anthropologists

Quirks and Quarks17:24How documenting the disappearance of the great auk led to the discovery of extinctionWhen species cease to exist, we often say they went "the way of the dodo." But it might be more fitting to say they went "the way of the great auk" because it was the Icelandic bird's disappearance that led to the discovery that humans activities could make a species go extinct.In his book The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, Gísli Pálsson retraces a 1858 trip two…

A team including University of Wyoming anthropologists works at the site of a circular plaza that was built around 4,750 years ago in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru. Credit: Jason Toohey Two University of Wyoming anthropology professors have discovered one of the earliest circular plazas in Andean South America, showcasing monumental megalithic architecture, which refers to construction that uses large stones placed…

Working with high-resolution satellite imagery in GeoPACHA, VanValkenburgh and other researchers used their specialized knowledge to find and tag certain landmarks, including hill forts. Credit: Brown University Parker VanValkenburgh has dedicated more than a decade of research to understanding how colonialism impacted Peru's Indigenous people in the 16th century. That time marked a turning point in the region: Spanish forces…

Migration map. Credit: R. Scott et al For more than 50 years, dental anthropologists have studied variation in the shape of human teeth to study the patterns of migration that people took as they populated the world. The last major continental migration event took place about 16,000 years ago, when humans first moved into North and South America. Where exactly did these people come from? How did they get there? Were there…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A seasoned deer hunter is shocked when his hound dog trots up with a human femur clenched between its teeth. A woman veers off her normal urban walking path and happens upon a human skull. New property owners commission a land survey that reveals a set of human remains just below a pile of leaves. …

For most people around the world, physical work takes up a great amount of time and energy every day. But what determines whether it is men or women who are working harder in households?In most hunter-gatherer societies, men are the hunters and women are the gatherers – with men seemingly walking the furthest. But what's the labour breakdown in other societies?We carried out a study of farming and herding groups in the Tibetan borderlands in rural China – an area with huge cultural diversity – to uncover which factors…

When anthropology first became established at English universities, its practitioners kept a fastidious distance from their subjects. The Victorian grandfathers of the discipline, Sir Edward Tyler at Oxford and Sir James Frazer of Cambridge, based their studies on ethnographic materials sent back by missionaries and colonial administrators from faraway lands. To research his massively influential The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, which eventually ran to 12 volumes, Frazer never travelled beyond Italy. The…