Before we get to the books, could you tell us where the limits of anthropology lie? At times he seems to be closely related to archaeology, but several of his books seem to be quite close to biology.
Anthropology is the study of humans, which means it’s the study of basically anything that might be interesting. but since this is an expansive topic, we tend to organize ourselves into subfields. so the subfield that I’m particularly associated with would be biological anthropology. my mission is to take the actual physical remains of humans and see what we can understand about how humans live now and how humans lived in the past. this quite often involves all sorts of other things like archaeology, since you have to find the remains in the first place. and archeology is of course another very useful tool to help us understand the environments that people lived in, the foods that they would have been eating, the houses that they would have been living in, the tools that they would have had. it all comes together so you can call me a biological anthropologist, but I also have a lot of archaeology.
You are reading: Best books for anthropology
Let’s go straight to the anthropology books you recommend. the first is a relative of rebecca wragg sykes. tell us about this book and why you chose it.
I have both personal and professional reasons for choosing this. Kinship is an extraordinary book. it really captures the spirit of the times of what is changing in our view of human evolution. For the last 150 years or more, we’ve had this idea of cavemen coming out of the dark into our modern progressive age. these are not really the views that anthropologists hold today. this is not how we see the past, as brutal and unpleasant Hobbesian lives.
kindred is about our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, our kissing cousins, if you will. kinship lyrically and poetically brings up the research showing us that this was a human species that had a very similar existence to our own and was probably capable of all sorts of creative thinking and the like. it really reopens, in a very beautifully written way, the idea of what the past would have been like when there was more than one human species roaming around, what other kinds of ways there are of being human. That’s the main reason I chose it, because it’s a fantastic and incredibly well-written book.
“Anthropology is the study of humans”
also, i have known rebecca wragg sykes for over a decade, because she works with me on the trowelblazers project, which seeks to raise the profile of women in excavation science. we have worked together on a number of fascinating projects, to try to show how important the contributions of women have been to our various disciplines. I know her as an excellent researcher and her book really impacted me.
next is peter ungar evolution bite.
peter ungar is a very important name in the highly specialized field of dental anthropology. you can be even more specific than biological anthropology and specifically do teeth, which is what I do. that’s my highly specialized academic subject. so there’s quite a bit of tooth reading on this list, but I think it’s for a very good cause. very few people realize how interesting teeth are. this book really covers the main topics from one of the biggest names in the field, and it’s very accessible. he has been there when the discoveries were made and he made some of the discoveries himself. that first-person aspect really highlights how exciting some of the research is about what our ancestors ate, how that changed the way we lived, and how that led us to be the species that we are.
what does it say specifically about the evolution of teeth?
He is an expert on the foods we ate. he has an incredible array of scientific techniques for reconstructing what species of hominins and even our earliest ancestors, millions of years ago, would have eaten. he can look at the scratches on your teeth and tell you if they are from leaves or nuts, and what this would have meant in terms of the environments our ancestors lived in, and what happened when they changed their diet.
Is there a general change that you are representing from our earliest ancestors to now?
In the book, he essentially goes over all the things we can know, given the various techniques we have for understanding evolution. look at the changes, for example, from species that feed primarily on grass to species that eat leaves, nuts and other things like fruit, essentially frugivores, to the kinds of omnivorous animals we are now with our impressive array of meat-eating abilities . which may well not have been present in our earlier ancestors.
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let’s move on to the paleofantasy of marlene zuk.
I love this book. again, it is written in a very readable style. if anyone has been bothered by the thought that there is a true way we have evolved to be, and that if we went back a little bit in time, we would all be happier, slimmer, healthier… this is definitely the book for them. paleofantasy is a truly informed look, from an evolutionary biologist, at the ways we imagine the past would have been and the lies we tell ourselves today about what we evolved to do. so one particular example of the book that I really like is the removal of this idea of a ‘paleolithic diet’, which is a nightmare of mine in particular, that affects the teeth like it does.
what is a ‘paleolithic diet’?
In certain segments of the internet, in particular, there is a search for a perfect evolutionary lifestyle. this must be accompanied by a perfectly adapted diet evolutionarily. so people look at the research on what our species would have eaten in the past and try to redesign this diet. people say, ‘oh well, it would have been just lean meat, no carbs.’ it is simply patent nonsense. It’s just not true, but you have a hold on your imagination.
paleofantasy takes these “one true way” ideas and puts them into context. he explains how, while it may have been a great idea to eat lots of lean meat when we were essentially tree shrews, that’s not what we’ve adapted to today. discusses some theories such as “Paleolithic parents”, how a baby should be raised.
what is paleo parenting?
is another of these recipes to have a healthy and happy baby. It’s a pretty understandable reaction to the incredible amount of advice new parents get about raising a baby. As any new parent can tell you, all he wants is a happy, healthy baby, preferably calm, maybe sleeping. there are all kinds of debates around things like whether you should carry your baby next to your skin with you at all times. she looks at some of the evolutionary arguments people have made for what are pretty demanding things, especially for the mother, like breastfeeding on demand and never putting down the baby. she discusses why those may have existed in the past, but why they may not be suitable for actual living humans.
the point is that there is no paradigm for some kind of authentic existence that we can follow that existed in the past.
no, the store is out of giant protein bars. those are no longer available.
let’s get back to the teeth with the stories told by tanya smith’s teeth. what is this book about?
