Anthropology
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50 free Anthropology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Anthropology asks the biggest question there is: what makes us who we are? Its answers come from very different places. One researcher spends a year in a remote village, another measures a fossil skull, and a third records a language with only a handful of speakers left. This quiz covers the ground an introductory course does. Expect the great fossil discoveries and one notorious fake, the pioneers who invented modern fieldwork, classic studies of exchange, marriage, descent and belief, and the core vocabulary of sociocultural anthropology. A few questions follow the subject into novels, television and one very famous raft. It suits students revising the basics before a first exam, quiz hosts after a social science round, and anyone curious about how people everywhere live, trade, marry and make meaning. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fossil skeleton from Ethiopia was named after a Beatles song played on repeat in the dig camp?
Lucy
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.
Q 02Which novelist earned an anthropology degree when Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle in place of a thesis?
Kurt Vonnegut
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.
Q 03Which Melanesian movements built straw planes and jungle airstrips after World War II to lure back goods?
Cargo cults
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.
Q 04Which primatologist first saw wild chimpanzees at Gombe strip twigs into tools to fish for termites?
Jane Goodall
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.
Q 05Which extinct human relatives are named after a German valley where workers dug up bones in 1856?
Neanderthals
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.
Q 06Which anthropologist became a household name with Coming of Age in Samoa, a debut study of adolescence?
Margaret Mead
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.
Q 07Which balsa raft did Thor Heyerdahl sail from Peru to argue that South Americans settled Polynesia?
Kon-Tiki
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.
Q 08Which author of Their Eyes Were Watching God trained as an anthropologist and collected Florida folklore?
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Q 09Which enzyme do most adults largely stop making after weaning, though herders like the Fulani and Bedouin often keep it?
Lactase
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.
Q 10Which phrase names the disorientation Kalervo Oberg mapped in four phases, starting with a 'honeymoon'?
Culture shock
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.
Q 11Which 'missing link', accepted for four decades, was exposed in 1953 as a human skull with an ape's jaw?
Piltdown Man
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.
Q 12Which gift-giving feast of Pacific Northwest peoples did Canada outlaw from 1885 until 1951?
Potlatch
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.
Q 13From which language of what Captain Cook called the Friendly Islands did English borrow 'taboo'?
Tongan
Q 21Which country did Ruth Benedict analyse, without visiting it, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword?
Japan
Japan was out of reach in wartime, so Benedict studied it at a distance, through films, newspapers, literature and interviews with Japanese-Americans.
Q 22Which forensic anthropologist writes the Temperance Brennan novels that inspired the TV drama Bones?
Kathy Reichs
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.
Q 23Which field joins cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology in the American four-field approach?
Archaeology
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.
Q 14Which extinct human group was first identified from the DNA of a finger bone found in a Siberian cave?
Denisovans
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.
Q 15Which 'tribe' in a Horace Miner satire turns out to be his own countrymen, their name spelled backwards?
Nacirema
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.
Q 16Which German-born physics graduate is often called the father of American anthropology?
Franz Boas
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.
Q 17Which fieldwork pioneer wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific after years in the Trobriand Islands?
Bronisław Malinowski
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.
Q 18Which Melanesian exchange passes shell necklaces clockwise and shell armbands counterclockwise between islands?
Kula
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.
Q 19Which founder of structural anthropology turned his travels in Brazil into the memoir Tristes Tropiques?
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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.
Q 20Whose essay 'Deep Play' reads a Balinese cockfight as a story the villagers tell about themselves?
Clifford Geertz
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.
Archaeology counts as part of anthropology mainly in North America. Elsewhere it is usually treated as an independent discipline, or grouped with history.
Q 24Which principle, named in print by philosopher Alain Locke, says beliefs make sense only in their own society?
Cultural relativism
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.
Q 25Which term did William Graham Sumner popularise in Folkways for judging other groups by one's own?
Ethnocentrism
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.
Q 26Which phrase did Arnold van Gennep coin for ceremonies such as weddings, initiations and funerals?
Rite of passage
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.
Q 27Which term, from the Latin for 'threshold', did Victor Turner give the in-between stage of a ritual?
Liminality
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.
Q 28Which term, from the Greek for 'people' and 'I write', names a first-hand portrait of one community?
Ethnography
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.
Q 29Which belief, named from the Latin for 'breath', holds that creatures, plants, rivers and rocks have souls?
Animism
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.
Q 30Which word for a spirit healer reached English from the Tungusic languages of Siberia by way of Russian?
Shaman
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.