Anthropology Science

Alone among the creatures of the world, man suffers a pang both bitter and sweet. It is an ache for the homecoming. The Greeks called it nostalgia. Post-modern man, homeless almost by definition, cannot understand nostalgia. If he is a progressive, dreaming of a utopia to come, he dismisses it contemptuously, eager to bury a past he despises. If he is a reactionary, he sentimentalizes it, dreaming of a lost golden age. In this profound reflection, Anthony Esolen explores the true meaning of nostalgia and its place in the human heart.

Humans are remarkable beings. We have mastered flight, cracked the genetic code, developed quantum mechanics and democracy, been to the moon, and may soon become a multi-planetary species. Yet, despite these unparalleled achievements, we can still be...pretty stupid.

The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

While doing fieldwork on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, anthropologist Gregory Forth came across people talking about half-apelike, half-humanlike creatures that once lived in a cave on the slopes of a nearby volcano. Over the years he continued to record what locals had to say about these mystery hominoids while searching for ways to explain them as imaginary symbols of the wild or other cultural representations. We follow Forth on the trail of this mystery hominoid, and the space they occupy in islanders' culture as both natural creatures and as supernatural beings.

Scientists' understanding of life is progressing more rapidly than at any point in human history, from the extraordinary decoding of DNA to the controversial emergence of biotechnology. Featuring pioneering biologists, geneticists, physicists, and science writers, Life explains just how far we've come - and takes a brilliantly educated guess at where we're heading.

Our Political Nature is the first book to reveal the hidden roots of our most deeply held moral values. It shows how political orientations across space and time arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits. These clusters entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests.

Inequality, social immobility, and political polarization are only a few crucial phenomena driven by the inevitability of social structures. Social structures determine who has power and influence, account for why people fail to assimilate basic facts, and enlarge our understanding of patterns of contagion - from the spread of disease to financial crises. Despite their primary role in shaping our lives, human networks are often overlooked when we try to account for our most important political and economic practices.

The human mind needs monsters. In every culture and in every epoch in human history, from ancient Egypt to modern Hollywood, imaginary beings have haunted dreams and fantasies, provoking in young and old shivers of delight, thrills of terror, and endless fascination. In Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, anthropologist David D. Gilmore explores what human traits monsters represent and why they are so ubiquitous in people's imaginations and share so many features across different cultures.

“Fans of the forensics-oriented novels of such mystery writers as Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell...not to mention television series like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, will make an eager audience for this one.”—Booklist On a patch of land in the Tennessee hills, human corpses...

A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis.

Madagascar is a place of change. A biodiversity hotspot and the fourth largest island on the planet, it has been home to a spectacular parade of animals, from giant flightless birds and giant tortoises on the ground, to agile lemurs leaping through the treetops. Some species live on, many have vanished in the distant or recent past. Over vast stretches of time, Madagascar’s forests have expanded and contracted in response to shifting climates and the hand of people is clear in changes during the last 1,000 years or so.

In the decades since 1945, Western Europe has undergone a seismic social and political transformation. The evils of racism, authoritarianism, and exclusionary nationalism, which once prevailed, have been defeated and marginalized. Through an arduous process of democratization and liberalization, today’s Western Europe is almost unrecognizable from the one our grandparents were raised in. Yet despite this commendable progress, alarm bells are ringing. Civilization is facing a new crisis, and once again, the Jews find themselves in great danger.

Drawing from decades of experience in the craft of language, both Dimópulos and Coetzee face the reality that when it comes to self-expression, some things will always get lost in translation. Speaking in Tongues finally emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.

Este libro es una extraordinaria guía acerca de las sectas, grupos que exigen de sus miembros una convicción, devoción y dedicación que pueden perjudicar, hasta extremos realmente peligrosos, tanto a los adeptos como a sus allegados y familiares.

Das erste Sachhörbuch des Bestsellerautors: die Menschheitsgeschichte von Tastaturen über Hotdogs bis zur Schönheit des Sonnenuntergangs in der Review. John Green verbindet sein eigenes Leben mit den großen Fragen der Menschheit: Was hat ein Teddybär mit Macht und Ohnmacht zu tun oder das Googeln mit unserer Endlichkeit? Mit seinem Blick für Seltsames, Wichtiges und Überraschendes bewertet John Green die menschengemachte Gegenwart auf einer Skala von 1 bis 5. Das Anthropozän ist das aktuelle Erdzeitalter, in dem wir den Planeten grundlegend verändern.

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

Die grüne Wiege der Menschheit: Die faszinierende Geschichte der Menschen und des Dschungels. Das Schicksal der Menschheit ist schon immer mit dem der Tropenwälder verbunden. Der Anthropologe und Archäologe Patrick Roberts nimmt uns mit auf eine spannende Reise durch die Jahrmillionen. Er schildert, wie die Wälder entstanden und das Aussehen unseres Planeten entscheidend prägten. Erst durch sie fanden Amphibien den Weg an Land, entwickelten sich neue Pflanzen- und Tierarten - und schließlich der Mensch.

The association between our ancestors and fire, somewhere around six to four million years ago, had a tremendous impact on human evolution, transforming our earliest human ancestor, a being communicating without speech but with insight, reason, manual dexterity, highly developed social organization, and the capability of experimenting with this new technology. As it first associated with and then began to tame fire, this extraordinary being began to distance itself from its primate relatives.

One cannot turn on the news today without a report on an extreme-weather event or the latest update on Antarctica. But while our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples, who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.

La femme est-elle l'avenir de l'homme ? Au présent, elle a du mal à se faire entendre sans élever la voix... Qu'en était-il dans le passé ? Paléoanthropologue, Pascal Picq enquête ici sur la femme des origines. Dans ce livre audio, il ne se contente pas de présenter ce que l'on sait des rapports entre hommes et femmes dans les premières sociétés humaines, il entend placer l'histoire et la préhistoire humaines dans la perspective de l'évolution.