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Since 2022, anthropology has been in the spotlight at CNRS. Caroline Bodolec, the deputy scientific director behind this initiative, looks back at the main mediation actions around the discipline after it "put on a show" on April 30, 2024. The CNRS Sciences humaines & sociales "Sharing Anthropology" focus ended on April 30.

The AlpSatellites project is moving forward: it aims at verifying the potential of remote working in alpine and remotes areas. At the end of the first phase of the quantitative reseach with stakeholders, researchers have been analizing the findings about the dynamic world of remote work and its ideal co-working settings.

Publication of the LGL-TPE in the journal Nature, on July 26, 2023. Communication of CNRS-INEE on August 1st, 2023. Paleogenomic analyses carried out on individuals from the Neolithic burial site of Gurgy "les Noisats" (Yonne), in the Paris Basin, have enabled the family trees of two families to be reconstructed on an unprecedented scale.

Omar Lopez sur Unsplash In the weeks that follow the birth of a child, both parents are likely to develop depression. Paternity leave, recognized for its benefits on family balance, child development and male-female equality, could be one of the keys to preventing this condition that affects one in ten fathers and almost two in ten mothers.

Temperature and mortality are linked. There is a short-term increase in mortality when temperatures are at their hottest or coldest - a phenomenon known as a "U-shaped relationship”.

The more social relationships we have, the more certain structures in our brain are developed. This has been the hypothesis of various neuroscience research projects for several years. With previous findings having highlighted the role of our social environment as one of the key factors behind the expansion of the cerebral cortex, researchers from Inserm and Université Lyon Claude Bernard Lyon 1, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, went one step further in elucidating this link.

Several months after infection with SARS-CoV-2, some patients are still having symptoms - a phenomenon known as "long COVID” or "post-COVID-19 condition”. Still poorly understood, scientists are now attentively studying long COVID in order to improve knowledge and offer patients the best possible treatment.

Within the 50,000 known species of spiders about 20 have developed a permanent social life characterised by a remarkable cooperation 1 . Among these, one or two species hunt "in packs", such as the Anelosimus eximius spiders of French Guyana, whose colonies can house several thousand individuals of all ages, coexisting peacefully in gigantic webs that often reach several cubic metres.

The infant mortality rate (IMR) is a key indicator of population health. In the absence of updated data on the statistical trends of this indicator in France, researchers from Inserm, Université de Paris, the Paris public hospitals group (AP-HP) and Nantes University Hospital, in collaboration with teams from the University of California, analyzed civil registry data from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) from 2001 to 2019.

Among the 17.1 million young Europeans who declared having used cannabis in the previous year, 10 million were between the ages of 15 and 24. Unsplash France has one of the world's highest levels of cannabis use, with around 40% of 17-year-olds reported to have used it in the previous year.

While temporary sterility after childbirth lasts on average only a few weeks for a woman who does not breastfeed, it can last for months, or even more than a year, for one who does. But it was unclear how this contraceptive effect of breastfeeding is affected by a mother's 'energetic status' - that includes her nutrition and levels of physical activity.

The loss of a loved one can be a defining moment, even in the animal world. In chimpanzees, for example, individuals whose mothers die when they are young are smaller than their counterparts, reproduce less and are also more likely to die at a young age. But why? To find out, an international research team 1 led by a CNRS researcher 2 studied the shortand long-term effects of maternal loss on the stress levels of orphaned chimpanzees over a 19-year period.

Since the 1960s, the Jebel Sahaba cemetery (Nile Valley, present-day Sudan) has become the emblem of organised warfare during prehistory. Re-analysis of the data, however, argues for a succession of smaller conflicts. Competition for resources is probably one of the causes of the conflicts witnessed in this cemetery.

An international research group has published the conclusions of a study focused on juvenile delinquency among ethnic and religious minorities from five different Western countries. Through the prism of delinquency, the study examines the social integration of minorities and concludes that interaction with public institutions and the living conditions of these young people contribute to different patterns of integration depending on the country.

Individuality is not exclusive to humans. Though this idea was previously rebutted by biologists, today it is accepted that individuality is found in all animal species. It is defined as all the behavior differences between individuals of a single species that are relatively stable over time. Though the process called individuation is supported by genetic and development components, researchers have just demonstrated in mice that the social environment and activity of some neurons also participate in determining the emergence of distinct individuals.

How are we affected by other peoples' opinions' To answer this question, scientists 1 at the CNRS, Inra and Université Toulouse 1 Capitole conducted a study in France and Japan, quantifying this impact on our decisions. They identified five behaviors common to both countries: a majority of subjects make a compromise between their opinion and that of others (59% of people in France), some hold to their opinion (29% in France), whereas others follow faithfully, amplify or contradict the information they receive.

How do children learn their mother tongue? This question has been the subject of few studies conducted outside of industrialized countries. At the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique (CNRS/ENS/EHESS), specialists in language development in children have studied a traditional population in the Bolivian Amazon, the Tsimane 1 , in partnership with bio-anthropologists from Toulouse 1 Capitole University 2 and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The existence of new “social” neurons has just been demonstrated by scientists from the Institut de neurosciences des systèmes (Aix-Marseille University / INSERM), the Laboratoire de psychologie sociale et cognitive (Université Clermont Auvergne / CNRS), and the Institut de neurosciences de la Timone (Aix-Marseille University / CNRS).

The existence of new â?'socialâ'' neurons has just been demonstrated by scientists from the Institut de neurosciences des systèmes (Aix-Marseille University / INSERM), the Laboratoire de psychologie sociale et cognitive (Université Clermont Auvergne / CNRS), and the Institut de neurosciences de la Timone (Aix-Marseille University / CNRS).

As they grow up, do children become young Robin Hoods? Depending on their age, they do not allocate resources in the same way between dominant and subordinate individuals. Thus a tendency towards egalitarianism develops and becomes even stronger between the ages of 5 and 8 years. These findings by a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France), Lausanne and Neuchâtel (Switzerland) universities provide a clearer understanding of how the notion of equality develops in human beings, and of their sense of justice.