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anthropology



  • Preparing Feasts Helped Make Us Human

    Cooking large meals represented a breakthrough in human evolution, both because cooked foods proved easier to digest and support larger brains and because the occasions supported more complex social organization. 



  • Ancient Flood Tales May be More than Myth

    The climate crisis is pushing some historians and folklorists to reconsider indigenous societies' origin stories of flooding and geographic cataclysm. Should science take this perspective into account? 



  • Harvard Holds Remains of 7,000 Native and Enslaved Persons

    by Gillian Brockell

    A university task force convened last year to investigate the provenance of human remains in Harvard's museums and collections condemned the leak of the report while defending their committee's work toward returning remains to appropriate tribal authorities and memorializing the deceased. 



  • The Antivax Right is Bringing Human Sacrifice to America

    Past debates about closing schools and businesses to control the pandemic at least could claim to be about balancing costs and benefits. The campaign to refuse vaccination will kill people for no purpose whatsoever.



  • Can Skeletons Have Racial Identity?

    Forensic anthropologists have largely stuck with techniques for assigning geographic ancestry to skeletal remains. Recently, the origins of those techniques in last century's scientific racism have prompted some in the discipline to call for stopping the practice.



  • What Should Museums Do With the Bones of the Enslaved?

    The Smithsonian is considering how to deal with its natural history collection of human remains, including those of enslaved people. Secretary Lonnie Bunch III suggests that the museum must be guided by the imperative "to honor and remember."



  • Paleo Con

    by Daniel Immerwahr

    Why do the lifestyles of paleolithic hunter-gatherers repeatedly pop up as foils for western capitalist modernity?