Tax the Rich placard -- Yuri Keegstra from Milwaukee, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Gary M. Feinman Political debates about democracy often focus on culture, leadership, or polarization. But history points to a more prosaic—and more powerful—driver of political outcomes: how governments raise revenue. Across thousands of years of human history, the strongest predictor of whether power is shared or concentrated is not population size, technological sophistication

Çatalhöyük, 7400 BC, Konya, Turkey - UNESCO World Heritage Site. A very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, 7400 BC (photo 2019) -- Murat Özsoy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Erdem Denk Standing in the dust of Çatalhöyük —a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site known to archaeology since the 1960s, yet virtually non-existent in discussions about political science and law—a question haunted me: “How come no one told us about it?” My tr

Göbeklitepe dig, 2015 -- public domain image By Erdem Denk In the heart of Ankara, less than a kilometer apart, stand two pillars of Turkish academia: the Faculty of Political Science ( Mülkiye ) and the Faculty of Language and History-Geography ( DTCF ). Mülkiye was established in 1859 to navigate the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic relations with the West, while DTCF was founded by the first president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in 1935 to create the historical and lingui

The American Southern accent reveals how linguistic prejudice reinforces classism, regionalism, and subconscious bias across generations. Plate with a quote from the film Forrest Gump at Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant in Hollywood, California, USA. -- Prayitno, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Madeline VanArsdale [Author’s note: IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It is an alphabet of symbols, not entirely unlike the Latin alphabet, which is used to guide pronunc

We are wired to find faces everywhere, and this instinct reveals how our perception and our environment can influence each other. Tree with a face, Heald Green by Benjamin Shaw, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Irina Matuzava Imagine that you notice an unfamiliar male face out of the corner of your eye. You turn to look at it, but it turns out that you perceived a face-like visual cue—a tree adorned with several hollows that appear like “eyeholes.” This kind of accident

Our robust Paranthropus cousins thrived in Africa for a million and a half years, making stone tools and sharing the landscape with different Homo species at the dawn of human cultural innovation. The original complete skull (without mandible) of a 1.8 million years old Paranthropus robustus discovered in South Africa -- Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Deborah Barsky The first fossil hominins were discovered at the beginning

Who and where were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? Almost 450 languages spoken by 4 billion people descend from their tongue—and J.P. Mallory...

A conversation with the legendary evolutionary thinker and archaeologist, Eudald Carbonell. Image via Matt Brown, CC BY 2.0, via...

Scientists are uncovering how the hidden effort of talking affects everything from everyday conversations to spotting deception and fake...

Near-death experiences blend science, spirituality, and the unknown, raising profound questions about what it means to be alive, what it...

From grammar rules to everyday slang, debates over descriptivism and prescriptivism reveal how we balance authority with the way people...

A national human ecology curriculum that begins with food education could help address our most pressing crises—from climate change to...

Mammuthus primigenius -- Smithsonian Institution, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons By Brenna R. Hassett There is an incredible amount of...

Stonehenge from a distance -- Noushin Nabavi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Andrew Califf How humans moved large rocks to...

A new archeology is being developed based on evidence of human activity in the Earth’s sedimentary record, and archeologists are helping...

By Marjorie Hecht The rapid growth of digital technologies in the last quarter-century has multiplied the number and types of possible...

By Gary M. Feinman Without archaeology, there is no way to truly examine economic inequality, its causes, and its consequences over very...

The attraction to luster is rooted in our evolutionary history and has persisted among prehistoric artifacts, ancient civilizations, and...

Başur Höyük in Türkiye By Brenna R. Hassett Perched on the edge of a river near the city of Siirt, Türkiye, is an archaeological site...

By Vijay Prashad In the past two decades, the external debt of developing countries has quadrupled to $11.4 trillion (2023). It is...