Social Anthropology

In the tradition of Jared Diamond's million-copy-selling classic Guns, Germs, and Steel, a bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight.

In recent years, genetic testing has become easily available to consumers across the globe, making it relatively simple to find out where your ancestors came from. But what do these test results actually tell us about ourselves? In Ancestors, Pierre Zalloua, a leading authority on population genetics, argues that these test results have led to a dangerous oversimplification of what one’s genetic heritage means. Genetic ancestry has become conflated with anthropological categories such as “origin,” “ethnicity,” and even “race” in spite of the complexities that underlie these concepts.

For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?

The Golden Bough, the monumental study of religious rites and practices in ‘primitive’ societies, was one of the earliest influential texts in anthropology. Its author, Sir James Frazer, surveyed the wide range of cultural habits, taboos and beliefs in communities across the world concluding that there was an observable pattern in the way magic developed into religion, though formal expression emerged in different ways.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet.

Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a brilliant pioneer in the field of archaeogenetics - archaeology augmented by DNA sequencing technology - which has allowed scientists to reconstruct human history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time. In this surprising account, Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe rewrite a fascinating chapter of this history, the peopling of Europe, that takes us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the present.

Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for reconfiguration of hormonal cycles, entraining women with the periodicity of the moon - and imbuing women with the concept of time.

Why We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Why have societies all across the world feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs, and origins in Europe's history. The witch came to prominence - and often a painful death - in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early modern state.

They live in shadows - deep in the forest, late in the night, in the dark recesses of our minds. They're spoken of in stories and superstitions, relics of an unenlightened age, old wives' tales, passed down through generations. Yet no matter how wary and jaded we have become, as individuals or as a society, a part of us remains vulnerable to them: werewolves and wendigos, poltergeists and vampires, angry elves and vengeful spirits.

In the past 50 years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day.

In Kindred, Neanderthal expert Becky Wragg Sykes shoves aside the cliché of the shivering ragged figure in an icy wasteland and reveals the Neanderthal you don’t know, who lived across vast and diverse tracts of Eurasia and survived through hundreds of thousands of years of massive climate change. Using a thematic rather than chronological approach, this book will shed new light on where they lived, what they ate and the increasingly complex Neanderthal culture that is being discovered.

Jessica Carew Kraft, an urban wife and mom of two, was rooted in the modern world, complete with a high-powered career in tech and the sneaking suspicion that her lifestyle was preventing her and her family from truly thriving. Determined to find a better way, Jessica quit her job and set out to learn about "rewilding" from people who reject the comforts and convenience of civilization by using ancient tools and skills to survive. Along the way, she found an entire community walking the path back from our technology-focused, anxiety-ridden way of life to a simpler, more human experience.

How does trauma affect a child's mind—and how can that mind recover? In the classic The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry explains what happens to the brains of children exposed to extreme stress and shares their lessons of courage, humanity, and hope. Only when we understand the science of the mind and the power of love and nurturing can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.

In the summer of 2022, Lee Berger lost 50 pounds in order to wriggle though impossibly small openings in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa—spaces where his team has been unearthing the remains of Homo naledi, a proto-human likely to have coexisted with Homo sapiens some 250,000 years ago. Lead researcher Berger had never made his way into the dark, cramped, dangerous underground spaces where many of the naledi fossils had been found. Now he was ready to do so. Once inside the cave, Berger made shocking new discoveries that expand our understanding of this early hominid.

While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges.

Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon's uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest's secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with one such tribe—the mysterious flecheiros, or "People of the Arrow."

Bizarre illnesses and plagues that kill people in the most unspeakable ways. Obsessive and inspired efforts by scientists to solve mysteries and save lives. From The Hot Zone to The Demon in the Freezer and beyond, Richard Preston's best selling works have mesmerized readers everywhere by showing them strange worlds of nature they never dreamed of.

From primitive man's cowrie shells to the electronic cash card, from the markets of Timbuktu to the New York Stock Exchange, The History of Money explores how money and the myriad forms of exchange have affected humanity, and how they will continue to shape all aspects of our lives--economic, political, and personal.

Michael Crawley immerses himself in various endurance cultures and asks what makes enduring together meaningful to people. He learns how Nepalese runners face different challenges depending on their location up a mountain, from those in the lowlands and ‘middle hills’ to Sherpas from the Solu Khumbu, and observes Tarahumara ultrarunners’ ability to cover extreme distances on highly technical terrain. But he also delves into the history of Dance Marathons, six-day pedestrianism races in Madison Square Gardens and the unique Enhanced Games.