Anthropology

In an age of deepfakes and alternative facts, it can be tricky getting at the truth. But persuading others – or even yourself – what is true is not a challenge unique to the modern era. Even the ancient Greeks had to confront different realities. Take the story of Oedipus. It is a narrative that most people think they know – Oedipus blinded himself after finding out he killed his father and married his mother, right?Right: Actor Christopher Plummer in the 1967 film ‘Oedipus the King.’ AP Photo But the ancient Greeks actually left us many different versions of almost every ancient tale.…

Much has been made of Chinese student achievement test scores, but inconvenient confounders are often ignored, such as that Chinese learn by rote. No teach in America wants to do that. Teachers are poorly paid and clean their own toilets. And only elite kids take the tests. The non-elites were overwhelmingly decimated by China's one-child policy, a totalitarian government mandate enacted in 1979 to reduce the population until agriculture could catch up. However, it closed the education gap, at least for those not born illegally. And for those women who weren't aborted by government decree.…

As we lick our Valentine card envelopes and slip into something more comfortable, it’s a good time to ponder our sexual relationships. As the first entirely digital generation and the largest demographic in western history, Generation Z, those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is the subject of extensive research. Often considered to be entitled, dependent and lacking real-life skills, these youth also display considerable resilience and creativity. This adaptive flair extends to their navigation of sexuality and relationships, which are in flux stemming from factors like digital dating…

It doesn't seem like it if you watch political news but humans are unusually cooperative. We are unique in that we often cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers. Nurses, firefighters, helping someone who dropped a package, standing in line, there is no natural selection benefit to that. In a natural selection-dominated world, the cheats, nepotists, and cronies would always win but unlike most of the animal kingdom, those behaviors are considered deviant. Why do we cooperate? Language, intelligence, religion, the desire to hunt large game, there is no shortage of speculation…

Waiting for the weekend can often seem unbearable, a whole seven days between Saturdays. Having seven days in a week has been the case for a very long time, and so people don’t often stop to ask why. Most of our time reckoning is due to the movements of the planets, Moon and stars. Our day is equal to one full rotation of the Earth around its axis. Our year is a rotation of the Earth around the Sun, which takes 364 and ¼ days, which is why we add an extra day in February every four years, for a leap year. But the week and the month are a bit trickier. The phases of the Moon do not exactly…

When Christopher Columbus discovered a continent unknown to Europeans, his accounts included harrowing descriptions of native pirates who cannibalized men and kept women as sex slaves, but more recent humanities scholars, even ones who readily accept oral histories long changed, dismissed that as myth. However, the belief stuck. He had no reason to lie, the Spaniards didn't know they had a new continent and didn't colonize it until that realization happened. New science studies show he may have been accurate. Analysis of the skulls of early Caribbean inhabitants show biological…

If you intended to holiday at a place that underwent a disaster it might be a good idea to keep your plans, especially if you are civic-minded and are willing to help. Such "volunteer tourism" can actually help communities recover from natural disasters, a new study finds. Most people will do nothing of the kind, they will send "thoughts and prayers" on Twitter and go anywhere else, but if you are a volunteer tourist (willing to help) rather than a disaster tourist(you want to take selfies) it will bring practical benefits, along with intangible economic ones. The researchers examined the…

The idea of hanging up decorations in the middle of winter is older than Christmas itself. Decorations are mentioned in ancient descriptions of the Roman feast of Saturnalia, which is thought to have originated in the 5th century BC. Some 900 years later, a Christian bishop in Turkey wrote disapprovingly about members of his congregation who were drinking, feasting, dancing and “crowning their doors” with decorations in a pagan fashion at this time of year. The 6th-century Pope Gregory the Great took a different line. The Venerable Bede, an English monk, records that English pagans had…

A joke in nutrition circles is that while you once needed to be rich to be fat, now you need to be rich to be thin. Scientific progress has given us cheap food, anyone can afford to eat well, and after an existence of worrying about food availability it takes generations for culture to change to not eating as much as we can. Rich people, though, have gym memberships. Some in the culture wars think the type of food is the problem rather than energy balance - calories consumed rather than the types of food. They have lobbied for busing people on food stamps to farmer's markets or mandating a…

As women started counting steps and walking to work wearing running shoes and fitness trackers, there was one work-related item that had to change: the briefcase. It’s not suited to walking fast and gets in the way of drinking coffee en route to the office. Enter the working women’s backpack. It’s a trend. The Atlantic announced that this is the year professional women started wearing backpacks, even though some of us swear it’s been going on for a while. The sale of women’s backpacks is up by more than 20 per cent in the past year, but the sale of men’s backpacks has flat-lined. The…