Anthropology Science

In the past the elders had encyclopaedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across the landscape and the stars in the sky, too. Yet most of us struggle to memorise more than a short poem. Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world.

This sweeping account confronts and upends old fantasies, revealing the far more startling reality of our world's largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, anthropologist Judith Scheele takes us from Libya to Mali, Algeria to Chad, from the ancient Roman Empire to the bloody colonial era to contemporary regional battles and fraught international diplomacy, questioning every easy cliché and exposing fascinating truths along the way.

For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character—an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years in films and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew.

As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased and for his or her close relatives. By removing and transforming the corpse, Wari' death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives. Drawing on the recollections of Wari' elders who participated in consuming the dead, this book presents one of the richest, most authoritative ethnographic accounts of funerary cannibalism ever recorded.

In a world where screens often replace faces, the importance of real, tangible connections stands out like a beacon, calling us back to what it truly means to be human. People with strong social connections tend to live longer than those who are socially isolated. But this isn't just about physical health; it's about the health of the soul and the comfort in shared experiences. In the chaos of daily life, the power of coming together remains undiminished.

We wait in lines around the block for scoops of cookie dough. We photograph every meal. We visit selfie performance spaces and leave lucrative jobs to become farmers and craft brewers. Why? What are we really hungry for? In Hungry, Eve Turow-Paul provides a guided tour through the stranger corners of today's global food and lifestyle culture. How are 21st-century innovations and pressures are redefining people's needs and desires? How does "foodie" culture, along with other lifestyle trends, provide an answer to our rising rates of stress, loneliness, anxiety, and depression?

From a renowned historian comes a ground-breaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution, a number one international best seller that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human”.

Tensegrità è la versione moderna dei passi magici degli sciamani dell’antico Messico. La parola Tensegrità è una definizione molto accurata perché nasce dall’unione di due termini, tensione e integrità, che connotano le due forze trainanti dei passi magici.” Così l’antropologo peruviano Carlos Castaneda mette a fuoco il tema di questo libro: i movimenti del corpo che, secondo gli antichi riti degli stregoni, permettono di stimolare l’energia vitale dell’organismo e aumentare le capacità psichiche.

私たちはどこにいるのか。そして、どう生きるべきか――。

Il y a environ 4 000 millions d'années, la vie est apparue sur la Terre. Mais quelle est l'histoire de son évolution ? La vie était-elle inévitable ? La race humaine, telle que nous la connaissons, était-elle prévisible ? Quels autres êtres intelligents auraient pu la remplacer ? À partir de questionnements comme ceux-ci et des réponses scientifiques qui existent déjà, Juan Luis Arsuaga nous présente les découvertes-clés de la théorie de l'évolution et nous élève vers un questionnement plus vaste encore : pourquoi sommes-nous ici ?

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a 500-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar" - or, as some say in Belize, "traveling with sugar". A decade in the making, this audiobook unfolds as a series of cronicas - a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease.

With insight and compassion, Pamela Stone shows convincingly that, far from representing a return to tradition, the decision of some women to relinquish high-powered careers is a reluctant and conflict-ridden response to the growing mismatch between privatized families and time-demanding jobs.

In the summer of 1579, Francis Drake and all those aboard the Golden Hind were in peril. The ship was leaking and they were in search of a protected beach to careen the ship to make repairs. They searched the coast and made landfall in what they called a "Fair and Good Bay", generally thought to be in California. They stacked the treasure they had recently captured from the Spanish onto on this sandy shore, repaired the ship, explored the country, and after a number of weeks, they set sail for home.

Anthropomorphism is the human tendency to attribute human-like thoughts, feelings, and intentions to non-human things. It’s a cognitive bias baked into the human mind that distorts our view of the world. But it doesn’t just affect our understanding of animals. Anthropomorphism impacts our relationship to all living things, as well as inanimate objects (like AI), and natural phenomena (like hurricanes). It’s perhaps one of the most powerful cognitive biases influencing our thoughts, but it’s rarely talked about. It’s time to change that.

Explore and understand the key ideas and movements in anthropology—the study of human societies and cultures and how they work.

This is the first thoroughly revised edition of The Rape of the Nile—Fagan’s classic account of the cavalcade of archaeologists, thieves, and sightseers who have flocked to the Nile Valley since ancient times. Featured in this edition are new accounts of stunning recent discoveries, including the Royal Tombs of Tanis, the Valley of Golden Mummies at Bahariya, the Tomb of the Sons of Ramses, and the sunken city of Alexandria (whose lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World).

Frustrated by her students' performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter's problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experiences at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students.

An esteemed activist invites us to consider the complex idea of abolition as much more than a strategy or a set of tactics—at a deeper level, abolition is an entire political framework, culture, and orientation.

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.

We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in mud huts rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than play football - or did we? Are our bodies and brains truly at odds with modern life? Although it may seem as though we have barely had time to shed our hunter-gatherer legacy, biologist Marlene Zuk reveals that the story is not so simple. Popular theories about how our ancestors lived - and why we should emulate them - are often based on speculation, not scientific evidence. Armed with a razor-sharp wit and brilliant, eye-opening research, Zuk takes us to the cutting edge of biology to show that evolution can work much faster than was previously realized.