The first humans to paint on cave walls probably didn’t call themselves artists. They weren’t agonizing over brushstroke techniques or debating whether their handprint stencil was too derivative of last season’s Lascaux trend. They were just documenting life—their hunts, their rituals, their weirdly consistent obsession with bison. If anything, they were proto-anthropologists: studying human behavior in real time, trying to make sense of who they were.
Fast-forward to today, and anthropology has become a bit more… official. No longer the exclusive domain of wandering scholars and colonial-era museum hoarders, it’s now a discipline with PhDs, fieldwork grants, and an ever-growing list of ethical concerns. But at its core, anthropology is still about that same ancient impulse: trying to understand ourselves before someone else does it for us.
So, what exactly is anthropology? And more importantly, why does it matter?
Defining anthropology as “the study of humans” is a little like saying Netflix is just a DVD rental service—technically true, but missing the bigger picture. Anthropology is an all-encompassing dive into everything that makes us human, from our evolutionary past to the bizarre cultural quirks we develop along the way, generally divided into four areas.
Cultural anthropology is the study of how people live, what they value, and why some of them think pineapple on pizza is a war crime. It examines everything from kinship structures to social media trends, and at its best, challenges assumptions about what’s “normal.” Somewhere out there, an anthropologist is studying how Gen Z slang is evolving in real time, and you just know their dissertation includes the phrase “rizz lexicon.”
Then there’s archaeology, which is anthropology’s time-traveling sibling. Instead of interviewing living people, archaeologists sift through centuries-old garbage, piecing together civilizations from whatever they left behind. The good news? Ancient Egyptians built pyramids. The bad news?
Future archaeologists will judge us based on our landfills and conclude that the most important artifact of 21st-century society was the discarded Popeyes chicken sandwich wrapper.
Biological anthropology takes things further back—before humans even were humans. It traces our evolutionary history, asking thrilling questions like “What did Neanderthals eat?” and “Why does your cousin still walk like he just crawled out of the Pleistocene?” It’s a field that reminds us that, for all our sophistication, we’re still just highly anxious primates in overpriced sneakers.
And last but not least, there’s linguistic anthropology, which unpacks the weird and wonderful ways we communicate. Ever wondered why some languages have 15 words for snow, while others don’t even differentiate between blue and green? Linguistic anthropologists do. They also explore how language shapes perception, which means—yes—if you spend enough time studying it, you might end up questioning reality itself.
At this point, someone will inevitably ask: But is anthropology still relevant? This is the same kind of person who believes Latin is a dead language just because nobody’s using it to tweet about The Last of Us. The truth is, anthropology is more relevant than ever.
Corporations now employ cultural anthropologists to decode consumer behavior, which is why your Instagram feed knows you’ve been casually thinking about buying a weighted blanket before you do. Biological anthropologists contribute to public health, tracking disease evolution and genetics, while archaeologists reconstruct lost histories to prevent modern societies from repeating old mistakes (though, historically, we’ve been really committed to that last one).
Even AI developers are turning to anthropology for guidance, grappling with the question: What even is human intelligence? At some point, we’ll have to explain to an algorithm why a sitcom about nothing became one of the greatest cultural artifacts of the 1990s, and honestly, we’re going to need all the anthropologists we can get.
Ultimately though, anthropology is about perspective—the kind that forces you to consider that your culture, your values, and your assumptions are just one version of being human, not the blueprint. It teaches you that history is a living thing, that progress is often a remix rather than a revelation, and that people in the future will probably think we were the weird ones.
If anthropology tells us anything, it’s that we’re not so different from our ancestors painting on cave walls, trying to document our existence before it slips into obscurity. Only now, instead of bison drawings, we have social media dances, digital footprints, and an undying devotion to arguing over pineapple on pizza.
Future scholars are going to have a field day with us.