Did Humanity Really Arise in One Place?
New evidence is prompting researchers to rethink Homo sapiens’ origin story—and what it means to be human. ✽ As a university student in the early 2010s, I recall…
New evidence is prompting researchers to rethink Homo sapiens’ origin story—and what it means to be human. ✽ As a university student in the early 2010s, I recall…
An anthropologist delves into the rarefied ritualistic world of specialty coffee, where highly trained brewers and judges compete to determine which beans reign supreme. Excerpted from Making Better…
Pollution is Colonialism book cover Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron 2021) uses plastics to trace pollution in fish stomachs in Newfoundland while showing how this pollution is embedded in…
Below is a recording of the talk I am giving in person at the 2022 annual American Anthropological Association meeting on November 10. Video of my talk
In Melanesia, Indigenous communities developed elaborate rituals to bring themselves material wealth starting in the late 19th century. These practices reveal a profoundly important and universal soci…
Researchers in artificial intelligence have made extraordinary strides in mimicking human language—but they still can’t capture the parts that truly make language human. ✽ The story begins with…
Cultural anthropologists seek to understand the dizzyingly diverse ways people live today, including how they think, act, create, struggle, make meaning, and organize their societies. WHAT IS CULTURAL…
An anthropologist describes the multiple ice ages of the Earth’s past and how our species survived the most recent one. This article was originally published at The Conversation…
The idea that evolution is a hierarchy of complexity with humans on top lurks in everything from biology classes to politics. It’s time to unlearn this false and…
My partner and I bought a house in 2019 and moved to San Antonio, TX, in service of my pursuit of a Ph.D. in anthropology. One thing that…
February of 2022 was a particularly dark month, both in Quebec and in Canada generally. In Quebec, we had the expansion of the use of “vaccine passports” to…
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…
In 1950, human blood was stored for patient use at a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons In the spring…
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I love trees. I also love dendrochronology—literally, “the study of tree time.” This science, which uses data derived from tree growth rings, provides scientists with a wealth of…
This browser does not support HTML5 audio Listen to an audio recording of this piece read by Nathan Klembara A recent trend in the sciences is the attem…
SAPIENS magazine is an online portal for readers to better understand the world and what it means to be human. AerialPerspective Images/Getty Images WHAT IS SAPIENS MAGAZINE? SAPIENS…
In this live event, a panel of archaeologists and podcasters celebrates the completion of SAPIENS Podcast Season 4 and RadioCIAMS’ SAPIENS Talk Back series. Meet the amazing people…
A person documents a centuries-old Basque carnival in Alsasua, Spain. Many anthropologists investigate cultural phenomena, such as rituals and religious traditions. NurPhoto/Getty Images …
Picture a traffic light. This isn’t a trick question. We want you to visualize some sort of box housing three lightbulbs, each behind a colored filter: red on…
As part of a tuberculosis screening, a radiologist in Germany examines a lung X-ray of a refugee from the 2022 Russian war in Ukraine. Matthias Balk/Picture Alliance/Getty Images…
An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation By Micha Rahder, Independent Scholar 336pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press § Colin Hoag spoke…