Quotes About Anthropology

On average, human brains have shrunk some 10 percent in size over the last 20,000 years,

But Medea is neither an anthropological retelling of myth in the style of Mary Renault, nor a simpleminded story of men-versus-women, of a sensuous moon-and-earth religion versus a cold and abstract sky theology. It is a study of power, and of the operations of power, and of the behavior of human beings under pressure when power squeezes them tight.

I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?

I view science as the priceless legacy of humanity's search for understanding of the material world. But in an unequal economic system, science cannot avoid being stained by prevailing prejudices and bigotry - not only social sciences, like anthropology, but the so-called hard sciences like biology.

But one may acquire what MacIntyre calls a "second first language," a language which is learned in the same way that a child learns to use the native tongue. A missionary or an anthropologist who really hopes to understand and enter into the adopted culture will not do so by trying to learn the language in the way a tourist uses a phrasebook and a dictionary.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

African and European skulls of half a million years ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead

1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas

the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own.

Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka

WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us

New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world's land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world's 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.

The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years.

For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.

Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago.

If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.)

That's why the question what men are good for continues to be debated within our societies, as well as between anthropologists

Children in the New Guinea highlands have the swollen bellies characteristic of a high-bulk but protein-deficient diet. New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia.

In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.