Category: Anthropology

As an avid reader with no prior background in anthropology or historical geography, I found Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel to be truly mesmerizing—a sweeping synthesis that tackles one of the most profound questions in human history: Why did some societies conquer others rather than the reverse? Since its publication, the book has achieved…

Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” may be the most popular non-fiction title of the past decade. It has sold more than 10 million copies and appears in dozens of languages. What surprised me most after finally getting around to reading it is how relatively unoriginal it all is. Harari divides his…

Anthropologists have long noted that marriage is virtually universally present in all cultures across time and place. From that observation it has been extrapolated that monogamous pair bonding is the natural mating arrangement for Homo sapiens. In “Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships,” Christopher Ryan…