Ask An Anthropologist
Ask An Anthropologist is an educational resource for students, teachers, parents, and life-long learners. We encourage anyone interested in anthropology to make use of its content.
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Culture holds all the information needed to make tools, friends, and a living. Humans are good at learning and imitating what other people do, which has helped us survive and thrive.
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Becoming human brings together interactive multimedia, research and scholarship to promote greater understanding of the course of human evolution.
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Walking Upright: A Tale of Two Legs
How do you move from one place to another? Well, most humans walk. Walking on two legs is a very human trait. Learn how the evolution of bipedal walking changed the course of our history.
Thumbs Up
When you tape down your thumb, you’ll get a sense of how hard it would be to do many things if our hands were shaped differently. Even a simple task like placing a straw in a bottle becomes difficult!
Hand Made
When you put on the mitts and try to build a structure, you will get a sense of how hard it would be to do things that we do every day if our hands were shaped differently.
Head to Head
The modern human brain is the largest and most complex of any living primate. As you will learn in this activity, it is also larger than the brains of our ancient human ancestors. What does brain size have to do with our biology?