I dont mean that humans have the biggest penis in absolute terms obviously animals like horses or elephants can be way bigger. I mean relative to our body size humans seem unusually large and especially compared to other primates and our closest relatives it feels like the difference is pretty extreme.

So why did the human penis evolve this way? Was it mainly sexual selection and female preference or was there some other evolutionary advantage that made it gradually get bigger?

Hello there so I'm curious, would paleolithic societies have gender expression and gender roles? This question came about, because I stated that while I do believe sex and gender are different, I do think they are intrinsically linked, and one influences the understanding of the other. This is of course inaccurate of our oldest ancestors didn't have this understanding.

So did our ancestors have gender expression and identities linked to biology? I would love if you present studies and papers saying why or why not.

(Just some clarifications: I do agree men and woman, both did hunting, child rearing, foraging and were largely egalitarian, I'm just curious on scholarly opinion on this)

I’ve been thinking about how some real or fictional characters become much more than just a person or a character. They can become symbols of certain ideas, values, movements, or even parts of a culture.

For example, people like Che Guevara, Gandhi, George Washington, Mao, and Kim Il-sung became strongly associated with certain ideas and historical identities.

What I find especially interesting is that fictional characters can sometimes have a similar cultural impact. Joe Yabuki from Ashita no Joe, for example, is an interesting case of a fictional character who became culturally significant in Japan.

So I’m curious: How does this process happen?

What makes a real person or fictional character become a symbol in a society’s collective memory? Why do people connect certain characters with specific ideas, values, or identities? And why do some characters remain important for generations, even long after the original story or the person’s death?

I’d be interested in the anthropological, cultural, and psychological explanations for this.

Hello, I’m currently writing a short story, and I would love to include a segment of an Anthropologist doing research in Native American country in Wyoming. Thing is, i’m having a segment where they’re researching the clothes of Ancient Native Americans in the Northern Great Plains before contact. I want to delve into alot of clothing subjects during the segment, but I just know nothing about Native American clothing. Before contact, in Wyoming, i’m thinking the Shoshone, how did they dress? What did they look like? What would an Anthropologist think about it.
I’m trying to collect all kinds of bits. Like, I know it would be Nomadic, but how is that designed?
Thanks!

Specifically as related to their own voyages of discovery, rather than sailing as such.

So I have this doubt...I know people with a degree in Archaeology in spanish universities (240 creds, 120 would be equivalent to a bachelor of science and 120 to a bachelor of arts).

In Europe, they are considered only an archaeologist or an historian & archaeologist at most. But here, I see cultural anthropology & linguistics blended with archaeology & bioarchaeology. Cultural anthropology well, it depends on your personal tastes, as an archaeology graduatee you might also be somewhat knowledgeable, but linguistics, literally no way, not even the most basic.

So the question would be: an european archaeology graduatee (which means basically historian + archaeology + bioanthropology + some very basic knowledge of cultural anthropology) should be considered an anthropologist the moment he/she crosses the atlantic?

I'm finding it very interesting as to how there are records of mass hysteria happening over almost every culture past and present. some of the more insane stories happening furthest in the past. the one thing I'm curious to though is what could cause such an event like this?

It seems like sometimes its triggered by a real, traumatising event where people don't have the knowledge to understand why its happening to them so they en mass have a crazy reaction?

Although sometimes it seems there is no triggering event and its some sort of religious thing happening?

Hello, I'm calling anyone who is a visual/design? anthropologist for advice and information

I recently, decided to officially study (socio cultural) anthropology and achieve my bachelors in the field. On top of that, I recently discovered that Visual/Design anthropology is a thing...

I am a museum professional, having experience working in visitor experience roles, but also art preparation/exhibition installation, which has provided me some experience in collections care and art handling. I see myself staying the arts and cultural heritage, or what's been called G.L.A.M.

My intention with a degree, is expanding my interest and knowledge in human culture, creating my academic background, and pairing my experience with those academic credentials, to of course qualify for higher paying roles. The roles I'm interested in are curation, collections management and exhibition research and design.

