Category Archives: Human behavior

Smithsonian Perspectives

The American Anthropological Association held its annual meeting in San Francisco in November, bringing together [...]

The Quality of Mercy

Writers Joyce and Richard Wolkomir crossed the threshold of Central Vermont Medical Center, not far [...]

Expressions: The Visible Link

Charles Darwin Wikimedia Commons He was an Englishman who went on a five-year voyage when [...]

A Social Divide Written in Stone

Cliff Palace Wikimedia Commons One of the great mysteries of North American archaeology concerns the [...]

Discovering the Odds

Nicolaus Copernicus Wikimedia Commons Whizzing along a highway in our cars or jetting across the [...]

Bone Specialist On Call

Wikimedia Commons The skeleton of a child, 10 to 12 years old, had been found [...]

Shop for This Label: “No Assembly Required”

Recently my wife and I purchased a new outdoor gas grill. It was delivered to [...]

You Are What You Buy

At a Wal-Mart, James Twitchell, professor of 19th-century poetry at the University of Florida, in [...]

Log-o-phil-ia Is Addictive

In 1994 a computer-sciences graduate student in Ohio named Anu Garg posted this announcement on [...]

Happily Ever After?

At a certain age, many of us turn to the obituaries after scanning the front [...]

We’re in a Jam

Consider how traffic bedevils modern America: we collectively waste more than 4.6 billion hours stuck [...]

Following the Track of the Cat

Tracking is deeply ingrained in the San Bushmen of Namibia on the southwestern edge of [...]

Testimony from the Iceman

The city of Bolzano, in northern Italy, has many things of which it can boast. [...]

The Hunt for Hot Stuff

/ “A gray-haired, cherub-faced 56-year-old, Meskhi is a local leader of the international effort to [...]

Rethinking Neanderthals

Indicating that Neanderthals buried their dead, a stone-lined pit in southwest France held the 70,000-year-old [...]