It was long thought that humans everywhere favor pointing with the index finger. But some fieldwork out of Papua New Guinea identified a group of people who prefer to scrunch their noses.
Le Guin’s father, Alfred Kroeber, was at a forefront of a movement that rejected social Darwinism and cultural superiority. In his daughter’s fiction, we see these ideas come to life.
Rolf Quam, Binghamton University, State University of New York
New discoveries are changing archaeologists’ ideas about the origins of our own species and our migration out of Africa. This fossil pushes Homo sapiens’ African exodus date back by 50,000 years.
Alma Gottlieb, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Opening the minds of worried new parents to other ways of raising children may assuage fears that if they fail to ‘do the right thing,’ their children will be doomed.
How can we understand each other, especially when stereotypes cloud our view? An ethnographic movie captures a sense of the ‘other’ in an encounter between Maasai villagers and Dutch tourists.
Puerto Rico’s Cayo Santiago Research Station has been a world-famous site for primate studies since 1938. Now scientists are working to save its staff and rhesus monkey colony after Hurricane Maria.
We tend to think of archaeological sites as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn’t how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them.
There’s little research into origins of the geographic patterns of language diversity. A new model exploring processes that shaped Australia’s language diversity provides a template for investigators.
Currency first hit the scene thousands of years ago. An anthropologist explains the early origins and uses of money – and how archaeological finds fill in our picture of the past.
We can’t observe the brain activity of extinct human species. But we can observe modern brains doing the things that our distant ancestors did, looking for clues about how ancient brains worked.