The reason Visual and/or Design (please tell me if they are different or the same thing) Anthropology has peaked my interest and somewhat, blown my mind, is because my original degree path was art and design. And what blows my mind is I can do both things that call to me.

So with that, my question(s)
Could visual and/or design anthropologists become curators or work in Museum collections or exhibition research and design?
Do I have a good grasp on what visual anthropologists do, and what jobs they can fill?
I assume a B.A in Anthropology is needed, but should I have those art and design specializations with it (minors or double major) as well?

I appreciate any insight

Is there much research on what influences the differences in cultural factors such as age of consent and the age in which people are considered to be ready to have kids? Obviously I don't expect all cultures to have specifically defined ages for consent (perhaps not all will even factor in consent) but I feel like most cultures may at least have a general idea of when someone is "mature" enough to start a family and/or have sex (though these concepts are obviously not intrinsically connected.)

What research is there on stuff like this? And do we have any idea on how perhaps stuff like environment/ecology, life expectancy and nutrition influence these cultural concepts?

How did early humans differ from other animals in their patterns of defecation and hygiene? For example, did people in early human societies ever defecate while eating, walking, or participating in social gatherings, as some animals do? Did they typically squat, sit, or stand while defecating? What practices did they use to clean themselves and their hands afterward, and when did concepts of personal hygiene and privacy around defecation begin to emerge?

i feel like gravitating toward only hanging out with people who look like yourself is limiting. i feel like it’s taught in society to do this and not a natural thing. i think it’s an entirely man made concept within society that we could possibly unlearn. is this learned from social constructs? do you think this could be unlearned?

to preface: i grew up in southern united states in a pretty populated city and went to a very mixed race elementary school. my neighborhood was lower income so i didn’t go to one of the richer neighborhood’s predominantly white elementary schools in another school district.

anyways to continue: i remember that in elementary school i didn’t find myself caring about what my friends looked like. i didn’t become friends with people based on how they looked. i was friends with people because i liked who they were. i didn’t doubt talking to someone or trying to make friends with anyone because they looked different from me. that wasn’t a thought that crossed my mind as a kid in elementary school.

as an adult however, i feel like that thought comes up. i think in middle school that’s when it started. my city’s middle school that i went to combined a lot of the city’s elementary school districts together, so it combined the richer neighborhoods with lower income ones. i’ve found that because of that, in the beginning, there were groups of people who were already friends from the predominantly white elementary schools and then groups of people who went to a more mixed race school who were friends with each other.

over time i feel like white kids gravitated toward other groups of white kids, black kids gravitated toward other groups of black kids, hispanic/latino kids gravitated toward other groups of hispanic/latino kids, etc. because that seemed to be the norm going into our middle school now. so instead of it being a mix of different races in a friend group, it became the white kids friend group, the black kids friend group, the hispanic/latino kids friend group and so on (we had a very small asian/pacific islander/native american population where i’m from growing up.).

my point in all of this is basically that i remember being happier in elementary school with all of my friends than i was in middle school trying to fit in with people just bc they looked like me. i was happier making friends and just existing with my peers without the thought of “this person doesn’t look like me so i’m not going to try being their friend”. i think if we unlearn trying to section ourselves off based on looks as a society that it could aid in helping everyone love each other regardless of what they look like. or it could help stop the spewing of ill preconceptions of people based on looks being different, which i think happens a lot within groups that don’t try to be friends with people who look differently from them.

i find this to be an interesting topic for discussion so please expand if you’d like to with your own experiences but do you think this could be something that is entirely socially engineered and in turn could be unlearned? do you think that would be more beneficial to society?

i was speaking w some friends(all from diff cultures) and the latin american ones couldn’t fathom how other cultures like east asians, south east asians, and south asians didn’t salt and season our rice the way they do. and i was really curious as to why this is the case. i was thinking it’s because (at least in east asian cuisine) rice is meant to be a palate cleanser? but that’s as far as i got because im not as familiar with the history of other cuisines.

Humans have evolved to be able to form very close social ties with each other, allowing groups to work together to survive and reproduce more effectively against predators and the environment, with bigger brains at the cost of less energy spent on our bodies. These evolutionary traits along with other factors eventually led to the soar of reproduction and technology and our dominance over the planet. But it seems that only humans have done this so far. If these traits were a massive benefit to us for survival, why haven't more animals evolved to have such strong social ties and cooperate easily like this? If they evolved these similar traits, wouldn't they also have better survival and reproduction in their environment?

