Skeptophilia

It's always thin ice to make too many assumptions about why our distant ancestors did what they did. Most of the time, all we have is th...

Beliefs in an afterlife of some sort are pretty ubiquitous.  It's understandable; death is scary, and seems final, and it's natural ...

"If humans came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" If there is one phrase that makes me want to throw a chair across the ...

I've been interested for years in how religions get started. There are a handful that come about from the work of a single person; Josep...

When I was about thirty years old, I stumbled upon a copy of American anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum 's 1969 memoir Keep the River on ...

Sometimes I run across a piece of research that is just so charming I have to tell you about it. This particular one comes from the European...

A woman walks into the kitchen to find her husband on all fours, crawling around peering at the floor. "What are you doing?" she a...

It's often difficult to look at other cultures, especially ones in the distant past, in a dispassionate way, without making value judgme...

We are hardly the only animal species that sports adornments, but most of the others -- bright colors, flashy feathers, ornate fins, and so ...