Why did ancient people keep human skulls around the house?
Welcome to the first episode of our new anthropology video series, Ancient People Did Stuff. We thought of naming this series something portentous like Amazing Origins or Ancient Wonders, but the fact is that our real, scientifically-verifiable history is pretty mundane. Most of the time, humans were doing ordinary things like hunting, farming, building houses, and, well, using the toilet. That's why we called the series Ancient People Did Stuff.
It's a humble title, slightly goofy, and a reminder that our distant ancestors were mostly just puttering around. More importantly, it's a nod to the realities of science, because the vast majority of what archaeologists excavate is debris from everyday life. And that's what the series is about: what regular people were doing during the long, strange history of our species from the Pleistocene to the present.
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