50 Fun Facts About Anthropology

Which fossil skeleton from Ethiopia was named after a Beatles song played on repeat in the dig camp?

Lucy takes her name from "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which blared from a tape recorder all evening after the find. She lived around 3.2 million years ago.

Which novelist earned an anthropology degree when Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle in place of a thesis?

Kurt Vonnegut left Chicago without a degree after every thesis idea he proposed was rejected. The master's arrived 25 years later, with the novel standing in for the dissertation.

Which Melanesian movements built straw planes and jungle airstrips after World War II to lure back goods?

Cargo cults copied the soldiers they had watched: islanders carved wooden headphones and sat in home-made control towers. The John Frum movement on Tanna in Vanuatu is often called the archetype.

Which primatologist first saw wild chimpanzees at Gombe strip twigs into tools to fish for termites?

Jane Goodall's mentor Louis Leakey replied that science must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human. She also found that chimpanzees kill and eat monkeys.

Which extinct human relatives are named after a German valley where workers dug up bones in 1856?

Neanderthals owe their name to the Neander Valley, itself named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century hymn writer who often visited. A local schoolteacher first saw that the bones were not modern.

Which anthropologist became a household name with Coming of Age in Samoa, a debut study of adolescence?

Margaret Mead argued that the turmoil of adolescence was shaped by upbringing, not fixed by biology. Published in 1928, the book catapulted her to national visibility.

Which balsa raft did Thor Heyerdahl sail from Peru to argue that South Americans settled Polynesia?

Kon-Tiki drifted for 101 days and some 6,900 km before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus. The genetic and linguistic evidence still points the other way, to settlers from Southeast Asia.

Which author of Their Eyes Were Watching God trained as an anthropologist and collected Florida folklore?

Zora Neale Hurston published her Florida folklore as Mules and Men in 1935, two years before the novel. She later studied rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Which enzyme do most adults largely stop making after weaning, though herders like the Fulani and Bedouin often keep it?

Lactase digests the sugar in milk, and in most mammals it fades after weaning. In north-west Europe, by contrast, around nine in ten people keep making it for life.

Which phrase names the disorientation Kalervo Oberg mapped in four phases, starting with a 'honeymoon'?

Culture shock is usually described in four phases: honeymoon, negotiation, adjustment and adaptation. Oberg first presented the idea to the Women's Club of Rio de Janeiro in 1954.

Which 'missing link', accepted for four decades, was exposed in 1953 as a human skull with an ape's jaw?

Piltdown Man surfaced at a Sussex gravel pit in 1912, and the teeth in its jaw had been filed down to look more human. A few researchers voiced doubts almost at once.

Which gift-giving feast of Pacific Northwest peoples did Canada outlaw from 1885 until 1951?

Potlatch hosts raised their family's standing by giving wealth away, which missionaries and officials condemned as wasteful. The feasts carried on underground until the law was dropped.

From which language of what Captain Cook called the Friendly Islands did English borrow 'taboo'?

Tongan supplied the word in 1777, when Cook wrote that anything forbidden to be eaten or used was called taboo. In the islands today, tapu means sacred or holy.

Which extinct human group was first identified from the DNA of a finger bone found in a Siberian cave?

Denisovans are named after Denisova Cave, itself named after Denis, a hermit who lived there in the 1700s. Their DNA survives in living people, notably Melanesians, Aboriginal Australians and Filipino Negritos.

Which 'tribe' in a Horace Miner satire turns out to be his own countrymen, their name spelled backwards?

Nacirema is "American" reversed, and Miner's deadpan 1956 paper recasts tooth-brushing as a mouth ritual and the medicine cabinet as a charm-box. Introductory textbooks have reprinted it ever since.

Which German-born physics graduate is often called the father of American anthropology?

Franz Boas wrote his 1881 thesis on the colour of water, then turned to anthropology after a geographical expedition among the Inuit of Baffin Island. He became Columbia's professor of anthropology in 1899.

Which fieldwork pioneer wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific after years in the Trobriand Islands?

