anthropology

#1099 Manvir Singh - Shamanism: The Timeless Religion

May 19, 2025

Dr. Manvir Singh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research program aims to explain why societies develop complex, recurrent traditions such as shamanism, witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance, music, and gods, as these have appeared in all types of societies across the globe, from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to complex, industrial, mega-urbanized states. He is the author of Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. More»
#1093 Agustín Fuentes - Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary

May 5, 2025

Dr. Agustín Fuentes is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. His latest book is Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary. More»
#1051 Mary Shenk: The Sexual Division of Labor, Kinship Systems, Fertility, & More

Jan 27, 2025

Dr. Mary Shenk is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Demography, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is a biocultural anthropologist, human behavioral ecologist, and anthropological demographer with interests in marriage, family, kinship, parental investment, fertility, mortality, and inequality. She has conducted field research on the economics of marriage and parental investment in urban South India, the causes of rapid fertility decline in rural Bangladesh, and the effects of market integration on wealth, social networks, and health in rural Bangladesh. More»
#1049 Thaís Pansani: H. sapiens in the Americas, and the Extinction of Megafauna

Jan 23, 2025

Dr. Thaís Pansani is an Associate Researcher at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Her main research questions are about human interaction with the Pleistocene megafauna in the Americas and the peopling of the Americas. She is interested in questions like: When did humans arrive in the Americas? Did humans interact with the Pleistocene megafauna? What were the environmental and ecological conditions in which these megamammals lived? What were the causes and consequences of the megafauna extinction in the American continent, especially in South America? How can we identify traces of human interaction in extinct animal bones through taphonomy and zooarchaeology? More»
#1045 Will Gervais - Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species

Jan 13, 2025

Dr. Will Gervais is a Reader in the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. He is a cultural and evolutionary psychologist who studies what people believe about the world. He is curious about a lot things that fall under the cultural/evolutionary psychology umbrella, but he is especially interested in atheists. What do atheists teach us about belief, morality, and what it means to be human? He is the author of Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species. More»
#1038 Briana Pobiner: The Evolution of the Human Diet

Dec 27, 2024

Dr. Briana Pobiner is a paleoanthropologist and educator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Her research centers on the evolution of human diet (with a focus on meat-eating), but has included topics as diverse as human cannibalism and chimpanzee carnivory. She has done fieldwork in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Indonesia and has been supported in her research by the Fulbright-Hays program, the Leakey Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, Rutgers University, the Society for American Archaeology, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. More»
#1036 Roderick McIntosh: Archaeology, Urbanism, State Formation and Human Evolution in Africa

Dec 23, 2024

Dr. Roderick McIntosh is Clayton Stephenson Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, Curator of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, New Haven, and Honorary Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His interests are in African and Old World comparative prehistory, intellectual history of prehistoric archaeology, ethnicity and specialization and the origin of authority in complex society, urbanism, geomorphology and palaeoclimate, and more topics. Dr. McIntosh has been a Guggenheim Fellow, twice a Fulbright Senior Fellow (Senegal and Mali), and has held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). More»
#1028 Sergio Almécija - Humans: Perspectives on Our Evolution from World Experts

Dec 5, 2024

Dr. Sergio Almécija is Senior Research Scientist in Biological Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. He studies the key adaptations defining different stages of ape and human evolution (i.e., hominoid evolution). He pays special attention to the process leading and following the split between humans and apes (i.e., “non-human hominoids”). He is the editor of Humans: Perspectives on Our Evolution from World Experts. More»
#1027 João Teixeira: The Evolution, Dispersals, and Interbreeding of Hominins

Dec 2, 2024

Dr. João Teixeira is Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative, School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University & Scientific Vice-Coordinator at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Coimbra. He is a population geneticist focusing on the evolution of humans and closely related species. His main research focus revolves around human evolution during the Pleistocene, in particular the admixture events between so-called modern and archaic humans after the out-of-Africa and before human colonization of Sahul. He is expert on uncovering signatures of natural selection in the genome, in particular balancing selection, and continue to study how advantageous genetic diversity can be maintained for millions of years in natural populations. More»
#1026 Robert Borofsky: An Anthropology of Anthropology

Nov 29, 2024

Dr. Robert Borofsky is the Director of the Center for a Public Anthropology and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Hawaii Pacific University. He is the author or editor of eight books dealing with constructions of knowledge in the Pacific islands—such as Making History (1987) and Remembrance of Pacific Pasts (2000)—and the current state of cultural anthropology, including Assessing Cultural Anthropology (1994) and Yanomami (2005). He is also the author of An Anthropology of Anthropology: Is It Time to Shift Paradigms? More»