Best of SAPIENS 2024
We are honored to have collaborated with dozens of anthropologists this year who shared compelling essays, opinion pieces, poems, and podcast episodes at SAPIENS. It is no small task for academics to transform their research and experiences into pieces that are evocative, insightful, and persuasive. In 2024, SAPIENS published more than 100 pieces by scholars from around the globe, read more than 3.5 million times. While each of this year’s publications strike a special note for us in their own way, we share 10 of our team’s favorites ordered chronologically.
—The SAPIENS Editorial Team
Material World
Tools of the Wild: Unveiling the Crafty Side of Nature
By Michael Haslam and Abigail Desmond
Once considered a uniquely human activity, tool use has been spotted across diverse species. It’s time to rethink what tools reveal about their users’ intelligence and evolution.
Wayfinding
Reading the Future of an Amazonian Mine
By Sebastián Vacas-Oleas
In Ecuador, Shuar people, an Indigenous group in the region, face increasing threats to their ways of life from industrial mining. But some find strength and courage to resist through knowledge gained by using hallucinogenic plants.
Cultural Relativity
Finding Footprints Laid at the Dawn of Time
By Mariana Petry Cabral
In the Brazilian Amazon, a university-trained archaeologist and Wajãpi Indigenous people understand traces from the past differently—but their partnership bears fruit for both.
Icons
What’s Behind the Evolution of Neanderthal Portraits
By Cindy Hsin-yee Huang
Since the 1800s, Neanderthal depictions have evolved not only with changing science but also due to social views. An archaeologist explains why visualizations of our evolutionary cousins matter.
Human Rights
How Israeli Prisons Terrorize Palestinians—Inside and Outside Their Walls
By Basil Farraj
An anthropologist in the West Bank explains how Israel’s prison regime dehumanizes Palestinians, who nevertheless dream of freedom and resist erasure.
Dwelling
A Freediver Finds Belonging Without Breath
By Sally Montgomery
An anthropologist takes us on a journey “down the line” to explore what freediving can teach us about ourselves and kinship with the sea.
Creative Nonfiction
Finding Our Way Forward—by Remembering
By Aaron McCanna
In a personal essay, a mixed-race and Native anthropologist draws strength from his ancestors.
Human Rights
By Alma Simba
SAPIENS’ 2024 poet-in-residence conjures the voices of those imprisoned in archives.
Expressions
Tackling the Impossibility—and Necessity—of Counting the World’s Languages
By Damián Blasi
A language scientist delves into historic and current efforts to catalog the planet’s 7,000-plus languages, uncovering colorful tales and Herculean challenges.
Lost in Translation
Doctors Are Taught to Lie About Race
By Matthew David
Decades ago, anthropologists dispelled the myth of biological race. Lagging behind in scientific understandings of human diversity, the medical profession is failing its oath to “do no harm.”
