Featured New Title
- Inequality : A Genetic History How genomics reveals deep histories of inequality, going back many thousands of years. Inequality is an urgent global concern, with pundits, politicians, academics, and best-selling books all taking up its causes and consequences. In Inequality, Carles Lalueza-Fox offers an entirely new perspective on the subject, examining the genetic marks left by inequality on humans throughout history. Lalueza-Fox describes genetic studies, made possible by novel DNA sequencing technologies, that reveal layers of inequality in past societies, manifested in patterns of migration, social structures, and funerary practices. Through their DNA, ancient skeletons have much to tell us, yielding anonymous stories of inequality, bias, and suffering. Lalueza-Fox, a leader in paleogenomics, offers the deep history of inequality. He explores the ancestral shifts associated with migration and describes the gender bias unearthed in these migrations—the brutal sexual asymmetries, for example, between male European explorers and the women of Latin America that are revealed by DNA analysis. He considers social structures, and the evidence that high social standing was inherited—the ancient world was not a meritocracy. He untangles social and genetic factors to consider whether wealth is an advantage in reproduction, showing why we are more likely to be descended from a king than a peasant. And he explores the effects of ancient inequality on the human gene pool. Marshaling a range of evidence, Lalueza-Fox shows that understanding past inequalities is key to understanding present ones.
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About Human Biology, Behavior and Evolution
This guide provides selected course-specific resources for AN102: Human Biology, Behavior and Evolution.
Featured Resource: Evidence for Human Evolution, The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program
- Evidence for Human Evolution, The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program Dr. Rick Potts provides a video short introduction to some of the evidence for human evolution, in the form of fossils and artifacts.
Featured Article
- Understanding racism in physical (biological) anthropology (AJPA, Wiley) The mainstream of American physical anthropology began as racist and eugenical science that defended slavery, restricted “non‐Nordic” immigration, and justified Jim Crow segregation. After World War II, the field became more anti‐racial than anti‐racist. It has continued as a study of natural influences on human variation and thus continues to evade the social histories of inequitable biological variation. Also reflecting its occupancy of white space, biological anthropology
Featured Sapiens Articles
- How Human Are We? (Sapiens Magazine) An evolutionary theorist considers how traits we think of as human may have been shared by other hominins.
- The Humans We Haven't Met Yet (Sapiens Magazine) One anthropologist contends that far too many species have been lumped into one category: Our story is more complicated, he argues.
Librarian
This guide was originally authored by Chris Smith, April, 2023.