Humans

Humans, and most other late Homo species, are characterized by large brains and bodies. However, the discovery of two small-brained Homo species—H. floresiensis and Homo naledi—has cast doubts on large brain size as a defining feature of our genus. We reevaluated brain and body size scaling using data for 225 extant primates and 16 fossil hominid taxa, including one of the most diminutive species in genus Homo, H. floresiensis. Brain and body size are tightly correlated in genus Homo, varying along a positively allometric slope (R² = 0.84, F(1,5) = 33, p < 0.01) that is significantly different from the slope characterizing extant primates (R² = 0.94, F(1,222) = 3294, p < 0.001). Both small-bodied Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi have endocranial volumes (ECVs) that are consistent with their body size given the scaling relationship that characterizes genus Homo. Paired ECV and body mass estimates demonstrate considerable overlap of brain:body size proportions across fossil hominid taxa. Earlier hominids, Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus anamensis, are characterized by ancestral brain:body size scaling; we discuss the hypothesis that a fundamental biological shift ca. 3 Ma altered the trajectory of encephalization—potentially linked to changes in fetal growth and gestation in Pleistocene fossil hominids—and may be directly implicated in the evolution of complex symbolic behavior in our lineage. Full article

Zora Neale Hurston describes herself as “a crow in a pigeon’s nest” in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. For Hurston, the metaphor illustrates her singular perspective as an atypical presence in what she considered a stereotypical environment—or, put differently, the difference her presence made in a dominant space. Katherine McKittrick describes metaphors as “observational scaffolding.” Observational scaffolding functions as both a signal and a map, highlighting sites of struggle and liberation along the continuum of life’s experiences. Therefore, this article engages with discourses on decolonization and Black feminist epistemologies, acknowledges the differences between Hurston’s and today’s anthropology, and challenges other disciplines and fields to reconsider how values such as democracy and justice might influence engagement with Black knowledge production, specifically from Black women. Full article

This article analyses the Museo de los Desplazados (Museum of the Displaced), a collaborative platform conceived by the Left Hand Rotation collective to foster shared reflection on gentrification processes. This project takes the form of a collective and decentralised digital archive, functioning as an open, ‘in-process’ collaborative tool. Within the context of the proliferation of self-organised digital archives, this study explores how the Museum acts as a dynamic social object that articulates dispersed narratives. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of the ‘anarchive’, the research validates the hypothesis that there is a direct relationship between the profiles of autonomous collectives and their specific epistemic practices. The findings reveal that activists utilise the archive as a tool for legal defence, ‘heat-of-the-moment’ ethnography, and networking, thereby resisting ‘archival violence’ and constructing collective counter-memory. Ultimately, the Museum demonstrates that memory is not a guarded site, but a living network built through horizontal and rhizomatic collaboration. Full article

The article presents the preliminary data from the excavation of the Azurrague 1 Dolmen (Ourém), carried out within the MEDICE II project, highlighting the importance of its location in a karstic landscape marked by a strong tradition of funerary cults in natural cavities. The dolmen structure features a heptagonal chamber and a short passage, with ritual deposits that include macrolithic tools, polished axes, ceramics, and human remains dated between the beginning of the Late Neolithic and the Middle Chalcolithic. The data indicates practices of secondary burial, continuity of regional lithic traditions, and a symbolic integration between exogenous architectural forms and endogenous ritual content established in caves. The proximity to caves with contemporary chronologies, such as Lapa da Furada, reinforces the coexistence of differentiated yet interconnected ritual spaces. Analogies with the Rego da Murta Megalithic Complex, caves and other sites in the Alto Nabão region support the hypothesis of a hybrid, long-lasting cultural system in which megalithic monumentalization is associated with ancestral symbolic practices. Full article