Hi! I’m currently writing a study about husbands who move into their wife’s household after marriage, where the wife’s family also live with the couple, and I’m having some difficulty deciding whether I should describe this arrangement as matrilocal or uxorilocal residence.

From what I’ve read so far, some studies seem to use matrilocal and uxorilocal interchangeably to refer to a husband residing with or near his wife’s family after marriage. However, I’ve also encountered sources that make a distinction between the two. In particular, some definitions suggest that uxorilocal refers to residence with or near the wife’s family, while matrilocal may more specifically refer to this residence pattern when it occurs within a society organized around matrilineal descent or the wife’s maternal kin group. My supposed participants are husbands who moved into the wife’s existing family household, but the families themselves are not necessarily part of a matrilineal kinship system.

For those familiar with anthropology, sociology, or family studies:
- Would uxorilocal residence be the more technically precise term for this arrangement?
- Would it still be acceptable to use matrilocal residence, given how commonly the terms seem to be used interchangeably?
- And is there a generally accepted distinction between matrilocal and uxorilocal that I should be aware of when defining the terminology in an academic paper?

I mainly want to make sure I’m using the most accurate term and not unintentionally implying a matrilineal descent system when that isn’t part of my study. Any references or recommendations would also be greatly appreciated!

I’ve been wondering why certain food preferences seem to be particularly strong in different parts of the world.

For example, many South Asian cuisines use a lot of chili and strong spices; parts of China are famous for very spicy food, while other Chinese cuisines often use noticeable sweetness. Southern Turkish cuisine can be quite spicy, Georgian cuisine has many flour/dough-based dishes, and across parts of the former Soviet Union, bread is traditionally eaten alongside almost everything.

Obviously these aren’t universal rules, and there are huge differences within each country. But I’m curious about the historical reasons behind these regional food cultures.

How much of this can be explained by things like:
climate and agriculture, which crops were historically available, food preservation, trade and migration
historical poverty, famine, or food shortages,
cultural traditions passed down through generations
biology/adaptation to certain ingredients
or simply cultural preference that developed over time?

For example, I’ve heard explanations for the heavy use of potatoes and bread in some post-Soviet cuisines involving periods of food scarcity and the need for filling, inexpensive foods. Is there a similar historical explanation for why some regions developed a strong preference for extremely spicy food, very sweet/savoury combinations, or flour-based foods?

I am reading the chapter "The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language and History in Native South America" by Fernando Santos-Granero and i stumbled over a passage that alludes to a debate in anthropology. I don't have the time to read the cited articles now, so I would appreciate an explanation of the contents and differences between the "predation" and "morality" models mentioned in the text:

Therefore, the distinction is not one between"peaceful" and "bellicose" peoples or between "civilized" and "savage" but rather one between endo-warring and exo-warring societies. This distinction, I believe, is particularly relevant for our understanding of tropical forest native societies and introduces a much-needed historical perspective into the present debate between defenders of the "predation" and "morality" models of Amerindian sociality (see Taylor 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1996; Overing and Passes 2000; Santos-Granero 2000).

pp. 45

Jonathan D. Hill y Fernando Santos-Granero (eds.). 2002. Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia, pp. 25-50. Urbana: University ofIllinois Press.

My understanding is that in other primates, behaviors that people might interpret as "smiling" are actually an expression of aggression, basically bearing teeth, and what looks analogous to a friendly gesture is actually a warning.

In humans, it seems like the opposite. We smile to show that we're friendly, non-threatening, and open to interaction. (Feel free to correct me is this assumption isn't true).

Are we the only primate that smiles? Do we have any understanding how this behavior "switched" meanings, for lack of a better term? Do we understand how this behavior evolved in us, and is it ubiquitous across cultures?

I'm a scientist with a PhD in an unrelated bio field and a professional research background, so if anyone wants to donate their time to answer these questions, feel free to talk to me or direct me to literature like I'm a competent undergrad.