I have incredible respect for Professor Tanya Smith. she does research that is very similar to mine. She has done some amazing work, for example, putting Neanderthal teeth into a synchrotron and hitting them with a very powerful laser beam to see inside and reconstruct the daily growth patterns of another human species that lived tens of thousands of years ago. Her research is super exciting and she is at the forefront of what dental anthropology can do.
His book takes an in-depth look at what we can learn about the past from teeth. While Professor Ungar’s book focuses a lot on diet, Professor Smith’s book allows us to think about some of the issues of how we grew up, how we ate, and what these things tell us about life in the past. plus, she writes quite personally about her own journey as a scientist, and her enthusiasm for the subject really comes through. I think even if you’re not obsessed with teeth, it’s a really good book for people, especially girls who might be interested in science, to see this journey of interest and excitement and feel how much fun it can be to do something so unlikely as dental anthropology.
Do you come to any surprising conclusions about how we lived or behaved in the past as a result of her pulling out all these teeth?
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Well, one of the really fascinating things he’s been able to do is reconstruct the infancy of different hominin species. In my own research, I am very interested in child growth. so their work, looking at how long it takes for Neanderthal children to grow, has been really interesting in terms of suggesting (the jury is still out) that Neanderthals may have grown a bit faster than modern humans. they may have had a slightly faster childhood than the long, slow childhoods that made us who we are today.
I think we can talk about that again when we get to your book, but do you come to any conclusions about why Neanderthals had this slightly more truncated childhood? or could have?
Much of his work is on the methodological forefront. he is explaining how we know these things. it’s pretty unlikely, if you think about it, that we can take a 50,000-year-old fossil and know exactly how it grew. His work looks at how the tiny fossil clock in our teeth can help us answer questions like that. she’s providing insight into how evolutionary science is done and the kind of joy with which it can be done, which I think is very important.
let’s go to the last book, our human story by louise humphrey and chris stringer.
I have to admit this is also professional and personal. our human story is my go-to book for what’s going on in human evolution right now. which species are which, which are where, and what is our current understanding of dates? what did they eat? what were their environments? why does that matter? what changed? what happened? human evolution is an incredibly complex subject. we keep inventing new species. no one expected the Denisovans. and we continue to find new species. there’s the hobbit species, homo floresiensis, and there’s homo naledi, which just emerged in south africa. it’s really hard to stay on top of these things and this book sums them up without skimping on the important details and is written by two people who know exactly what they’re talking about.
There is also a personal aspect, because both Louise and Chris are fantastic anthropology researchers at the Natural History Museum in London, where I was lucky enough to work.
Did these new species come onto the scene because they were dug out of the ground or because you were working on existing species and realized there are actually two separate threads?
all of the above. we have ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’ in anthropology. people are continually reevaluating old information. biological anthropology as a discipline is based on looking at bones and teeth and differences in shape. Are your teeth made for meat? do they transform into teeth built for grass? what is the evolution there? recently, of course, we have added new techniques to this. One of those, ancient DNA studies, has particularly thrown up some fox species among the anthropological chickens. For example, Denisova’s finding is from the tip of the little finger bone. The last little finger bone was discovered in Denisova cave, and they were able to recover some ancient DNA from it. and lo and behold, it was not a Neanderthal. he wasn’t a human. it was something completely new. we have a new species. We know that it has a DNA that is not ours and that it is not a Neanderthal, but in reality we do not know what it is like.
“very few people realize how interesting teeth are”
some discoveries are made in the traditional way. naledi is a pretty fabulous story. Some cavers went very deep into the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. they were in contact with an anthropology professor who had asked them to look for something interesting. after one of the men went through an 11-inch gap and dislocated both shoulders, they discovered some hominin fossils. there was a live video campaign, and some very brave anthropologists who went into this cave system, and got an incredible treasure of a whole new species that we didn’t know existed, homo naledi.
Let’s move on to your book now. growing human: the evolution of childhood. what gap in the market are you filling?
There are many evolutionary books that have talked about why we walk upright and why we have big brains. but one of the incredibly strange features of human life that isn’t really talked about is our childhood. we have ridiculously extended childhoods. we are children forever. earlier I said lightly that it is now possible to be a child until the age of 40, possibly beyond. What I mean by this is that humans have a period of investment in the next generation that really exceeds any other animal, including our closest relatives, and probably including our fossil relatives, our ancestors. this has a huge impact on the species we grew up to be. In the book, I’m really interested in talking about how we get the childhood that we have, and how that childhood has made us the species that we are because we have some unique characteristics. they have to be used to explain the strange species we’ve become.
Do you answer the question why we have such a long childhood?
I hope so. I think the general theory, in terms of evolutionary biology, is that the long investment period gives you more time to transfer skills, calories, learning, and training to the next generation. all primates have fairly long inversion periods as children. what the primates have been doing is taking the time to learn how to be better monkeys. we need that time to learn to navigate our complicated social worlds. there is nothing more complicated. in the social world of modern humans you have to learn everyone’s name; you have to learn to do useful things, be it pottery, hunting or accounting.
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