"What makes a 17-year-old girl decide to wrap a bomb around her body, walk into a supermarket, and detonate it, killing herself and an 18-year-old girl shopping there? In this book, renowned anthropologist W. Penn Handwerker shows that individual choices, from the fatal to the m…
"In this controversial, thought provoking, and brilliant book, renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá debunk almost everything we 'know' about sex, weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and…
Human culture depends on human minds for its creation, meaning and exchange. But minds also depend on culture for their contents and processes. Past resolutions to this circularity problem have tended to give too much weight to one side and too little weight to the other. In thi…
"This book illustrates how fusion-fission cycles actually constitute what we call "culture." Providing specific case studies, including cultural shifts in the 1960s, recurring "moral panics", and nation-formation, the book concludes with general principles of fusion-fission dyna…
A history of humanity's ancient ancestry draws on ground-breaking scientific findings to offer insight into such debated issues as the evolution of language and race, the domestication of companion animals, and the defeat of the Neanderthals.
On 10 September 2008, amid much fanfare, the Great Collider run by CERN in Geneva was turned on. The Collider was supposed to fire protons around a seventeen-mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to the speed of light and break into even tinier pa…
"This book examines three interlocking topics that are central to all archaeological and anthropological inquiry: the role of technology in human existence; the reproduction of social traditions; the factors that generate cultural diversity and change. The overall aim is to outl…
"This book is about the irreducibility of human evolution to purely biological properties and processes, for human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes. Human evolution over the last few million ye…
