How do today’s indigenous communities of South America trace back to the history of human migration and contact in the continent? An international team including NCCR members from the UZH has worked to reconstruct the legacy of Chile’s largest indigenous community, the Mapuche, thanks to genetics and linguistics.
It’s a first in Switzerland: the Human Neuroscience Platform (HNP) now hosts a magnetoencephalography (MEG) facility, first of its kind in Switzerland. This acquisition promises new breakthroughs in the understanding and treatment of brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy or aphasia.
Children demonstrate early in life social skills and a strong desire to interact with their peers. They engage in social interactions more often than our closest relatives, the great apes, says a study led by researchers from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Neuchâtel.
A new study led by researchers at the University of Zurich provides the first systematic review of musical instrument diversity in the archaeological and ethnographic history of the continent, suggesting cultural contact over long geographic distances, and cases of recent extinction. These findings bring a new piece to the puzzle of human history that combines the movement of populations, cultural characteristics and the evolutionary history of languages.
Humans have been always on the move, creating a complex history of languages and cultural traditions dispersed over the globe. An international team under UZH’s lead has now traced families of related languages over more than 10,000 years by combining data from genetics, linguistics and musicology using novel digital methods. Their findings: grammar reflects best the common prehistory of a population and therefore mirrors genetics more than any other cultural feature.
Apes use specific gestures to start and end social interaction. A behavior not seen outside of the human species until now, report scientists from the Universities of Neuchâtel (UniNE) and Durham (UK). They also found that the social and power dynamics between the interacting apes affected the communication efforts used, which the researchers say mirrors patterns similar to human politeness. The findings are published today in the journal iScience.
Marmoset monkeys perceive the vocal interactions between their conspecifics not just as a string of calls, but as coherent conversations. They also evaluate their content. These are the findings of a study by researchers at the University of Zurich which combined thermography methods with behavioral preference measures.
Some languages require less neural activity than others. But these are not necessarily the ones we would imagine. In a study published today in the journal PLOS Biology, researchers at the University of Zurich have shown that languages that are often considered “easy” actually require an enormous amount of work from our brains.
Bonobos, when abruptly interrupted in a social activity with another bonobo, resume it, as soon as the interruption is over, with the same partner.