Anthropology

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century  by Charles King, Vintage Books Edition, 2019.  Anthropology Comes to America Franz Boas was a German Jew who emigrated to America. He founded anthropology in America. Boas did field work on Canada's Baffin Island with the indigenous Inuits. He also visited Canada's Vancouver Island, where he studied: the Tlingit and Kwakiutl indigenous peoples. Issues Add

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease  by Daniel E. Lieberman (Author), Vintage; Reprint edition, 2014.  Physical Evolution The author describes how the bodies of our ancestors changed over time. He describes how many bones have changed their shapes, due to walking upright. The intestines have evolved to be smaller, because we have prepared our food to make it easier to digest. Mismatch Diseases Cultural evolution proceeds much faster than physical evolu

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich, Pantheon, 2018.  Ancient North Eurasians These were a people whose descendants contributed substantially to both Native Americans and Europeans. But they are no longer present in North Eurasia itself. India India is a mixture of Ancestral North Indians (Aryans, Indo-Europeans) from the Caucasus and Ancestral South Indians (Dravidians) from Iran. Cousins The book also discusses ou

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies  by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.  Pre-History This book is an interesting complement to the more common books that study pre-history by means of language and genetics. The domestication of plants and animals was the beginning of civilization. This process depends on which plants and animals were present in various parts of the world and whether they were amenable to domestication. Domesticated Plants: Fertil

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human  by Richard Wrangham, Basic Books, 2010.  Cooking Food Increases Calories Absorbed Cooking was a major step on the path to being fully human. Cooking food is important, because cooked food is easier to digest, and the body can absorb more calories from cooked food than from raw food. Roots versus Leaves As we evolved and moved out of the trees, our diet changed from leaves to roots. Roots provide more calories than leaves. This change

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World  by David W. Anthony, Princeton University Press, 2010.  Domestication of the Horse This book describes how human being domesticated the horse. The people who spoke the proto-Indo-Europeans language are called the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya lived between 4500 and 2500 years BCE. They were descendants of hunter-gatherers who lived in the Eurasian steppes, north of the Black an

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes  by Svante Pääbo, Basic Books, 2014. Laboratory Analysis of Ancient DNA This book describes how the author, a Swedish molecular biologist, analyzed Neanderthal DNA in his laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. He and his group have analyzed the DNA of some Neanderthal remains. Avoiding Sample Contamination His main achievement has been the prevention of contamination of his Neanderthal DNA samples by contemporary human DNA. Ancient DNA is

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution  by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, Basic Books, 2009.  Recent Human Evolution This book describes how human evolution did not stop with the emergence of homo sapiens two hundred thousand years ago, but instead continues even now. In fact, they argue, the rate of human evolution is speeding up. Race The authors discuss the scientific arguments made by the opponents of the concept of race. The oppone

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanamamö and the Anthropologists  by Napoleon A. Chagnon, Simon & Schuster, 2013.  Yanamamö The author describes the many years he spent among the Yanamamö tribes in Venezuela. In the 1960s there were 25,000 Yanamamö people spread among 250 villages. He writes about the Yanamamö language, name taboos, genealogy (kinship relations), tribal history and geography.  Marxist Anthropology The Marxist anthropology establishmen