Anthropology

Lice from 1,000-year-old mummies in Peru may unravel important clues about a different sort of passage: the migration patterns of America’s earliest humans, a new University of Florida study suggests…

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed. In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we…

Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that languages change and evolve in rapid bursts rather than in a steady pattern. The research in Science investigates thousands of years of…

Evolution is shouting a message at us. Yes, evolution herself. That imperative? Get your ass and the asses, burros, donkeys and cells of your fellow species—from bacteria and plants to fish,…

You don't need other people to feel less lonely. You just need things you think are people. Social scientists call this tendency “anthropomorphism.” As a research topic, the phenomenon carries…

Many people pay silly amounts of money to wear a particular logo or a designer brand. A designer outfit doesn't keep you any warmer or dryer than an unbranded one, but functionality is only part of…

Someone named Scylla waterboarded himself and provided a detailed account of what happened. “Old” self-experimentation, you could say, was doctors doing dangerous things to themselves for a short…

The transition from apes to humans may have been partially triggered by the need to stand on two legs, in order to safely carry heavier babies. This theory of species evolution presented by Lia…

The belief among some archaeologists that Europeans introduced alcohol to the Indians of the American Southwest may be faulty. Ancient and modern pot sherds collected by New Mexico state archeologist…

In our first exciting episode of Who’s Smarter: Chimps, Baboons or Bacteria? The Power of Group IQ ( Part I ) we showed how small-brained baboons can outsmart big-brained chimpanzees and how bacteria…