Sausage of Science

On this week's SoS episode, we bring you a guest episode from the Inking of Immunity podcast, brought to you by Chris Lynn, Becci Owens, Mike Smetana, Julia Sponholtz & Patricia Arnett. In this episode, they interview Dr. Gemma Angel and discuss her experience with preserved tattoos. Dr. Gemma Angel is an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in the history and anthropology of the European tattoo...

On this weeks SoS episode, we bring you a guest episode from Inking of Immunity podcast, brought to you by Chris Lynn, Becci Owens, Mike Smetana, Julia Sponholtz & Patricia Arnett. In this episode, they interview Dr. Aaron Deter-Wolf. Aaron Deter-Wolf is a Prehistoric Archaeologist with the Tennessee Division of Archaeology in Nashville, where his responsibilities include managing ancient Native A...

Our second bonus episode is a reading by Dr. Sera Young, an associate professor in the department of anthropology at Northwestern University. Dr. Young is sharing with us the preface and the first chapter from her book Craving Earth: Understanding Pica, the urge to eat clay, starch, ice & chalk. The reading is followed by a rerun of Chris and Cara's interview with Dr. Young (Episode 34). You can f...

In this week’s episode we bring you an excerpt from “Lazy, Crazy, & Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health” by Drs Brewis and Wutich. Afterwards, you’ll hear their prior interview with Chris and Cara on water pirates, stigma, and the book itself. Drs. Alex Brewis and Amber Wutich are both President’s Professors in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State Univer...

Dr. Kara Hoover from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks chats with Chris and Cara about her research on the human sense of smell. She tells us about the development of testing tools needed to understand olfactory ability and how olfactory research can provide insight into human adaptation, the long-term consequences of Covid-19, and the relationship between pollut...

Dr. Benjamin Campbell is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee specializing in the evolution of human life course. He focuses on the way steroid hormones form a critical link between energetics and the timing of important life events, including childhood growth, pubertal maturation, and senescence. His recent work is on the role of DHEA (dehydroepiandroste...

Carlye Chaney is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Yale University and the HBA student rep. She chats with us about her undergraduate work on the association between exercise and immune function, the importance of including midterm exams as confounding variables, and the HBA student member Happy Hour. You can read Carlye's paper "Salivary secretory immunoglobulin A variation between female varsit...

Cara and Chris chat with Dr. Marc Kissel, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University. Dr. Kissel is broadly interested in the processes by which we became human, and he uses methods grounded in paleoanthropology, genetics, and semiotics to address this question. In this interview he discusses is work on human warfare, including his recent book (written...

Our guest this week is Dr. Courtney Helfrecht, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. Dr. Helfrecht chats with us about her path to bicultural anthropology and her work on adrenarche and alloparenting in sub-Saharan populations. She tells us about the importance of cooperation and what doing fieldwork far from home may teach us about ourselves. Find out...

This week's guest is Katie Sayre, a PhD student at the University of Southern California. Katie's work focuses on aging across different populations and lifestyles. She chats with Chris and Cara about her work with the Hadza of Tanzania and what it takes to stay healthy while growing old. Find Katie's publication on physical function and aging here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1...

Athena Aktipis is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and is the co-director of the Human Generosity Project. She is also the chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting: http://www.zombiemed.org/ and host of the podcast Zombified: https://www.zombified.org/ on Channel Zed: https://www.channelzed.org/. Today Chris and Cara talk to her about science communication, h...

In this special 100th SoS episode, Chris and Cara chat with our very own podcast producer Alexandra Niclou. A PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame, Alex studies the many facets of human energetics and physiological adaptations. In particular, her work focuses on brown fat activity variation in adults under different climatic and energetic conditions, exploring the metabolic cost of brown...

This is the first of a series of episodes highlighting the work and interests of the Sausage of Science team. First up is our associate producer, Dr. Theresa Gildner. Theresa is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College and will be starting a new position as an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Washington University in St, Louis in January. She chats with Cara and Ch...

Ruby Fried is an Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. She is currently researching traditional food security and its effects on physical and mental health on St Paul Island with the Aleut community. Additionally, she is working on research investigating the widespread effects of COVID-19 in rural Alaska among Alaska Native peoples. In this episode, Chris an...

This week Cara and our assistant producer Alex chat with Dr. David Raichlen, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California. We discuss his work on physical (in)activity in the Hadza people and why “how” we rest matters. We also delve into how applying evolutionary perspectives may help us slow down brain aging and why no one has thought of installing squatting racks i...

Dr. Frank Johnston, a Professor Emeritus of biological anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, passed away on August 20, 2020. Dr. Johnston was known for his work in child development, especially the impact of lifestyle variation on nutritional status and growth. He received many honors throughout his prolific career and held several notable positions, including president of the American A...

Tisa Loewen is a bioarcheologist and Ph. D. student at Arizona State University. Her current work studies the Romanized peoples that once lived-in modern-day Croatia and the Eastern Adriatic. She uses quantitative genetics of dental nonmetric traits to understand regional biological relationships and to provide a biohistorical perspective on relational identities. Tisa is also a contributor to Bla...

Dr. Leslea Hlusko is currently the Vice President of the American Association of Physical Anthropology and a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. She will soon be joining Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, CENIEH, in Burgos, Spain as a research professor. In this episode Cara and Chris interview Leslea about her recent paper “A genotype: phenotype approach test...

Dr. Alan Walked passed away on November 20, 2017. A paleoanthropologist known for his work in early human evolution, Dr. Walker was the Evan Pugh Professor of Biological Anthropology and Biology at the Pennsylvania State University and was also a research scientist at the National Museum of Kenya. During his impressive career Dr. Walker discovered the “Black Skull” and was also on the research tea...

This week Chris and Cara chat with the “guru of dental microwear”, Dr. Peter Ungar. Dr. Ungar is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on the use of teeth to reconstruct the diets of extinct species, especially hominins. In this interview, Dr. Ungar discusses the important contributions of dental microwear analyses to paleoanthropology, as we...

In this episode Chris and Cara talk with Dr. Tom Leatherman (Professor of Anthropology at UMass Amherst) and Dr. Alan Goodman (Professor of Anthropology at Hampshire College). Drs. Leatherman and Goodman discuss their revolutionary work advocating for biocultural collaborations within anthropology, focusing especially on concepts of embodiment, political economy, and structural racism. The convers...

SoS 90 – Biocultural Perspectives on Tattooing with Dr. Christopher Lynn We’re back from break! To kick off this new season, we have an interview with our very own Dr. Christopher Lynn. Chris is a biocultural medical anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. In this episode Chris talks about his ongoing work examining associations between immune function...

This week we continue our series featuring book excerpts read by previous podcast guests. In this episode, Dr. Rebecca Lester, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis , reads the Preface from her book, "Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America". We then rebroadcast her original interview (SoS 63, aired in March 2020), in which Dr. Lester discusses...

This week we bring you a crossover with the podcast “Speaking of Race”, hosted by Drs. Jim Bindon, Jo Weaver, and Erik Peterson. This episode features an interview with Drs. Yolanda Moses and Alan Goodman, speaking about their work on the American Anthropological Association Project on Race. This interview originally aired on MAY 16, 2020. Check out other Speaking of Race episodes here: http://spe...

This week we continue our series featuring book excerpts read by previous podcast guests. In this episode, Dr. David Geary, Curator's Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, reads Chapter One, "Evolution of Fatherhood" from his book, "Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences". We then rebroadcast his original interview (SoS 41, aired in May 2019), in which Dr. G...