New course for Winter Quarter – Earliest Art and Culture

I am looking forward to teaching a new course next quarter, called Earliest Art and Culture (ANTH 490)! There are still spots available, so if you are looking for a 490 or WP3 course, please think about joining us. The description is posted below:

Earliest Art and Culture (ANTH 490 WP3) – 

What is art? What is culture? Are humans the only species that create art and culture? When did art and culture begin? And can we see the traces of these behaviors in the fossil record? These are just some of the questions we will explore in ANTH 490 Earliest Art and Culture. Topics of discussion include art in the fossil record, changes in technology during the Plio-Pleistocene, the evolutionary function of music, the interaction between culture and genetics, among others. Reading and discussion materials for the course will be based on literature assigned each week.

This course is a WP3 designed to offer students the opportunity to learn skills in scholarly writing. In this course, we will cover the basics of science writing, including searching for literature, learning about citations and references, summarizing academic papers, and writing an abstract. The course will culminate in a rough draft and final paper that is a literature review based on a topic of the student’s choice (related to the course materials).