A scientist explains how a liberal arts education made ‘subtle yet significant contributions’ to his understanding of what science is, how it’s done, and how advancements are made.
For human groups to grow from small, intimate communities to the huge interconnected societies we know now, people needed to be willing to cooperate with strangers. Religion might have played a big role.
Not all technologies are created equal. Researchers devised a new model to explain why, after eons of nothing much new, we sometimes see an explosion of innovation in the archaeological record.
Rolf Quam, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Beyond the cool factor of figuring out hominin hearing capacities two million years ago, these findings could help answer the tantalizing question of when did human vocalized language first emerge.
Prehistoric grandmothers helping out with the kids may have led to a surplus of older men competing for a comparatively small number of young, fertile women. Could this have created long-term couples?
Human cooperation is the cornerstone of any society. We looked at teamwork in an indigenous minority group in Scandinavia, whose lifestyle is under threat.
Jason E. Lewis, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York) and Sonia Harmand, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
Stone tools excavated in Kenya date back 3.3 million years – making them about a million years older than the oldest known fossils from our own hominid genus Homo. Who made and used these tools?
In a recent study, of the 53 films watched that had at least one anthropologist as a character, just under half belonged to the horror genre. Why should that be the case? And how were indigenous peoples in those films portrayed?
Adrian Jaeggi, University of California, Santa Barbara and Ben Trumble, University of California, Santa Barbara
Levels of a male sex hormone known to influence aggression and a “love” hormone that promotes bonding both rise in traditional hunters headed home after the kill. What’s going on?
Claims that bones found in an Indonesian cave are not the remains of a new species of extinct hominin but more likely modern humans suffering from a chromosomal disorder have been disputed by a new look…
It’s often said that blood is thicker than water – that family ties trump all others. But research with groups of men fighting in Libya has suggested that the bonds they formed in times of great adversity…