Science
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Anthropology
Societies of perpetual movement
Why do hunter-gatherers refuse to be sedentary? New answers are emerging from the depths of the Congolese rainforest
Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias
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Biology
Explore a bioluminescent world of cellular life via cutting-edge microscopy
27 minutes
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Death
Even in modern secular societies, belief in an afterlife persists. Why?
9 minutes
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Human evolution
How to grow a human
Our childhood is preposterously long compared to other animals. Is it the secret to our evolutionary success?
Brenna Hassett
video
Human evolution
Far from frivolous, cuteness is a powerful – and still mysterious – force of nature
6 minutes
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Human evolution
How like the kiwi we are
To understand helpless human babies, our big brains and oddly involved dads, look to the evolution of birds not mammals
Antone Martinho-Truswell
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Anthropology
Lessons from the foragers
Hunter-gatherers don’t live in an economic idyll but their deep appreciation of rest puts industrialised work to shame
Vivek V Venkataraman
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Archaeology
Children of the Ice Age
With the help of new archaeological approaches, our picture of young lives in the Palaeolithic is now marvellously vivid
April Nowell
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Human evolution
Out of the forest
We have thought of humans for a century or more as creatures of the savannah, shaped in every way by grassland life. Not so
Patrick Roberts
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Neuroscience
The brain repurposed our sense of physical distance to understand social closeness
5 minutes
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Love and friendship
Tainted love
Love is both a wonderful thing and a cunning evolutionary trick to control us. A dangerous cocktail in the wrong hands
Anna Machin
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Anthropology
Primitive communism
Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong
Manvir Singh
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Virtues and vices
Is virtue signalling a vice?
Proclaiming one’s own goodness is deeply annoying. Yet signalling theory explains why it’s a peculiarly powerful manoeuvre
Tadeg Quillien
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Human evolution
Homo imaginatus
Imagination isn’t just a spillover from our problem-solving prowess. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do
Philip Ball
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Music
Music and sex
A song can take you on a journey of ecstatic arousal. Is music imitating sex, inviting it, or something else altogether?
Michael Spitzer
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Philosophy of mind
Caring for the vulnerable opens gateways to our richest, deepest brain states
7 minutes
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Sleep and dreams
Why do we sleep?
Adults sleep less than babies. Sperm whales sleep less again. A new mathematical theory unlocks the mysteries of slumber
Van Savage & Geoffrey West
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Anthropology
How equality slipped away
For 97 per cent of human history, all people had about the same power and access to goods. How did inequality ratchet up?
Kim Sterelny
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Mental health
We heal one another
When a person is in distress, we can draw on deep, evolved mechanisms to calm the storm, through attention, touch and care
Brandon Kohrt
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Human evolution
Brains in a dish
What pea-sized brain organoids reveal about consciousness, the self and our future as a species
Alysson Muotri
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Animals and humans
The joy of being animal
Human exceptionalism is dead: for the sake of our own happiness and the planet we should embrace our true animal nature
Melanie Challenger
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Anthropology
Sitting by the fire with a nomadic tribe, a physicist ponders the many shapes of wisdom
2 minutes
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Anthropology
Beyond the !Kung
A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale
Manvir Singh
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Human evolution
Sheanderthal
Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived?
Rebecca Wragg Sykes