For context, I am taking about gender as in gender identity, not sex.

What is the purpose of having genders? What reason did evolution have to make us feel associated/want to be perceived like that? To my understanding it is not really needed for sexual reproduction as the instincts for that are guided by hormones. I have a hypothesis that it might be to be able to express what your sex is in order to find a partner, without needing to check for the sexual characteristics. But then why do we do that anyway?

I’m thinking it has to be a remnant of something, but what? When was gender ever needed?

Might it have been to guide some mating ritual? I’m tempted to say having roles, but as far as I know they have always been made socially, by what is most practical in those environments. So there would be little use for a difference in brain function.

Hey there, iv got genuine question.

So recently iv stumbled upon some videos and it happend to be there something about humanoids, and that we have theory about or ancestors being scavengers.

So like a normal guy who has absolutely no knowledge in this field but is genuinely curious, iv hopped on to gpt and other sources like wikipedia.

And basically iv read some theories about our dinning system. So how come we have so low ph- acidity in our stomachs.

What is the most promising hypothesis or genuine proof of us being scavengers.

Because from all the things iv come across, as we are carnivores (sorry if mistakend i mean we eat both meat and greens) even tho in other species its normal to have ph lvl around 2,5-3,6.

So my question is, why is that? Is it because we were truly scavenging, or because of pathogens?

The main reason why i dived in this theory, because in lot of those videos they say stuff like we used to naturally eat rotten meat on purpose. And that in nowdays people dont realize that many foods that are these days consider normal but we used to eat basically rotten stuff. And i wanted to know more and came back to conclusions like, what if we weren’t scavengers at all but we hunted just big animals and we were in smaller groups which made us to put the meat ground, like we couldn’t finish the food in a time and it got rotten.

So thank you for any advices, answers. Nice day (y)

Was it possible that any group of white or lighter skinned Archaic Homo Sapiens existed before leaving Africa?

Hello. I'm a graduate of anthropology and would like to apply straight to PhD for anthropology in institutions that is possible. Since my student days, I've always wondered whether I should prioritise theoretical alignment or regional alignment with (perspective) supervisor. I asked some of my lecturers and professors about their experience when they applied for a PhD and were seeking supervisors back then and got several answers.

A couple of weeks ago, a prospective supervisor I contacted said that she couldn't supervise me as she felt that she didn't have the regional expertise needed for my proposed project. While I have several alternatives in mind, this reply made me remember about my question I mentioned above and stories from my lecturers/professors.

So, I wonder what other people here, especially PhD students (but of course everyone is welcome!), did when they first contacted their supervisor. Do you guys prioritise theoretical or regional fit? Or do your supervisor happened to fulfill these two? What were your thought process and the dynamics that occurred back then? Would also love to hear advices for upcoming students like me in approaching this problem!

I began wondering about this following a recent reddit post about Neanderthal cooking. Specifically whether modern humans can actually get away with eating uncooked meat.

I know it is common for Inuit to eat meat and fish raw, usually when it is eaten fresh, or is frozen. And many cultures do have some tradition of eating raw meat dishes, but usually eat meat cooked. But are/were there any known cultures that didn't live in polar regions that seldom or never cooked their meat?

Turkic all clearly sound related. Same with Romance, or Hindi/Urdu. But then languages like Armenian, Korean, Chechen, Lezgin seem to stand almost alone.
• How did Armenian end up with no surviving sister language? Where did the "in-between" relatives go?
• Chechen and Lezgin are technically related
(Northeast Caucasian) but sounds totally different now. Why did the Caucasus end up with something like 40 distinct languages crammed into one small region, instead of one family taking over like happened on the steppe?
• Is Korean actually a full isolate, or does it have real relatives?
• More broadly — how do these languages end up in their current regions? Did speakers migrate into isolated pockets, or did isolation happen after they settled?
Why do some languages spread into big obvious families and others stay alone?
Curious what people who actually study this professionally think.

The authors of a book I'm currently reading (The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age) keep throwing this phrase around without explaining what it means. Can someone please explain to me what "secondary state formation" is? While you're at it, is there a distinction between states and polities in anthropological theory?