Adapt or Abandon? Hard Choices in the Himalayas
Anthropologists are documenting how global warming is transforming Asia’s water tower and threatening the livelihoods of farmers and herders.
Environment
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Allying With Parasites to Fight Industrial Oil Palm
In West Papua, industrial oil palm plantations threaten Marind people’s ways of life. Some in the community find solidarity with resilient parasite species—beetles, rats, fungi, and many more—that attack oil palm trees from within. -
What Drove Homo Erectus Out of Africa?
Excavations at the site of 'Ubeidiya are at the heart of a debate about Homo erectus migrations, with profound implications for questions of human resilience and adaptability.
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Did an Asteroid Shape This Famous Biblical Story?
Analysis of debris at the site of an ancient city demolished by a cosmic impact has led an archaeologist and his colleagues to theorize the same event destroyed Sodom. -
Lessons From Mars—and Jamaica—on Sovereignty
The billionaire space race thrives on romantic ideas of colonizing “the last frontier.” An anthropologist looks to Jamaican histories of colonization to show why such narratives are so dangerous—and offers an alternate vision of Black freedom in the Sovereign State of Accompong.
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These Unheralded Workers Are Helping Prevent the Next Wildfire
In Southern California, an anthropologist’s research aims to illuminate his late father’s work of weed abatement. He’s learning how crews of migrant Latinx workers bring deep environmental knowledge to stop destructive fires at the wildland-urban interface.