Despite our differences, when it comes to babies, we communicate the same way all over the world.
Research suggests that parents and babies communicate in remarkably similar ways despite striking variation in cultural practices.
Examining chicken intestines, reading the tea leaves, watching the markets – people turn to experts for insight into the mysteries that surround them.
Hidden forces are always at work in the world, and people always want to control them, a cognitive anthropologist explains. Enter the human universal of shamanism.
Human civilisation is threatened by long-dead organisms, whether as White Walkers or petrol.
Inmates, members of MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, wait upon arrival at the maximum security prison in Zacatecoluca, 65 kilometres east of San Salvador, on August 9, 2017.
Marvin RECINOS / AFP
Imaginaries of gangs as inherent forms of brutal anarchy promote particular political agendas and obscure the ways gangs can reveal the underlying dynamics of the contexts within which they emerge.
A modern mouse lemur
Microcebus sits upon the cranium of an extinct Megaladapis lemur.
Dao Van Hoang www.daovanhoang.com
A series of new studies sheds light on the population crash and extinction of the giant birds, lemurs and more that roamed the island until around A.D. 700-1000.
What came first – all-seeing Gods or complex societies?
God the Father and Angel, Guercino Giovan Francesco Barbieri via Wikimedia Commons
God only started watching over us quite recently, according to a new study that analysed 414 societies from 30 world regions.
New technology means accessing new information from ancient human remains, some which have been in collections for decades.
Ancient DNA allows scientists to learn directly from the remains of people from the past. As this new field takes off, researchers are figuring out how to ethically work with ancient samples and each other.
JC142 research cruise: reproduced with permission of the British Geological Survey, National Oceanography Centre ©UKRI 2018.
Deep sea mining could supply valuable rare minerals to green technology, but one project in the south-west Pacific is invoking the wrath of local spirits.
Philip Pullman can help us understand what smartphones are doing to people – here's how.
North Sentinel Island. Vivaswa/Shutterstock
We need a more nuanced approach to the world's last isolated peoples.
By only working in their own backyards, what do psychology researchers miss about human behavior?
Ninety percent of psychology studies come from countries representing less than 15 percent of the world's population. Researchers are realizing that universalizing those findings might not make sense.
An Ig Nobel Prize-winning study suggests we need to rethink why imitation evolved.
A fragment of an ancestral Pueblo jar dating to c. A.D. 1150.
Keith Kintigh, Arizona State University
Only a small fraction of the data from archaeological fieldwork is made accessible to the public or preserved for future research.
Is a cassette player an “ordinary object” or a “mystery”? It depends on whom you ask, and ethnography can help you ask the right questions.
Big data is all the rage in management circles and beyond, yet little is said about the understanding needed with such voluminous data. An important lesson can be learned from ethnographic research.
Vincent Copley senior and Vincent Copley junior at Redbanks Conservation Park, Burra, in June, 2018. They are holding Ngadjuri book, with their grandfather and great-grandfather, Barney Waria, on the cover.
Photo: C.J. Taylor, Flinders University.
In the 1940s, the last initiated Ngadjuri man, Barney Waria, gave a series of interviews to anthropologist Ronald Berndt. Almost 80 years later, Waria's grandson wants to share this material with his family.
In the medical culture of the Bugis and Makassar peoples in Indonesia the word
means that the penis is actually shrinking, or retracting, but the Dutch in the 19th-century East Indies did not believe it was real.
Koro is widely believed to be a culturally localised delusion. But a theory that it's a fight-or-flight reflex might be corroborated by studying traditional healing treatments in Indonesia.
Coming together for a solstice feast in ancient Peru.
How did civilization emerge from small groups of hunter-gatherers? Some archaeologists focus on cooperation as the vital ingredient – and find evidence for it in the form of feast-related artifacts.
Where did our written numbers come from?
Linguistic clues show how people around the world first developed mathematical thought.
Artist’s impression of Proxima b, a planet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri within the closest known star system outside of our solar system.
Using AI to search for ET might help us find things we couldn't even imagine we should look for, but to succeed we also have think critically about how we create and use that technology.
Sunrise at noon in the Arctic. Little exposure to sun was a piece of the genetic puzzle.
Bering Land Bridge National Preserve
Why was one gene mutation that affects hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts ubiquitous among ice age Arctic people? New research points to the advantage it provided for ancestors of Native Americans.