Anthropology

Jalees Rehman writes: When we observe an interaction between two other human beings (Person A and Person B), we sometimes draw conclusions about the personality traits or character of these two individuals. For example, if we see that Person A is being rude to Person B, we may be less likely to trust Person A, [...]

In a review of The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, Wade Davis says that Jared Diamond’s approach to anthropology is rooted in many of the prejudices of the nineteenth century which saw societies from traditional to modern as stages in a linear progression of advancement. The other peoples of the [...]

National Geographic: In the winter of 1769, the British explorer Captain James Cook, early into his first voyage across the Pacific, received from a Polynesian priest named Tupaia an astonishing gift — a map, the first that any European had ever encountered showing all the major islands of the South Pacific. Some accounts say Tupaia [...]

Civilization is overrated — and often confused with culture, whose development predates civilization by tens of thousands of years. The popular view is that once we started ploughing fields and building cities, we could rise above the needs of mere survival and start cultivating our higher faculties through art and science, and that did indeed [...]

Michael Trimble writes: In 2008, at a zoo in Münster, Germany, a gorilla named Gana gave birth to a male infant, who died after three months. Photographs of Gana, looking stricken and inconsolable, were ubiquitous. “Heartbroken gorilla cradles her dead baby,” Britain’s Daily Mail declared. Crowds thronged the zoo to see the grieving mother. Sad [...]

Science Daily reports: A skull fragment unearthed by anthropologists in Tanzania shows that our ancient ancestors were eating meat at least 1.5 million years ago, shedding new light into the evolution of human physiology and brain development. “Meat eating has always been considered one of the things that made us human, with the protein contributing [...]

The Washington Post reports: When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: A dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp. Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory [...]

Scientific America reports: Time and again humans have domesticated wild animals, producing tame individuals with softer appearances and more docile temperaments, such as dogs and guinea pigs. But a new study suggests that one of our primate cousins—the African ape known as the bonobo—did something similar without human involvement. It domesticated itself. Anthropologist Brian Hare [...]