Participants in this Yahoo Human Ethogram Group, need not have a full-blown plan. They can discuss aspects of such plans. Or ask questions about needed/necessary features of such plans. And, of course, people may simply ask me questions about my plan, my empirical approach to understand a major behavioral system (cognitive development), which I think will help lead to a FULL HUMAN ETHOGRAM.

Great question waiting for answer

Any research report that looks like it could be part of the information for an ethogram, or clearly pointing to such information would, of course, be VERY WELCOME.

A new Yahoo Group: "A Human Ethogram": https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/humanethogram/info

For a critique of the deficiencies of, and censorship occurring in, the present Human Ethology Yahoo Group, see:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_would_moderator_of_yahoo_human_ethology_list_throw_a_classical_human_ethologist_and_author_of_a_necessary_start_of_a_human_ethogram_off_the_list

Brad, as this question is also related to your other posted question, I do wish to contribute here. A range of scientist in anthropology have been seeking as a community to better understand the complexities of human behavior and our evolutionary past. The incorporation of ethological methods & perspectives to study human behavior in the 1980s-1990s was most welcome to many of us in anthropology to escape some of the assumptions about human behavior and employ a method that could quantify what humans actually do in traditional societies. The older view in cultural anthropology (and this is of course a simplification of the diversity of views even in that discipline) was that "culture" was a set of ideas carried about by participants, and that interview methods (whether by anthropologist who had taken the time to learn the language of traditional groups or in translation) could elicit the "rules" and interactions of those systems. In response to E. O. Wilson's extension of his sociobiology perspective to hominid evolution, some cultural anthropologists circled the wagons on what was viewed as an environmentally deterministic extension of biological thinking that bordered on a eugenic perspective about human behavior. In my opinion, that was simply out of a lack of understanding of the centrality of evolutionary thinking in all of biology that must include living humans and our ancestors, and a misunderstanding of how anthropology could still view humans as uniquely complex in our behaviors in ways that are not analogous to other animals. Past hominids (auto-correct will only maintain the older term "hominid" and not allow we to use the current term "homini-n") became more successful (had more babies and demographically swamped) than other great apes because of our behavioral flexibility that allowed us to occupy a greater diversity of environmental ranges, and modern humans occupy all environments on earth except Antarctica. We are not biologically different across this vast distribution of our single species, while most other animals speciate under conditions of geographic extension and potential breeding isolation. The centrality of the flexibility in behavior, not biology, is an organizing view in this kind of evolutionary anthropology that embraced the ethological views and methods, as human behavioral ecology or other such terms. The implications have had tremendous influence among paleoanthropologist and archaeologists who recognize the importance of rigorously quantified approaches to better understanding traditional peoples' adaptations to these different environmental, subsistence, and demographic conditions. Sadly, some vocal faction of cultural anthropology not only disagrees with this perspective, but actively advocates for the destructive nature of this paradigm. The terms "scientistic", falsely objective, colonial, hegemonic, racist, etc. are employed to criticize such comparative anthropology as demeaning of human nobility. In my view, these post-modern perspectives have proliferated and become a force in anthropology simply because of the ease with which those views can be replicated in academics. Using subjective methods to identify or uniquely describe some aspect of human behaviors (and an alleged "de-racializiation" of our subject matter by working within industrialized and developed settings to escape the characterization of traditional peoples as "exotic others", as opposed to recognizing that the anthropological rationalization for working with traditional populations is to learn about economic activities relevant to our evolutionary history and not just the last few hundred years of post-industrial revolutionary world, with no right-minded fieldworker thinking these folks are analogies for past populations, they are fully 21st century folks who still engage in hunting & gathering or small-scale agriculture/pastoralism because of their remoteness from larger population centers, the unsuitability of those regions for modern economic exploitation, disease barriers, and even choice) takes very little time compared with the long-term fieldwork in more remote locations with people who may not speak common languages. The post-modern inspired studies and qualitative interpretation can be done more quickly, and more post-modernists can be minted as new Ph.D.s to pass along the idea that this is a useful anthropological perspective. The antagonism