Through theorists like M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Carolyn Cooper, and Michelle Wright, this project reconsiders the “vulgarity” attributed to Caribbean musical genres, like dancehall, dembow, and reguetón, as a pedagogical practice: an embodied, sensorial way of knowing that challenges colonial and racialized modes of aesthetics, morality, and order. Through an examination of Vybz Kartel’s “Fever,” Tokischa’s “Sistema de Patio,” and Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón,” I examine how sound, image, and movement converge to create what Alexander calls “pedagogies,” which simultaneously disturb and instruct. These pedagogies of the vulgar illuminate the ongoing impact of colonialism and plantation slavery in the Caribbean, particularly the gendered extraction of labor and capital that continues to shape daily life. In this context, vulgarity is not simply performed but inverted, prompting us to ask what is truly vulgar: Caribbean music and dance, or the systemic violence of Western modernity? These pedagogies foreground the paradoxical beauty of violence and survival, revealing how Caribbean peoples reconfigure “vulgarity” to craft pleasure and freedom amidst constraint. Embracing Michelle Wright’s concept of “epiphenomenal time,” this study invites readers to watch, listen, and feel, reminding us that the pedagogy of the vulgar must be embodied to be understood. Full article

There have been numerous attempts to examine Indigenous cultures from a scientific and evolutionary perspective. In this work, however, there has been little acknowledgment of how the study of biological evolution is changing. I examine evidence of the way Indigenous cultures think about nonhumans and examine concepts of creation and creator figures in relation to Niche Construction, a 21st century evolutionary concept that examines how organisms shape both their own environments and those of other species by studying how Natural Selection can act upon how most organisms impact the survival and existence of other species. I focus this comparison on how many Indigenous Plains cultures of North America regard wolves as being creator figures within the context of the way they experience their environments. Ecological studies revealed that in 30 years since wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone, this species has reshaped the ecology of many other species in the park ecosystem. I argue that in the belief systems of Indigenous peoples, this restructuring is tantamount to an Act of Creation, and that Indigenous Americans recognized that wolves filled both this role, as well as a role in helping Indigenous cultures adjust to the environments of North America as they arrived on this continent over the last 20,000 years. I also consider the relationship from the wolves’ perspective. This concept of creation is rooted in ecology and evolutionary biology, and does not involve supernatural anthropomorphic beings the way Western stories of creation do. Full article

This article is an introduction to the issues faced by the unhoused and those with substance use issues in San Antonio, TX, and an analysis of the mis-fits and misrecognitions that lead to failures. It focuses on three areas: aspects of civil rights and full citizenship tied to real estate, neurodiversity as a lens for understanding the needs of many unhoused persons, and the running partner relationship as potential object of analysis and intervention. Full article

The exploration of Doggerland, the prehistoric landscape that once connected Britain to the continent, remains one of Europe’s most significant archeological challenges. This paper presents a study into the palaeolandscape and the paleoenvironmental development of Doggerland, through the geochemical analyses of a core (ELF019) taken from the southern North Sea. The thermal properties divided the core into three sedimentary zones based on the variations in organic matter and carbonate content. Organic biomarkers were used to distinguish between terrestrial and aquatic vegetation inputs, revealing alternating freshwater, terrestrial, and marine input influences. Chemostratigraphy defined six depositional zones that corresponded with the identified thermal and biomarker data. Radiocarbon dating of peat-derived humic fractions anchored the key environmental transition between freshwater and saline deposition to the Greenlandian period of the Lower Holocene (10,243–10,199 Cal BP). The integrated geochemical evidence suggests a transformation from freshwater silts, low organic content, and sandy clay deposit to saline clay marine deposit. The progressive transformation may reflect the inundation sequence that led to the final submergence of Doggerland. Full article

This article examines the cognitive theory expressed in early Buddhist Pāli sources by situating their analyses of perception, language, and meditative experience within a psychosemiotic framework. It argues that Buddhist thinkers conceived cognition as a stratified process emerging from the dynamic interaction between sensory and effectual domains, culminating in the semiotic determinations of nāmarūpa and the proliferative activity of conceptual constructs. Drawing on parallels with Peircean pansemioticism, the study highlights how both traditions interpret phenomena as sign-constituted events and how contemplative practice can intervene in the habitual chains of semiosis that ordinarily shape human experience. By bridging Buddhist phenomenology with contemporary cognitive science and semiotics, this work proposes that the Buddhist model—precise in its technical vocabulary and rich in its analyses of attention, perception, and conceptualization—offers valuable tools for understanding and modulating cognitive processes in both theoretical and practical domains. Full article

