Anthropology

Culture Wars

Count the times the word “culture” came out of reporters’ mouths last week, and you’d think they were anthropologists. Usually in this context: “The culture of white supremacy has gone fully mainstream.* “The bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities…  ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Nov 24 2022 - 1:10pm

How Cats Went From Pest Control To Pet 10,000 Years Ago

The most popular pets are cats and dogs but their origins as human companions are much different. Dogs became domesticated during the ice age 23,000 years ago as humans and wolves co-habitated in tolerable refuge areas. Scavenging and then feeding by human ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 5 2022 - 2:23pm

The Animals We See As Friends Versus Food

Ask a hunting guide about what your first experience as a novice hunter should be and they will say a turkey. No one ever cried over eating turkey whereas a rabbit would be a bad idea for many. A new survey in Human-Animal Interactions attempted to assess ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Dec 12 2022 - 12:02am

Anthropologists Link Monogamy To Significant Inequalities Among Women

Cooperative breeders, where we count on the help of others to raise offspring,is not unique to humans. It may only appear that way. A new paper amassed data from 90 human populations comprising 80,223 individuals from many parts of the world — both histori ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 12 2023 - 4:27pm

Cannibalism Is Our 1.5 Million-Year-Old Legacy, And For Other Animals It's Much Longer

Nearly 3 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, and for half that time they were butchering each other- a new paper says 1.45 million years of killing each other f ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 26 2023 - 10:09am

Slaves, Servants At Machu Picchu Came From Lands Incans Colonized

The first investigation of the genomic diversity of individuals buried at Machu Picchu and adjacent places around Cusco, the Inca capital finds that the mitmas- slaves- and members of the empire who were forced to serve elites and lived, worked, and died a ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 26 2023 - 3:15pm

How Did Neanderthals Come Up With The Idea For Birch Tar? New Paper Reveals Cognition Clues

Both Neanderthal and early modern humans used birch tar- the first time in known history that a new material came into use. Coming up with it is one thing, but finding a way to scale it is more challenging. ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 25 2023 - 12:39pm

Peace Through Partying At The Sorceror's Wake

At the Hilazon Tachtit cave site, before it was Israel, before King David even fought the Philistines, the area north of Nazareth and west of the Sea of Galilee was populated by Natufians, an early settled people, and in 2008 archaeologists revealed detail ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Oct 1 2023 - 12:49pm

How Would You Interpret 'Blue' And 'Green' If Your Language Lacked Those Words

If you visit Japan, you may be surprised that Japanese traffic lights have blue on go rather than the green in the U.S. Actually, green is the standard there, just as red is, they just have a different definition of green. It is rather common that things w ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 24 2023 - 3:17pm

The Predicament Of Diversity: No One Agrees On What It Means

“Diversity” as a concept has a lexical and political value all its own, with a widespread appeal. The problem with that is, however, that no one actually has the same idea of what diversity actually means. There is some consensus that the concept has, ove ...

Article - The Conversation - Dec 26 2023 - 2:58pm