While there are many different definitions of anthropology, I like this one, which comes from a student who took this class, for its elegant conciseness. The term “anthropology” literally means the study of humans (Anthropos is Greek for humanity). We are often fascinated with other people and even fascinated with ourselves, and why shouldn’t we be?… Anthropology is not about a single aspect of humanity, such as our economic systems, political organization, religion, or biology. Rather, it is about all of these topics and how they intersect with each other.

Compared to other species, humans stand out as being a highly successful in terms of our technology, our ability to communicate, and our propensity to adapt to all sorts of environments. Philosophers and scholars have long discussed and debated exactly how our species is different. Sometimes though, there is a hidden assumption that humans are better than other species, given our particular suite of talents. This point of view where all species are judged based on a human standard is called anthropocentrism. Rather than focus on who is better, a completely subjective endeavor, anthropologists are more interested in figuring out how we came to be such a successful species.

Deciding what to eat has been called the “omnivore’s dilemma”, a term popularized by writer Michael Pollan. Today, about half of the world’s population lives in urban areas and buys food rather than produces food. Pollan illuminates just how W.E.I.R.D. our relationship with food is, by pointing out that we need investigative journalists to track down where it comes from and what’s in it.

“At the bull-jumping rite” by Carsten ten Brink is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 You Are Not a Human Being Having a Spiritual Experience. You Are a Spiritual Being Having a Human Experience. –attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (popularized by Wayne Dyer) In 1999, I was in Rome, Italy, for an excavation at the […]

“Maasai1” by medicalmission is licensed under CC BY 2.0 What does Santa Claus have to do with marriage? Saint Nicholas was a Greek bishop who lived in the 4th century. In those times, and in many places today, dowry was needed to marry a daughter to a suitor. Dowry is paid by the bride’s family […]

“Aboriginal Australian girl” by mingzhuxia is licensed under CC BY NC SA 2.0 “Language is an app for converting a web of thoughts into a string of words.” —Steven Pinker, Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century “Where’s the cheeser? I want the cheeser!”  You want cheese? I asked, heading for the refrigerator. “No, […]

“Thinking” by Axel Hahn Primates In the 1970s, a young graduate student primatologist named Barbara Smuts was working under the wing of the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. They were studying the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream in Tanzania. An adolescent chimpanzee named Goblin was giving Barbara, a petite woman, trouble. Male chimps are hierarchical, and constantly […]

“The structure of DNA” by brian0918g is licensed under public domain My son is colorblind and has trouble distinguishing red and green and a few other colors. For a long time, he thought pumpkins were yellow and that we had a green couch. Now we refer to that couch as the “green couch” using finger […]

“Neanderthal Museum” by suchosch is licensed under CC BY SA 2.0 I vividly remember my anthropology professor explaining how Raymond Dart is credited with discovering the first Australopithecine in South Africa 1924— a strange primate that walked on two legs some 3 million years ago. Technically, the real discoverers were miners who were instructed to […]

“Cueva de las Manos, Argentina” by Lisa Weichel is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Archaeology is only partly about discovering things; for me, archaeology is about thinking about things. —Stephen Lekson Taking a noon-day break from excavating on Albuquerque’s windswept West Mesa in the summer of 2002, we stretched our legs, cramped from kneeling in […]

The Human Revolution In the previous chapters, we have discussed human features that appear in the paleoanthropological record: bipedalism, big brains, hunting, stone-tool making, fire and cooking, and even the rise of sweat glands and furlessness. We now turn to the question of when and where other humans features first appeared—storytelling, music, bodily decoration, and […]

The Long Now Foundation “Human existence is about to get much better, much worse, or both.” —Robby Berman “As long as you have a ridiculously long view of things, things are getting better.” —Robert Sapolsky “How can we recognise the shackles that tradition has laid upon us? For when we recognise them, we are also […]

Chapter 1 Achenbach, J. (2014, March 01). Why Carl Sagan is Truly Irreplaceable. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-carl-sagan-truly-irreplaceable-180949818/ Archaeosoup Productions. (2011, July 08). A-Z of Archaeology: ‘M – Material Culture’. [Video file] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq3I5W5RORo Azar, B. (2010 May) Are Your Findings WEIRD? American Psychological Association. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird.aspx Amzath Fassassi, Amzath (2014, Sept. 24). […]