Ask An Anthropologist
Ask An Anthropologist is an educational resource for students, teachers, parents, and life-long learners. We encourage anyone interested in anthropology to make use of its content.
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When you tape down your thumb, you’ll get a sense of how hard it would be to do many things if our hands were shaped differently. Even a simple task like placing a straw in a bottle becomes difficult!
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Becoming human brings together interactive multimedia, research and scholarship to promote greater understanding of the course of human evolution.
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Who Are You?
Have you ever wondered how your cat, dog, bird, lizard, or fish is related to you? Animal bodies today are like living history books. They tell us a story that goes back at least 500 million years.
On the Origin of Species
In 1859, Charles Darwin published a book called On the Origin of Species that completely changed our understanding of how biodiversity arises.
Head to Head
The modern human brain is the largest and most complex of any living primate. As you will learn in this activity, it is also larger than the brains of our ancient human ancestors. What does brain size have to do with our biology?
Historical Human Habitats
Many types of plants and animals lived alongside our ancestors in East Africa over the last six million years. These organisms can help us learn about the habitats of early humans and how these habitats changed over time.