This week, we have a guest contributor to eHRAF Highlights: HRAF Research Anthropologist Ian Skoggard, who shares some thoughts and findings on human cooperation. Cooperation has deep evolutionary roots. Bees do it, ants do it,…
Damián Blasi at the University of Zurich and a research associate here at HRAF has just published a paper with colleagues in Science reporting significant differences in the frequency of “F” and “V” sounds in…
Jeffrey Vadala Archaeological and anthropological research shows that many human societies across time and space have used alcohol in religious and ritual contexts. There are often customs and ethics that govern how alcohol is produced,…
Jeffrey Vadala “The shaman is not merely a sick man or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.” -Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching During the…
Carol R. Ember, Michele J. Gelfand, Joshua Conrad Jackson, and Tahlisa Brougham All societies have expectations about how people should behave. But some societies appear to have more rules than others, have more people who…
Jeffrey Vadala Given that the archaeological record is often incomplete, how can archaeologists make reliable conclusions about human behavior in the past? Archaeologists employ a variety of approaches to this end, using statistical, interpretive, comparative…
![2019 HRAF Internship in Honor of Melvin Ember [CLOSED]](https://hraf.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Photo-of-Melvin.jpg)
The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University is pleased to announce a one-year internship in Melvin Ember’s name. Melvin Ember was President of HRAF from 1987 until his death in 2009. The intent…
The New Year is underway, which means it’s time for our annual news and notes review. This post will summarize our highlights from the previous year as well as what you can expect to see…
As people throughout much of the Western world mark the end of another year by finalizing their New Year’s resolutions, it is a good time to reflect anthropologically on how others around the globe observe the…
By Jeffrey Vadala Human relationships with dogs extend into the deep past, just as they strongly endure in myriad forms in the present. New research in Siberia indicates that humans may have established relationships with…