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Anthropology
Fortune cookies emerged from one of America’s darkest moments.
Most male mammals have little or nothing to do with their kids. Why is our own species different?
6mins
What beavers and earthworms can teach us about working with, not against, Mother Nature.
In order to figure out how English might evolve in the future, we have to look at how it has changed in the near and distant past.
"Not my circus, not my monkeys."
Brian C. Muraresku, New York Times best-selling author of "The Immortality Key," unpacks ancient evidence for the widespread ritual use of psychoactive plants.
Researchers discovered something modern humans had never before seen—a flashy Neanderthal horn collection.
A new discovery pushes back the origin of these technologies by about 40,000 years.
7mins
Find food, have sex, not die. That’s pretty much all we need to do — but why do we make it so complicated?
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
The strange bronze artifact perplexed scholars for more than a century, including how it traveled so far from home.
5mins
We are ~99% genetically identical to chimpanzees. But there are three key traits that separate us.
8mins
Your brain on sex, love, and rejection with biological anthropologist Helen Fisher.
"I am an anthropologist, and for years, I have spoken to people who have had these experiences."
John Templeton Foundation
If you get married in South Africa, don't be surprised if someone shows up to the ceremony dragging along a smelly goat.
A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
Humans are good visual thinkers, too, but we tend to privilege verbal thinking.
Some objects were softer than others.
Ancient bones reveal that domesticated felines were at home in Pre-Neolithic Poland around 8,000 years ago.
Evolution repeatedly hit upon this solution simply because it works.
We don’t know when or how music was originally invented, but we can now track its evolution across space and time thanks to the Global Jukebox.
There is more consensus on what heaven looks like than hell.
7mins
We don’t need one Elon Musk. We need 8 billion empathic futurists.
There are different types of atheism and atheists. In general, they can be classified as the non-religious, the non-believers, and agnostics.
Ancient humans may have evolved to slumber efficiently — and in a crowd.
The word “turkey” can refer to everything from the bird itself to a populous Eurasian country to movie flops.
8mins
Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman debunks the ‘10,000 steps per day’ myth.