Humans as a species with a deep history.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Forest People
Colin M. Turnbull · 1961
Portrays the Mbuti of the Ituri forest as an egalitarian, playful society whose identity is bound to the forest itself, and argues their way of life…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
Thomas Henry Huxley · 1863
Marshals comparative anatomy of ape and human skeletons to argue, within four years of Darwin's Origin, that humans evolved from the same stock as…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Altruistic Punishment in Humans
Ernst Fehr & Simon Gächter · 2002
Shows experimentally that people will pay to punish free-riders even when punishment yields them no material benefit, and argues this costly,…
+2 more at this level
9 works
Colin M. Turnbull
Portrays the Mbuti of the Ituri forest as an egalitarian, playful society whose identity is bound to the forest itself, and argues their way of life offers a working alternative to hierarchy rather than a primitive stage before it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jared Diamond
Argues that adopting agriculture made most people's lives worse, shorter, more disease-ridden and more unequal than foraging, even though it eventually enabled larger populations and civilisation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Henry Huxley
Marshals comparative anatomy of ape and human skeletons to argue, within four years of Darwin's Origin, that humans evolved from the same stock as the great apes rather than occupying a separate created order.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Wolfgang Köhler
Reports experiments with captive chimpanzees solving tool-use problems and argues their behaviour shows genuine insight rather than blind trial and error, challenging behaviourist accounts of animal learning.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nina G. Jablonski & Gerhard Maré
Brings biological anthropologists and social scientists together to argue that race has no coherent basis in human biology even as its social effects on health, wealth and opportunity remain profound and measurable.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pascal Boyer
Argues that cultural phenomena — religion, gender norms, ethnic conflict — are better explained by the evolved cognitive systems that make some ideas easier to transmit than by treating culture as a thing in itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ernst Fehr & Simon Gächter
Shows experimentally that people will pay to punish free-riders even when punishment yields them no material benefit, and argues this costly, otherwise irrational spite is what sustains cooperation in large groups of strangers.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten & Kevin N. Laland
Argues that cultural change can be studied with the same conceptual toolkit as biological evolution, variation, competition and inheritance, and sets out a unified research programme for doing so.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lee R. Berger et al.
Announces a previously unknown hominin species from a South African cave chamber and argues its mix of primitive and modern traits does not fit neatly into the existing human family tree.
link checked 17 Sept 2026