Traditionally, the field of forensic anthropology has built its foundation on being an objective observer of human behavior to answer questions of medicolegal significance. With the publication of the NAS report in 2009, the field continues to fulfill scientific criteria by analyzing data and providing statistical validation for methods of identification, yet may often fall short in offering interpretations of the patterns that exist and the underlying factors influencing these observations. Conversely, biocultural anthropology excels at theorizing and interpreting social patterns by recognizing that biology and culture interact to impact an individual’s lived experience, but its foundation often lacks a robust statistical lens. However, if we combine the analytics of forensic anthropology with the interpretive power of biocultural anthropology—specifically, social theories of behavior—we have the opportunity to explore the intersection between personhood, the body, and society. One such example can be seen through examining the prolonged (and often generational) effects of structural, physical, and cultural violence, social injustices, inequities, and inequalities that may affect an individual’s propensity to be both a perpetrator AND a victim of circumstance. This paper examines previous work discussing the theoretical foundations of forensic anthropology and existing social theory research to bridge the gap between the “who,” the “why,” and the “when” as they exist in the forensic record. Ultimately, the goal is to provide meaningful steps for understanding, interpreting, and potentially influencing change in the field of forensic anthropology. Full article

As online spaces have become increasingly hostile, some internet users have begun to organize collectively to counter hatred through what is known as counterspeech. This article explores how loosely affiliated individuals come to feel a strong sense of community in such efforts, even when they have never met in person. Using digital ethnographic data collected on the international counterspeaking group #iamhere, I argue that participants build imagined rhetorical communities: affective bonds forged through shared moral language and collective communicative action. Although members are geographically dispersed and largely unknown to one another offline, they nonetheless experience a sense of solidarity rooted in their common linguistic and ethical framework. This article shows how rhetorical practices, particularly those focused on empathy and civil discourse, become the glue that holds these activist formations together. By examining the ways moral discourse enables both individual agency and collective identity in counterspeech, this work offers new insight into how human groups form online to resist hatred and assert shared values. Full article

The 1992 cold case homicide of “Ina Jane Doe” illustrates how an interdisciplinary team worked to identify the decedent using a combined approach of skeletal re-analysis, updated forensic art informed by anthropologists’ input, archival research, and forensic investigative genetic genealogy. The original forensic art for “Ina Jane Doe” showed an over-pathologization of skeletal features and an inaccurate hairstyle; however, the case gained notoriety on internet true crime forums leading to speculation about the decedent’s intellectual capacity and physical appearance. The “Ina Jane Doe” case demonstrates the importance of advocating for skeletal re-analysis as more robust methods and technologies emerge in forensic science, as well as the impact of sustained public interest in cold cases. In this case, continuous public interest and online speculation led to anthropologists constructing a team of experts to correct and revise narratives about the decedent. Forensic anthropologists’ role in cold cases may include offering skeletal re-analysis, recognizing and correcting errors in the original estimations of the biological profile, searching for missing person matches, and/or working collaboratively with subject matter experts in forensic art, odontology and forensic investigative genetic genealogy. Full article

Gold mining has played a central role in shaping Peruvian society from pre-Inca civilizations to the present. However, existing literature offers fragmented perspectives, often focusing on isolated themes such as metallurgy, colonial mercury use, or environmental degradation, without integrating these across time and territory. This review addresses that gap by offering a place-based synthesis that combines archaeological, historical, legal, environmental, and comparative insights. Drawing on both Spanish-language sources and international literature, the paper reconstructs Peru’s gold mining trajectory through five historical phases—pre-Inca, Inca, colonial, republican, and contemporary—highlighting continuities and ruptures in governance, labor systems, and environmental impacts. The analysis reveals persistent challenges in Peru’s gold sector, including informality, mercury pollution, and weak institutional capacity. Compared to other mining economies such as Chile, Ghana, and South Africa, Peru exhibits greater fragmentation and limited integration of mining into national development strategies. The review also explores the role of gold in the global energy transition, emphasizing its relevance in clean technologies and green finance, and identifies policy gaps that hinder Peru’s alignment with sustainability goals. By bridging linguistic and disciplinary divides, this synthesis contributes to a more inclusive historiography of extractive industries and underscores the need for interdisciplinary approaches to mining governance. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reimagining of Peru’s gold sector, one that prioritizes environmental justice, social equity, and long-term resilience. Full article

