Round-up: East Asia and individualism

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Earliest evidence of making fire. Rob Davis and colleagues present the earliest evidence of fire making by early Neanderthals or other Homo species from a site in southeast England. The evidence dates to 400,000 years ago, and includes burnt surfaces, fire-cracked handaxes and fragments of iron pyrite (which is known to have been used in later periods to make sparks). Previous examples of early fire use were consistent with human exploitation of natural fires.

On the relationship between indirect measures of Black vs. White racial attitudes and discriminatory outcomes. Jordan Axt and colleagues examine whether implicit (i.e., subconscious) racial attitudes influence discriminatory behaviour by white Americans via an adversarial collaboration. They find that such attitudes can predict discriminatory behaviour beyond the effect of explicit (i.e., self-reported) attitudes, though their effect is far smaller, accounting for only 2.5% of the variance.