Editorial Gananath Obeyesekere, a man larger than life, passed away today. His death marks the end of an intellectual force that reshaped the very foundations of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the critique of
The fossil record of our ape ancestors in Africa is almost nonexistent for a period of about 8 or 9 million years. This long gap lasted from about 16.5 million to 7
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We know that humans live relatively long lives, and we certainly know that we spend a larger proportion of those lives as children than other species. The question remains: how did we
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Roman land tenure was based increasingly on the appropriation of conquered territory, which was declared public land, the ager publicus populi. The normal practice was to settle war veterans on it, but the
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Millions of years ago, in the Miocene Epoch (23 to 5.3 million years ago), about 100 species of apes roamed Europe, Asia, and Africa. Just a few million years later, this number
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Why were Clean Slates so important to Bronze Age societies? From the third millennium in Mesopotamia, people were aware that debt pressures, if left to accumulate unchecked, would distort normal fiscal and
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An ancient Greek myth tells the story of Prometheus, who, after molding humans out of clay and teaching them the fine arts of civilization, defied the Olympian Gods by stealing the secret of
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Managing our emotions is said to be one way of improving the quality of our life. How much we really know about ourselves, according to psychologists, is a measure of our personal
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A 60-year-old son was at the bedside of his elderly father and saw him breathing his last. The son was thoroughly anguished and shouted at the top of his voice, “Dad, be
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Breakthrough anthropological and scientific findings have allowed researchers to better trace the outlines, and begin to fill in the blanks, of the human evolutionary story in recent decades. We’re now able to
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