Our ancestors hunted big game for the same reasons some of us drive fancy cars or carry a designer handbag: status. The hunters were hungry for prestige, and the meat was a bonus.

The Evolution of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics

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Could the ancient city of Caral in Peru be the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere?

Four Thousand Years Ago in Coastal Peru: America's First Civilization?

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Garbage is rich with contradictions. It is both intimate and global, ubiquitous and invisible. We generate trash in vast quantities but few of us know where it goes, or how it gets there, or what happens to it next.

Garbage: Learning to Unsee 

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The majority of urban trash is plastic or biodegradable. What is the best way to manage these materials? Businesses and environmentalists are battling it out right now.

Products, Plastics, Putrefaction, and Power

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Every human culture leaves some broken pottery and more, which fill the trash dumps that archaeologists study. But the trash of today is a product of industrialization.

Rags, Bones, and Plastic Bags: Trash in Industrial America

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