found it "like crazy"--along with her niche as an anthropologist who created waves in her field.

Evon Z. Vogt Jr., 85, an anthropologist and leading authority on the Maya Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, died May 13 of pulmonary fibrosis at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass., his family reported Born in Gallup, N.M., Vogt financed his education at the University of Chicago by working in Nevada's gold mines and as a U.S. Forest Service ranger. During World War II, he was a combat intelligence officer in the Navy.

You do it. I do it. Everybody does it. According to anthropologist Terry Y. Le Vine, the practice of giving and receiving gifts is so universal "it is part of what it means to be human." As a visiting curator at UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Le Vine is organizing an exhibit of the roles gifts play in five cultures, including our own. "It's something everyone can relate to," explains Le Vine, who has been scrutinizing the practice of gift giving professionally for 15 years.

Sandy Harcourt wasn't prepared for the hostile reaction he got when he suggested recently that the nation's science priorities are askew. In a letter published in the British journal Nature, the biological anthropologist at UC Davis said the search for fossilized evidence of life on Mars can wait, but that the search for a better understanding of life on this planet cannot.

Sir Raymond Firth, 100, a social anthropologist known for his studies of Pacific cultures, died Feb. 22 in London, the London School of Economics announced this week. The New Zealand-born anthropologist was most famous for his studies of the Tikopia people in the British Solomon Islands. His 1936 book, "We the Tikopia," a study of the social organization of the 1,200 islanders, was followed by nine more books on the Tikopia.

Lydia T. Black, 81, an anthropologist who wrote several books on Alaska native culture and history, died Monday in Kodiak, Alaska. A cause of death had not been determined, but she had been suffering from liver failure, said one of her daughters, Zoe Pierson. Black was born in Kiev in the former Soviet Union on Dec. 16, 1925, and came to the U.S. in 1950.