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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Brauner et al. is the final published version of the preprint from the list of 2021-01-11. Comparing the two, their former conclusion about mask wearing has vanished without a trace. Granted, I had myself expressed doubt about that part of their results, but still, a change like that ought to have been mentioned and explained. As it stands now, the newly total accord with political orthodoxy smells a bit too Orwellian for my taste.
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Cohen (the unnumbered figure on his last page) and Starr et al. supply food for thought. Starr’s result is well known from the breeding of antibiotic resistance through medical treatment, but the results seem to arise much faster with vira.
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There are a few points to be made about Cooper & Turney et al. and as far as I can see Voosen has already made them admirably.
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As far as I can tell Bromham et al. ask entirely the wrong question to support their hypothesis. Spice is an acquired and learnt preference for an innately disagreeable taste. The relevant metric here is the amount and perceived strength of the spiciness, not the number of different kinds of spices used together.
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Reading Pilloud & Larsen and Chylenski et al. naively, they seem to imply they tried to sample random and typical houses and neighbourhoods and their results map the lifestyles of most people in Çatalhöyük. Mills makes it quite clear this is very far from the case. What was sampled were a few exceptional “history houses” and the interments probably had little or nothing to do with the people living in them but rather with rare ceremonies performed there.
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The interesting point about Nichols et al. is where and how it is published. Its content is very little more than a definition of how science works, as it should be taught at high school, plus an elementary explanation of Bayesian inference. It says a lot, when the editors of PNAS consider that worth reiterating to their perceived audience.
The point where Nichols et al. go beyond those basics is where they discuss the role of models. In post-processional archaeology it has become fashionable to denounce models as trying to press all life into a single mould and denying all cultural variation. The opposite is true. Comparing the actual finds to model expectations and highlighting the differences is what makes culture studies relevant and differentiates them from meaningless retelling of anecdotes.
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