• ASU researcher Curtis Marean has spent over 20 years excavating caves in South Africa. He wants to learn about the relationship between climate and environmental change and human evolution.

Ask An Anthropologist

Ask An Anthropologist is an educational resource for students, teachers, parents, and life-long learners. We encourage anyone interested in anthropology to make use of its content.

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Becoming human brings together interactive multimedia, research and scholarship to promote greater understanding of the course of human evolution.

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A Brief History of History

What does it mean to be human? Take a look at the story of how we became…well…us. The search for our first ancestors who looked and acted like people today is the search for what it means to be human.
Compare the size if primate brains in this activity!

Head to Head

The modern human brain is the largest and most complex of any living primate. As you will learn in this activity, it is also larger than the brains of our ancient human ancestors. What does brain size have to do with our biology?
Link to Chomp Into the Past

Chomp Into the Past

Sitting on the sofa, you flip through a family photo album. You see a young man dressed in a uniform from the 1940s. Your father looks a lot like the man in the black and white photograph. You flip another page and go further back in time.

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Changing Climates and Changing Faces

Climate change has been a hot topic in discussions on the future of our global community. But looking into the past is also important. What do we know about how the climate and the environment affected our early ancestors?