Human Anthropology

When Gene Roddenberry conceived Star Trek, he imagined a future very different from what was typically put forth in science fiction - a future where humanity has overcome greed, bigotry, misogyny, materialism, conflict and war. Star Trek's fans embraced that vision. But many consider it unattainable, if admirable, even those who wrote and produced Star Trek after Roddenberry. Is Star Trek's vision of the human future achievable? Can humanity overcome its darkest impulses and attain a new level of social cooperation and progress? The answer, per "Chasing the Enterprise", is Yes - we can do ...

Just over 125,000 years ago, humanity was going extinct until a dramatic shift occurred—Homo sapiens started tracking the tides in order to eat the nearby oysters. Before long, they’d pulled themselves back from the brink of extinction. The human brain, and its evolutionary journey, is unlike anything else in history. In A History of the Human Brain, Bret Stetka takes listeners through that far-reaching journey. He also tackles the question of where the brain will take us next, exploring the burgeoning con­cepts of epigenetics and new technologies like CRISPR.

Violence and the Sacred is Rene Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature, and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy, and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.

In her memoir All That Remains, internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist Dame Sue Black recounted her life lived eye to eye with the Grim Reaper. During the course of it, she offered a primer on the basics of identifying human remains, plenty of insights into the fascinating processes of death, and a sober, compassionate understanding of its inescapable presence in our existence. Now in this book, Black builds on that memoir, taking us on a guided tour of the human skeleton and explaining how each person's life history is revealed in their bones.

Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.

"My God. These people really are Neanderthals!" At an archeological dig in Gibraltar, science journalist Tom Cook’s hopes and dreams are shattered in an instant by a mysterious explosion—his pregnant fiancée is missing. During the search, things go from bad to worse when Tom plunges through a time portal and into the strange and dangerous era of the Neanderthals. Can he get back, or is he stuck in the past forever? On top of figuring out how to return to the present, Tom must use his modern-day wits to fight for survival in the world of 40,000 years ago. And contend with a group of ...

Physiology is the science of life, and sets out to understand how living things work and what makes them distinct from the non-living. It considers how our bodies are supplied with energy, how they maintain their internal parameters, the ways in which we gather and process information, the ways we take action, and the creation of new generations.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us sapiens? In this bold and provocative audiobook, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

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.

Alexandra Horowitz’s brilliant On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary - to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, "the observation of trifles". On Looking is structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, with experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. She also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it.

We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet - having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art - while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins?

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.

“Can I save my daughter . . . and them?” Time traveler Tom Cook has settled into his prehistoric life among the Neanderthals, but it’s not without its challenges that include a burning desire to see his future-dwelling daughter, Pook, again. When a growing threat from hostile neighbors turns into an attack, an old contact from another world comes to the rescue and leads both Tom and his Neanderthal wife, Brassy, back to that future through an increasingly unstable time portal. Now, after traveling to and from two different worlds, Tom must find a way to defeat his enemies in both, ...

The association between our ancestors and fire, somewhere around six to four million years ago, had a tremendous impact on human evolution, transforming our earliest human ancestor, a being communicating without speech but with insight, reason, manual dexterity, highly developed social organization, and the capability of experimenting with this new technology. As it first associated with and then began to tame fire, this extraordinary being began to distance itself from its primate relatives.

In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology, and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. Surpassing Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivaled complexity - and what it will take to sustain them.

A giant of archaeology, Colin Renfrew has immeasurably improved our understanding of human history. In this passionately argued work, he offers a concise summary of prehistory - human existence that predates the development of written records - while challenging the very definition of prehistory itself.

There is no one better qualified than Jared Diamond - renowned expert in the fields of physiology and evolutionary biology and award-winning author - to explain the evolutionary forces that operated on our ancestors to make us sexually different. With wit and a wealth of fascinating examples, he explains how our sexuality has been as crucial as our large brains and upright posture in our rise to human status.

Racist pseudoscience is on the rise - fueling hatred, feeding nationalism, and seeping into our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Even the well-intentioned repeat stereotypes based on "science", because cutting-edge genetics are hard to grasp - and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, misconceptions are multiplying amid today's unprecedented surge of research on human genetics. We've never had a clearer picture of who we are and where we come from, and the science, when accurately understood, is a powerful and definitive ally against racism.

Tracing the migrations of the Denisovans and their interbreeding with Neanderthals and early human populations in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas, Andrew Collins and Greg Little explore how the new mental capabilities of the Denisovan-Neanderthal and Denisovan-human hybrids greatly accelerated the flowering of human civilization over 40,000 years ago. They show how the Denisovans displayed sophisticated advances, including precision-machined stone tools and jewelry, tailored clothing, celestially-aligned architecture, and horse domestication.

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.