Bronisław Malinowski was a subject of Austria-Hungary, so he risked internment as an enemy alien when war broke out during his 1914 trip to Australia. He was born in Kraków.

Which Melanesian exchange passes shell necklaces clockwise and shell armbands counterclockwise between islands?

Kula valuables are never put to practical use: partners canoe hundreds of miles to trade them, and even brief possession of a famous piece brings prestige.

Which founder of structural anthropology turned his travels in Brazil into the memoir Tristes Tropiques?

Claude Lévi-Strauss lived to 100, the first member of the Académie française to reach that age. He had gone to Brazil in 1935 as a visiting professor of sociology in São Paulo.

Whose essay 'Deep Play' reads a Balinese cockfight as a story the villagers tell about themselves?

Clifford Geertz won the villagers' trust only after he and his wife fled a police raid on an illegal cockfight alongside them. The essay is a showcase of his method of thick description.

Which country did Ruth Benedict analyse, without visiting it, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword?

Japan was out of reach in wartime, so Benedict studied it at a distance, through films, newspapers, literature and interviews with Japanese-Americans.

Which forensic anthropologist writes the Temperance Brennan novels that inspired the TV drama Bones?

Kathy Reichs gave her heroine her own profession, having consulted for the chief medical examiner's office in North Carolina. She also taught anthropology at UNC Charlotte.

Which field joins cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology in the American four-field approach?

Archaeology counts as part of anthropology mainly in North America. Elsewhere it is usually treated as an independent discipline, or grouped with history.

Which principle, named in print by philosopher Alain Locke, says beliefs make sense only in their own society?

Cultural relativism became popular after World War II, in reaction to Nazism, colonialism and racism. The idea is decades older than the label, which only became common in the 1940s.

Which term did William Graham Sumner popularise in Folkways for judging other groups by one's own?

Ethnocentrism, as Sumner put it in 1906, treats one's own group as the centre of everything. The word itself is thought to have been coined earlier by Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz.

Which phrase did Arnold van Gennep coin for ceremonies such as weddings, initiations and funerals?

Rite of passage anglicises his French title, Les rites de passage. Van Gennep pictured society as a house of rooms and corridors, with each ceremony moving a person from one room to the next.

Which term, from the Latin for 'threshold', did Victor Turner give the in-between stage of a ritual?

Liminality is the state Turner summed up in a 1967 essay title as "Betwixt and Between": the old status has been left behind, but the new one has not yet begun.

Which term, from the Greek for 'people' and 'I write', names a first-hand portrait of one community?

Ethnography usually rests on fieldwork lasting a year or more, living with local people and learning their ways. Ancient authors wrote such accounts of foreigners long before it was a science.

Which belief, named from the Latin for 'breath', holds that creatures, plants, rivers and rocks have souls?

Animism is a scholar's label from 1871: peoples who see the world this way often have no word for it in their own languages, or even a word for religion.

Which word for a spirit healer reached English from the Tungusic languages of Siberia by way of Russian?

Shaman was picked up by Russians who met Siberia's peoples, and a 1698 translation of a merchant's account of a Russian embassy to China introduced it to English readers.

Which word did linguist Kenneth Pike coin for an insider's view of their own way of life?

Emic was clipped from 'phonemic', and its twin etic from 'phonetic', for an outsider's account. Pike coined both in 1954, arguing that the tools of linguistics could describe any human behaviour.

Which way of moving do the Laetoli footprints, left in volcanic ash 3.7 million years ago, record?

Bipedalism came before big brains, the Laetoli trail showed: its makers strode like people while their skulls were still ape-sized. Mary Leakey's team found the prints in 1976.

On which continent did Homo sapiens first appear, as 315,000-year-old fossils from Jebel Irhoud suggest?

Africa is where the species arose, and the Jebel Irhoud remains from Morocco pushed its known age back by more than 100,000 years when they were redated in 2017.

Which human species found in an Indonesian cave is nicknamed 'the Hobbit' for standing about 1.1 metres tall?