against science in anthropology is not understandable to me. My fear is that this group cannot contribute to the field in general, because of their individualist subjective research focus, that seems to promote unique description (wow, the world can be described many ways!), rather than the debates about how we generate relevant data from our observations that address the big questions about human evolution and behavioral variation. I have been glad to see the paradigm of evolutionary psychology develop as an extension of cognitive psychology and an antidote to the black box approach to the human brain, but the glibness of studies of college students and allegation that correlation indicates what our brains have evolved to do shows it is a very young perspective. The proliferation of beauty studies that evaluate what college students find lovely in male or female faces or body shapes is an ideal example. Modern college students may have large numbers of potential sexual partners, generally are not reproducing, nor are most engaged in the beginnings of their adult economic roles. In traditional societies, sexual activity is usually associated with young adults status, reproduction, and the small scale of these societies means that most folks have a very limited number of potential mates that are identified through their kinship system. Skills (and kin ties to productive older adults) are are important aspects of the "attractiveness" of any of these potential mates, not just facial beauty or our ideas of ideal body forms (my colleagues working with agriculturalists in the Peruvian Amazon reported a male preference for woman shaped "like cylinders" not the alleged ideal hip to waist ratios in many ev psych studies). The problem for human behavioral ecologists, is that the fast nature of the ev psych studies, and the alleged identification of evolutionarily important aspects of behavior, has led to a greater emphasis on quick fieldwork, use of questionnaires that allegedly elicit propensities such as risk aversion or risk taking, and a decrease in actual behavior observation. I still feel, from over 30 months of quantified behavior observation among savanna hunter-gatherers in Venezuela and over 12 months among Maya agriculturalists, that we continue to need dedicated fieldwork to research about what actual variation in human behavior is like across the many different environments where people live. This is slow, and it can be even more productive if we learn the languages, and as scientists we must always question how adequate our methods are at capturing the information relevant to our current questions, how to make it comparable to those of our colleagues, and how will this allow us to learn more about the next vital questions to move our understanding a bit further. I worry that the trend for quick, interview-based fieldwork misses the shrinking number of opportunities to contribute observations needed for a better understanding of human behavioral variation, to learn rather than impose an optimism that questionnaires can capture what traditional people could teach us about what is critical to a lifetime of hunting & gathering, or traditional small-scale agriculture, or pastoralism, or combined economies, inclusion of wage work, or other recent shifts within these other subsistence practices. All of this is critically relevant to moving us as a community of scientists to being able to debate and move forward with more sophisticated understanding and research questions. The fast interview approach in anthropology is a throwback to older ideas about human behavior, and an assumption that we already understand the relevant categories of human cultural variation. That view prevents us from questioning other past assumptions we have made about the functions of a range of human activities. Art can be assumed to be decorative, rather than exploring its use as mnemonics for important information in oral literature based societies. "Religion" is though to just be about "myth" and other popadoodle misunderstandings of the world, as opposed to being a set of linguistic literary allusions to peoples' actual scientific knowledge about how the world works. Dance is just fun rather than fostering strong social cooperation (as psychology has demonstrated in lab experiments and militaries have known for millennia). I fear that an ethogram risks codifying our current views without the dynamic contributions of new observations. Anthropology is young in its use of science. It should be expected that our early forays will fail as often as they show us what we have been missing. I am optimistic that scientific methods of investigation, and the community of interested researchers seeking comparative knowledge, is what we really need to continue to explore human diversity and the reasons for our evolutionary success. It is not yet time to rest on our notions of what is universal about human cognition, behavior, and flexibility. We need dedicated empirical scientists to keep bringing us new challenges from long-term observations of traditional societies, and we need to recognize the value of those contributions for the creation of useful models that guide research are are not seen as answers in themselves (the old saw that "all models are wrong, but some are useful"), testing of our hypotheses, and the eventual building of theory about how behavioral flexibility has shaped our evolution.