In this article I analyze the symbolic role of the hospital in its social context, from its creation in Rome in the 2nd century BCE to contemporary Montreal hospitals. I trace the change from its original role as a site to isolate the sick to limit the symbolic pollution of the allegedly perfect social body of the Roman state, a trope that became an important vector of unity as Rome expanded and incorporated greater numbers of foreigners and slaves. Today, however, western hospitals have become a semiotic engine where patients construct a new biography to counter the depersonalisation of contemporary medical practices. I propose that today patients use the hospital as raw material to construct a temporal framework that substitutes the rhythms of everyday life that illness and the institutional culture of the hospital have interrupted. These narratives adhere to the same basic structure: the entrance scenario is always admission to the hospital; the plot structure is built with the non-medical details of the daily hospital routine. Surrounded by a neoliberal ethos that insists on the autonomy of the self but silenced by the mechanisation of illness, contemporary patients transform hospitals into semiotic engines where patients use their immediate environment to re-engineer new voices of the self. Full article

Higher education inculcates in students an enduring curiosity about the world. Accomplishing this goal requires helping undergraduates recognize that learning is a social process occurring within multiple communities of practice. Each of these collectives provides different lenses through which aspects of reality are illuminated, none encompassing all there is to know about a subject. Students thus appreciate that learning is an open-ended processes driven by a curiosity that is never satisfied. Knowledge resulting from that process is forever being refined, a project to which undergraduates can contribute. Appreciating the many ways of knowing the world requires engaging meaningfully with these distinct communities. This is best achieved by participating directly in the work and lives of multiple such collectives. Field schools provide excellent opportunities in which students come to perceive, think about, and act in worlds constituted by the community of archeologists and that comprise people hosting and participating in the investigations. We use our experiences directing an archeological field school in northwest Honduras from 1983-2008 to illustrate how we used this learning environment to help undergraduates make original contributions to knowledge of the area’s past while rethinking who they are and what they are capable of achieving. Full article

This article examines how ethnographic methodology and literary theory can advance research engines and artificial intelligence systems beyond the reductive computational approaches that dominate contemporary AI development. Drawing on recent Stanford research revealing fundamental gaps in large language models’ ability to distinguish factual knowledge from belief, I argue that contemporary AI systems enact what I term “abducted semantics”—appropriating the inferential logic of human meaning-making while systematically attenuating the culturally embedded, phenomenologically grounded capacities that generate authentic understanding. Through close analysis of Clifford Geertz’s thick description, Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics, and canonical literary works—Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—I demonstrate that human understanding operates through complex semiotic processes irreducible to pattern-matching and statistical prediction. The article proposes concrete interventions to transform research engines from tools of semantic extraction into technologies that preserve and enhance interpretive richness, arguing that ethnographic and literary methodologies offer essential correctives to the epistemological impoverishment inherent in current AI architectures. Full article

Several people in contemporary postindustrial societies experience difficulties retaining intimate partners. This paper investigates the proximate reasons (the immediate causes of reduced capacity) and the ultimate reasons (the evolutionary causes behind those proximate mechanisms) that lead to such difficulties. I argue that the mechanisms or adaptations involved in partner retention evolved in ancestral preindustrial contexts and may not be effective in contemporary postindustrial settings. Relevant mismatches include the protection of human rights, dependence on intimate partners, freedom in mate choice, and access to parenting resources. I further argue that these mismatches have affected adaptations involved in partner retention, including the expression of undesirable traits, such as aggression and jealousy, insufficient mating effort, poor initial mate choice, and an impaired ability to meet the demands of parenting. As a consequence, many individuals today experience reduced mate-retention capacity, with implications that I explore. Full article

This article highlights the phenomenon of marginalized populations and minorities who espouse white supremacist ideology despite their own ethnic and cultural backgrounds within the USA. This study focusses on how non-Caucasian individuals are attracted to this ideology, its organizations, and how this contradiction is reconciled. Of particular interest is the rise in gun violence or the advocacy of gun violence by non-white individuals in the United States harboring white supremacist ideals and identifying with those principles. Statistical data for national violence is limited to general categories by state and federal law enforcement. This article examines public comments made by high-profile individuals as examples reflecting current attitudes under examination as well as violent acts resulting in deaths perpetrated by minorities motivated by supremacist ideals. Findings suggest that non-Caucasian or minority individuals from multivariant ethnic groups who espouse Nazi ideals are not following a singular objective or unified under one rubric but have mixed motivations rooted in establishing legitimacy and “white proximity”. White supremacist ideology is redefined to suit personal grievances unique to an individuals’ cultural group and/or needs. Full article