Homo floresiensis lived on the island of Flores until about 50,000 years ago. Its discoverers were looking for something else: traces of the first modern people to travel from Asia to Australia.

Which Tanzanian ravine, named from a Maasai word for wild sisal, did the Leakeys make famous for fossils?

Olduvai was home to Homo habilis about 1.9 million years ago, then to Paranthropus boisei and later Homo erectus. Its name comes from oldupai, the Maasai word for a plant that grows all along it.

What does Homo habilis, a name coined in 1964 for an early maker of stone tools, mean in English?

Handy man was a label suggested by Raymond Dart, from a Latin word meaning able, handy and mentally skilful. Many researchers at first refused to accept the fossils as a new species.

Which Homo erectus fossils from Zhoukoudian in China vanished in 1941 on their way to wartime safekeeping?

Peking Man remains from at least 40 individuals were packed into two wooden footlockers for US Marines to carry out of China. Nobody knows what became of them after 4 December 1941.

Which mosquito-borne disease does carrying one sickle-cell gene help people to survive?

Malaria kills fewer carriers of the trait, so the gene stays common wherever the parasite is endemic. Inheriting two copies, though, brings the severe symptoms of sickle-cell disease.

Which idea, named for a Yale linguist and a fire prevention engineer, says language shapes thought?

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis honours Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, who inspected buildings for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. Whorf drew his boldest claims from how Hopi treats time.

Which opening in the base of the skull sits further forward in species that walk upright?

Foramen magnum position is the main argument that Sahelanthropus, a fossil skull from Chad, may have been the earliest known upright walker. A forward opening lets the head balance on top of the spine.

Which descent system do Sumatra's Minangkabau and Ghana's Akan both follow?

Matrilineal custom among the Minangkabau passes property, family name and land from mother to daughter. They are the largest society of this kind in the world.

Which form of marriage, practised among Tibetans in Nepal, joins two or more brothers to the same wife?

Polyandry of this fraternal kind keeps a family's land intact and undivided, because brothers who share one wife have no need to split the farm between them.

Which way of life, still followed by Tanzania's Hadza, has filled at least 90 percent of human history?

Hunting and gathering emerged with Homo erectus about 1.8 million years ago and stayed the norm until agriculture arose in the Neolithic. Such societies are typically nomadic groups of a few dozen people.

In Elman Service's scheme of political organisation, which unit comes before tribe, chiefdom and state?

Band societies are usually foragers numbering no more than 30 to 50 people, with only weak leadership: power within them is generally egalitarian.

Which Amazonian people did Napoleon Chagnon call 'the fierce people' in a best-selling study?

Yanomami villages hosted Chagnon for seventeen months from 1964. His claim that their most successful warriors father the most children made him one of the most disputed scholars in his field.

Which confederacy did railroad lawyer Lewis Henry Morgan describe in a founding work of ethnology?

Iroquois hosts returned the interest: the Seneca adopted Morgan into their Hawk Clan in 1847, partly to honour his help in a dispute over their reservation.

Which English scholar's Primitive Culture gave the classic definition of culture as a 'complex whole'?

E. B. Tylor left school at 16 without a degree, yet in 1896 he became the first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford. The definition is the opening sentence of his 1871 book.

Which study of magic and religion by James Frazer takes its title from an episode in Virgil's Aeneid?

The Golden Bough grew from two volumes in 1890 to twelve by 1915. In Virgil's poem, Aeneas must present the branch to the gatekeeper of Hades to be let into the underworld.

Which nephew of Émile Durkheim argued in The Gift that every present creates an obligation to repay?

Marcel Mauss saw three duties in every exchange: to give, to receive and, most important of all, to reciprocate. His 1925 essay remains the foundation of theories of reciprocity.

Which country, where Tok Pisin is a lingua franca, is the world's most linguistically diverse?

Papua New Guinea counts about 840 living languages, though the total depends on where a language ends and a dialect begins. Most of them are indigenous Papuan languages.