anthropology

#1120 Pascal Boyer: Ritualized Behavior, Ownership Psychology, and Victim-Devaluation

Jul 7, 2025

Dr. Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He’s also the author of books like Religion Explained; Memory, Mind and Culture; and Minds Make Societies. More»
#1113 Vicky Oelze: The Diets of Great Apes, and the Evolution of Human Diets

Jun 20, 2025

Dr. Vicky Oelze is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department and Director of the Primate Ecology & Molecular Anthropology Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include mobility and dietary adaptations in archaeological human populations; African strontium isoscapes and isotopic investigations of the Atlantic and transatlantic slave trade; the dietary ecology of extant African great apes; great ape breastfeeding and weaning; and chimpanzee tool use and termite-chimpanzee interactions. More»
#1107 Donald Johanson: Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, and Homo habilis

Jun 6, 2025

Dr. Donald Johanson is the Virginia M Ullman Chair in Human Origins in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Founding Director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. For the past 30 years, he has conducted field and laboratory research in paleoanthropology. Most notably, he discovered the 3.18-million-year-old hominid skeleton popularly known as "Lucy." Dr. Johanson has carried out field research in Ethiopia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Tanzania. More»
#1106 Kevin Hong: Magic, Divination, and Dream Interpretation Across Societies

Jun 5, 2025

Dr. Kevin Hong is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Macau. He is broadly interested in human behavior and culture, and currently has three lines of research: magic, divination, and epistemic norms in small-scale societies; reporting biases in the transmission of instrumental practices; and theoretical modeling of the transmission of culture. More»
#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»