Being able to walk upright on two feet is a physical trait that distinguishes modern humans from our early ancestors. While the evolution of bipedalism has contributed to our success as a species, it has also limited the evolution of other features and increased our risk for certain diseases.... Read more about Video: When Evolution Hurts

Manifest: Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African-American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies.... Read more about Video: Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Lecture & Conversation

Manifest: Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African-American material culture... Read more about Video: Manifest: Thirteen Colonies Lecture & Conversation

Human evolutionary scholars have long assumed that the earliest stone tools were made by members of the genus Homo... Read more about Video: Exploring Humanity’s Technological Origins

Transcript

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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Roughly every five years since 1992, the United States has experienced major urban destruction, both natural and man-made. Even before the shock has passed, dealing with trash and rubble is a critical part of post-disaster response. How do cities clean up?

Tornadoes, Twin Towers, and Hurricanes: 20 Years of Urban Disaster Clean-up

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The golden age of mass disposal is now being supplanted by the age of mass recycling. Managing waste production has become an economic and ecologic imperative.

Waste Ecologies: The Landscape of Energy Cycling, Material Movements, and Resource Exchanges

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Harvard generates as much trash as a small city, with a wide spectrum of refuse from residences, dining facilities, offices, clinics, and research laboratories. How does the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university recycle and reduce waste?

Stuff by the Yard: Campus Materials Management

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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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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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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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