Best Anthropology Books

It’s hard to imagine that someone can squeeze the subject worth hundreds of books into a single book but professor Yuval Noah Harari succeeded in this. In his book Sapiens, he guides the reader through the history of mankind, masterfully and effortlessly covering and explaining the key points in the process of development that started thousands of years ago and is still going. Highly valued by multiple publishers, critics, and readers, the book became an absolute bestseller and continues to blow the minds of more and more readers around the globe. And not without the reason.

Starting from the title, the book declares a pretentious promise to cover human history from the Stone Age till now and it brilliantly delivers on that promise. The focus is Homo sapiens as the species that managed not only to dominate the world but enhance their dominance and hold it for millennials. From that perspective, Harari divided the history of Sapiens into four parts that correspond to the parts in the book and include the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Unification of Humankind, and the Scientific Revolution. Within those chapters, the author touches upon important and strongly arguable questions. Why, being not much different from animals, do humans stand out among them? Has farming really made us healthier and happier? Where has our unique ability to cooperate and communicate brought us? How do our fundamental scientific achievements change and shape us? These and many other interesting questions are discussed in this book in a very extraordinary and smart manner.

To say a few words about Harari’s writing style, it noticeably differs from altiloquent scientific narrations of traditional anthropology books. It is neither dry nor boring. Instead, it strongly resembles a novelistic style, which is engaging, captivating, and easy-flowing. With a decent amount of research behind it, the book doesn’t feel botched or amateurish, though.

Have you ever thought why some continents undergo fast-paced economic growth and development while others still drown in poverty? Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond casts the light on this issue and provides an interesting theory that looks highly persuasive and compelling.

A professor in geography and an experienced biologist, Diamonds studies the history of humanity through the environmental and biological lens. In fact, it was the question from his friend from New Guinea that pushed Diamond to create this book. “Why is it that you Europeans have so much more cargo than we do?” By cargo, he meant knowledge, technology, and goods manufactured. To explain why the world around is so uneven economically and why some people are obviously superior to the others in many senses, Diamond throws us back to the times when it all started and when humans switched from hunter-gatherers to farmers. This is where the core of the answer lies. Due to territorial, landscape, and climatic differences, Europeans had a whole lot of domesticable plants and animals. Initially, the European content had more natural resources that were of great value at that time and eventually pushed the growth in other spheres. Besides, the materials (such as metal) that set up prerequisites for technological growth are also not evenly distributed on our planet that gave some areas an advantage over the others. Likewise, the impact of germs and varying immunity defense was considered in the course of the survey and proved to largely affect the development of civilizations.

Throughout the whole book, the author delivers multiple facts along with biological, medicinal, and cultural data to support his theory and clarify some disputable issues. To do that in a more comprehensible manner, he provides a whole lot of visual material including tables, charts, diagrams, maps, and illustrations. So, the reader gets an opportunity to visualize the author’s major assumptions and generalize the layers of information given in the book.

People tend to think that they are the masters of the world and often view themselves as almighty ones capable of conquering the forces of nature. But we are what our planet made us, neither more nor less than that. And this is what Lewis Dartnell takes as a basis in his book Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History.

Studying the history of human civilization and tracing the roots of the human race, many scientists refer to great leaders, focal historical events, and a human factor overall as the key points in humankind's evolution and development. Unlike those, Dartnell has been searching for the answers in the planet under our feet and has eventually found them. Though today people seem to determine life on the planet, initially, it is the planet that has been shaping human history. And little has changed in this concern today.

In a broad sense, we owe the rise of humanity to the earth and the collision of enormous tectonic plates that kick-started huge geological and climate changes. Those changes, in turn, became a decisive factor for human race evolution. Everything from the Ice age to the interglacial period to the hunting-gathering era to farming to the Iron age had its distinctive direct impact on human civilization. People had to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions and responded by enhanced social cooperation and inventive use of technology. In the book, Dartnell smoothly switches from prehistory to history, and skillfully explains the role and impact of the Earth on each stage of human development. Plant and animal domestication, swift rise of farming, armor invention, marine voyages, colonization, and other crucial achievements and events are represented and accounted against the geological background.

Once underestimated, a biocultural approach to health problems and medicine is on the rise and keeps gaining strength nowadays. So, whether you study medical anthropology or review different health approaches within your medical career, Medical Anthropology: a Biocultural Approach will make a perfect introduction to the subject.

Medical anthropology is a sub-branch of biological anthropology that seeks to understand the nature of illnesses and find the primary cause of modern health problems via a biocultural perspective. In other words, it considers the most common contemporary health conditions in the realm of evolutional, historical, and cross-cultural aspects to get to the roots and help apply new knowledge for the improvement and enhancement of current preventive measures and treatment.

The book touches upon the main health issues that greatly impact human societies and reveals how human health interacts and responds to the changes in biology, culture, and environment. The authors analyze present-day biological and medicinal data via evolution and major challenges it threw into human health and survival. The topics covered include healing, diet and nutrition, aging problems, reproductive health, infections, behavioral diseases, stress-related problems, mental illnesses, racial and social inequality. In each chapter, they first provide general biological information on a specific health problem and then survey it from different angles and perspectives to show in detail how medical anthropology can help modern medicine.

With a lot of power and secrets behind it, genetics has been the field for multiple investigations and surveys for decades. And anthropology is not an exception in this concern. If you want to find out how all people are genetically close as a race despite all the natural diversity, The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Syke will fascinate you for sure.

While there are a whole lot of stories, hypotheses, theories, and assumptions around the origin of the human race as a species, the genetic survey of professor of genetics from Oxford and a leading authority on DNA evolution Bryan Sykes confidently stands out among multiple works. The book is pushed by the real research Sykes was involved in back in 1994. At that time, frozen remnants of a man who lived about 5,000 years ago were found in Northern Italy. Sykes was able not only to identify a living ancestor of this man but also to put forth and ground the theory of a remarkable gene pertinent to all generations aging back thousands of years and passing through the maternal line.

In the course of the survey, having plotted a whole multitude of DNA sequences, the author finally makes a staggering conclusion that almost all Europeans, no matter where they reside throughout the world, are descendants of one of the seven women, the so-called Seven Daughters of Eve. Sykes named them Ursula, Xenia, Tara, Velda, Helena, Jasmine, and Katrine and depicted their worlds in detail including their migration patterns and their ancestors. As a result, we learn that each of us is a part of a certain DNA group that remains indestructible through millenniums and discover how we can trace our genetic roots and origins.