Our ancestors’ ability to recognize water sources was crucial to their survival. As a result, the attraction to lustrous materials is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and is evident among prehistoric artifacts, ancient civilizations, and modern consumer culture. ...

Perched on the edge of a river near the city of Siirt, Türkiye, is an archaeological site that offers a chance to completely rethink one of the most complex human stories: the development of the world’s first cities and states. Sitting up in the rugged...

Until now, at least 14 different species have been assigned to the genus Homo since it emerged in Ethiopia some 2.8 million years ago revealing branching evolutionary stories of survival, intermixing, and extinctions. Archaeology is increasingly allowing us to glimpse into one of...

The late 19th century saw economists, mainly German and Austrian, create a mythology of money’s origins that is still repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred because it is nonperishable (and hence amenable...

Archaeologist and scholar Giorgio Buccellati’s book At the Origins of Politics describes how Mesopotamia’s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium BC shaped a new mentality. The segmentation and specialization of industrial production required written recordkeeping, standardization of weights and measures, and surveying and allocation of...

Rigid thinking has been linked to social and professional problems, difficulty in adapting to societal change, and mental health issues that can lead to suicide and mass shootings. ...

Hierarchies are a familiar form of human organization where individuals and groups of high social status are ranked above others and make decisions. Some examples are an oligarchy, a small group of committed individuals (sharing religion, wealth, etc.); an absolute monarchy that controls all the...

Five times a day, approximately one-fourth of the world’s population turns toward Mecca to bow their heads in prayer. The Kaaba at the center of this global genuflection has a cornerstone that some speculate is a meteor. ...

Power in human societies is often viewed as hierarchical, meaning that it’s tiered and ranked. This view doesn’t fully capture the complexity of how power is managed in different cultures. Some societies are not strictly hierarchical but heterarchical, where power is distributed among various groups...

How do we organize elements in a system? One way is through the lens of hierarchy, which presupposes levels, a top-down ranking of elements. Another is homoarchy, which permits one (and only one) ordering. Both terms, while useful to characterize a stable formation, do not...