Looking Into the World of Frog Gigging
The moon emerged out of the clouds at a few minutes past midnight, reflecting on the murky water of a forest pond. I watched as Wyatt*, the organizer…
Author: SAPIENS
Difficult Truths: Confronting Irish Industrial Schools
This article was originally published at Otherwise magazine and has been republished with permission as a lightly edited excerpt. CONSTELLATIONS The 1918 Spanish flu altered the course of…
What Ancient Stone “Swiss Army Knives” Mean
This article was originally published in The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Humans are the only species to live in every environmental niche in the…
What Klingon and Other Constructed Languages Reveal
This article was originally published at Knowable Magazine and has been republished with Creative Commons. Most languages develop through centuries of use among groups of people. But some…
Stop Projecting Nationalism Onto Stonehenge
In late May, eight images of the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II were projected onto the megaliths of Stonehenge to celebrate the monarch’s 70 years on the throne.…
Did Margaret Mead Think a Healed Femur Was the Earliest Sign of Civilization?
An anthropologist digs into the origins of a popular story attributed to Margaret Mead about the original sign of civilization. ✽ According to a commonly shared story, the…
Living With the Prospect of Assisted Dying
Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig. Used with permission of the publisher,…
Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
An anthropologist dives into the morally fraught blood and plasma industry and what it reveals about human societies—the good, the bad, and the gory. ✽ In the spring…
Can Machine Learning Translate Ancient Egyptian Texts?
A new program aims to use AI to help academics and the public decipher hieroglyphs. Here’s an inside look at how—and whether—it works. ✽ I have long been…
Neanderthals: Body of Evidence
As every fan of crime drama television knows, the human body holds a wealth of information about its once-living owner. Flesh and bugs may tell of time of…
The End of the World As We Know It
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Listen to the companion episode of SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human! Back in 2008, Chad Huddleston was driving home from work when he saw a stra…
The Rise of Emotional Robots
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Listen to the companion episode of SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human! When Dan White first pulled Pepper out of the box, it was slumped…