The famous wall painting from Çatalhöyük depicts tightly clustered domestic houses beneath an erupting volcano. Photo/Illustration by Asya Denk. By Erdem Denk The theme for an exhibition that opened on June 4, 2026, at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye), World’s First City Plan/Map, as part of my Arkeopolitics initiative, was met with reservations by a group of students from the Middle East Technical University’s faculty of architecture. They questione

Each leap in human communication—from vocal anatomy to writing to digital networks—followed the same pattern: faster, more complex, less individual. By Deborah Barsky Many people are overwhelmed by the fast-paced evolution of mass communication in a world increasingly shaped by the internet and artificial intelligence (AI). Yet ideas have not always circulated across the globe at lightning speed. Looking into deep time allows us to view our current mode of existence from a br

Research suggests that human consciousness evolved as a cognitive filter, privileging and amplifying human-communicative inputs as a foundation for transmissive teaching and learning, language development, and, ultimately, cultural evolution and culture itself. The Thinker, Musée Rodin, Paris -- Tammy Lo from New York, NY, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Josh Fisher This piece explores human consciousness as the foundational engine of culture, tracing its evolution from e

Archaeological ruins at Mohenjo-daro, Sindh, Pakistan -- Saqib Qayyum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Adam S. Green Inequality and Urbanism Today’s cities are hotbeds of inequality. Urban real estate is one of the most expensive kinds of land in the world. It attracts billionaires looking to store their wealth and hedge funds looking to garner predictable returns: New York’s avenues, Paris’s thoroughfares, and Dubai’s dazzling skyscrapers are great at making the rich

Viewing food as a system of biological signals helps explain why diets affect people differently and how nutrition can better support metabolism, mental health, and long-term well-being. Touzrimounir, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Michael S. Fenster Modern nutrition science has continued to see food through numbers. Calories, macronutrients, ingredient lists, and percent daily values have become the primary language of eating. This approach, often referred to as “nut

Human ecology offers a framework for understanding how social systems in Nordic countries and New York shape participation, trust, and collective well-being. Skogn folkehøgskole folk high school, Norway -- Ragnhild Lovli, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Sandra Ericson The United States is a nation of extraordinary wealth and extraordinary contradiction. Tens of millions of Americans live in material insecurity, while aggregate wealth continues to expand. Institutional

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...

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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...