Human Anthropology

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.

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.

Best-selling author Brian Fagan brings early humans out of the deep freeze with his trademark mix of erudition, cutting-edge science, and vivid storytelling. Cro-Magnon reveals human society in its infancy, facing enormous environmental challenges - including a rival species of humans, the Neanderthals. For ten millennia, Cro-Magnons lived side by side with Neanderthals, an encounter that Fagan fills with drama.

Paleophilosophy: The Dawn of Thought is a book that restores to us the forgotten dignity of ancient humanity. It makes a simple and radical claim: philosophy is older than cities, temples, and alphabets; it begins not with libraries, but with silence around the fire, with palms pressed against stone, with the rhythm of the dance, with the care given to the dead, and with dreams in which humankind first encountered the “other.

Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in myriad different ways. Why did recipients of a loan offer accept a higher rate of interest when a pretty woman's face was printed on the flyer? Why did one poll on immigration find the most despised aliens were ones from a group that did not exist? What made four of the Air Force's best pilots fly their planes, in formation, straight into the ground?

Is humanity ready to give up knowledge to machines?

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.

For fans of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future This program is read by the author. Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a...

This provocative and panoramic book shows listeners what they can learn from their ancestors, and how the unwavering ability of prehistoric people to survive and thrive can continue into the present.

What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness.

Bronislaw Malinowski's seminal work, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, delves into the intricate dynamics of sexuality and societal control within primitive cultures. Published in 1927, this ethnographic study challenges prevailing Victorian notions of sexuality and sheds light on the nuanced ways in which indigenous societies navigate and regulate sexual behaviors. Malinowski's immersive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands enables him to provide a rich anthropological account, exploring the role of rituals, customs, and taboos in shaping sexual practices.

In the new book, Earl and Charlotte introduce and cross-examine a set of societal influences or Framing Factors, which have a significant influence in the daily lives of Americans. The anti-humanitarian effects of several of these Framing Factors were amplified during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to exist at an elevated level today.

A business anthropologist reveals how cultural intelligence is the essential tool for understanding human behavior Why do people do what we do? To answer this question, many of us turn to psychology. But it’s not enough to understand how we think. We also have to recognize the influence of...

"Why do we do what we do?" This may seem like a simple question at first; in practice however, the closer we examine where our decisions come from, the less intention and independent reasoning we find. Instead, we find primitive instincts and ideas that are often based on nothing more than the imagination of someone who has been dead for centuries.

With two out of every three Americans overweight or obese, scientists are studying how excess fat changes physical and mental health, demographers are calculating how it's shortening life spans, and economists are debating the impact it has on America's productivity and global competitiveness. But how weight affects intimacy and sexuality is barely discussed. Yet, it's a question of high importance for the tens of millions of Americans who are overweight or obese and having difficulty sexually and romantically.

How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Challenger's book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the way we distance ourselves from other species.

In About You, Dick Staub addresses irreligious, religious, spiritual seekers, and all kinds of Christians and shows us that Jesus came to satisfy our universal longing for a fully human life, not to establish a narrow us-versus-them religion. In short, Jesus didn't come to make us Christian; Jesus came to make us fully human.

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.

How can Christian men and women live faithfully in a world confused over sexuality and gender? Surely we must be reminded of what Scripture teaches. Yet as God’s design for sexuality is being suppressed and denied in the modern world, we need to hear it articulated in a fresh and accessible way. God’s Good Design presents the historic, biblical view of sexuality in a manner that is appealing even to those who have been conditioned to believe it is scary or oppressive.

Why are behaviors associated with masculinity increasing the risk of illness, injury, and premature death among young men? What makes these men vulnerable to substance misuse, interpersonal violence, and suicide? How can recovery look like? This book draws on more than eight years of recurrent ethnographic fieldwork in urban South Africa to answer these globally urgent questions from a systems perspective.