Anthropology

Humans are calorically dense enough that it is no surprise that some ancient cultures engaged in cannibalism - or even more modern people in the right circumstances.(1) Yet it is also taboo. In…

Before I became a mycologist, I knew Beatrix Potter as the author of some of my favourite childhood books. It was only years later that I learned she was also a serious student of fungi. The…

In 53 B.C., a member of Rome's First Triumverate, Marcus Licinius Crassus, wanted to show himself the equal of fellow rulers Caesar And Pompey. Both those generals were spectacular in the field and…

Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries. Modern historians have generally assumed they were…

Mesopotamia is Greek for “land between rivers” and indeed it sat between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, what is now basically modern Iraq. Nearly everything we know about Mesopotoma is via Greece,…

One enduring myth about the collapse of the Roman Empire was that barbarians - Pagans from the north and Muslims from the south - caused it.  The real cause was weather. Some 1600 years ago…

In times of social rancor and strife, most will fight each other, but societies are saved by those who think about the bigger issue. There is a lesson humans could learn from wasps. Polistes…