Tags: humans

New research from UGA Anthropology has found that the practice of feeding wildlife could be more detrimental to animals than previously thought. In a paper published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers found that feeding wildlife can disrupt the social lives of animal communities, which they discovered by observing and documenting the behavior of moor macaque monkeys along a wooded roadway on the island of Sulawesi in eastern…

Millions of years ago, before humans became fully bipedal, ancestral hominins used stones to break bones and nuts, probably while standing upright. A new study from the Primate Cognition and Behavior Lab in the department of psychology published today by the Royal Society journal Proceedings B documents how contemporary bearded capuchin monkeys likewise use stones to break nuts: [B]ecause the fossil record is…

A striking new study published in the journal Cell shows details how ancient microbes that thrive in some of the world’s most extreme environments and modern-day humans have more in common than meets the eye—namely, they both respire and conserve energy using a similar molecular mechanism, one that has adapted to changing environmental conditions over billions of years: "Nature is really good at finding molecules that work and then modifying…

In addition to these service and professional activities, having served in the academic senate at UGA as well as the University Council, Assaf teaches a First-Year Odyssey seminar on the civilization of ancient Egypt. As a new professor whose arrival coincided with that of the computer age, Assaf was instrumental in helping the Romance languages department become more computerized. His continued engagement with that aspect of his professional…