Menu Close

Articles on Anthropology

Displaying 181 - 200 of 226 articles

Yuttasak Jannarong / shutterstock

Have humans always gone to war?

Archaeological remains, traditional tribes and conflict among chimpanzees can tell us much about the history of human warfare.
Illustration of ritualised human sacrifice in traditional Hawaiian culture, as documented by the French explorer and artists Jaques Arago in 1819. Arago, Jacques. (1822). Promenade autour du monde: pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820, sur les corvettes du roi l’Uranie et la Physicienne, commandées par M. Freycinet

Why did early human societies practice violent human sacrifice?

Human sacrifice seems horrifying and costly. But there might be a reason so many early human societies practiced it.
3D virtual reconstruction of two-million-year-old ear. Rolf Quam

Testing ancient human hearing via fossilized ear bones

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.
isaravut/Shutterstock.com

Review: Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island is certainly an epoch-defining novel, at least inasmuch as it revolves around the task of defining our epoch.
Excavating stone artifacts that date from 3.3 million years ago in Kenya. MPK-WTAP

Our stone tool discovery pushes back the archaeological record by 700,000 years

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?
Films such as Avatar idealise indigenous people as Noble Savages, enjoying simple and uncorrupted lifestyles until contact with colonisers. Nicole Hanusek

Anthropologists do well in movies, indigenous peoples not so much

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?

Top contributors

More