Some 30 years after the popularization of the ‘social brain hypothesis’, this commentary takes a multispecies lens to highlight the catalytic role that ectoparasites have played in the evolution of grooming and, by extension, potentially in humanly organized multimodal communication. Predators and foraging helped draw our ancestors into groups, but lice and other parasites applied a more intimate pressure, compelling tactile care. If grooming began as a response to parasites, became pleasurable before it became symbolic, and gossip later replaced grooming in larger groups, then the origins of language may be more relational and ecological than previously assumed. This speculative intervention suggests that even our most celebrated capacities may be rooted in interspecies entanglements. A multispecies perspective on human evolution reminds us that the story was never just human, and never just one story. What we know of the human is incomplete if we only know humans.
Industrial expansion in Ethiopia has positioned cement production as central to national development, yet its local environmental and bodily consequences remain under‐explored. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2023‐July 2024) in Kuyu district, this article examines how the Kuyu Cement Factory reshapes everyday life through dust, odours and environmental degradation. Residents describe coughing as part of daily existence, alongside impacts on health, livestock and crop production, while the surrounding landscape is frequently obscured by dust and smoke. Factory workers report prolonged exposure with limited protection. The article argues that industrial pollution is experienced not only as environmental harm but also as a transformation of sensory and embodied life. Crops lose colour, livestock show respiratory distress and visibility declines as emissions spread, while dust and odours reshape spatial orientation. These experiences reveal exposure as a shared atmospheric condition linking humans, animals and environments.
Jonathan Marks reads the committee's report on the humanities as an uncredited rehash of the 1990s science wars, a familiar quarrel with the academic left dressed as a defence of knowledge. Rather than rebut it point by point, he sets out ten propositions about human sameness and difference that anthropology has pressed on the comfortable since the 1870s. Much of what feels natural is a product of history rather than biology. Race marks politically relevant groups misrepresented as natural kinds. Human thought is symbolic and linguistic in a way ape thought is not. And one may be an ape and yet, in reading this, certainly human. Anthropology unsettles every generation, he argues, which is precisely why reactionaries find it threatening.
Writing amid sustained attacks on the academy, from terminated grants and the mandated removal of gender and race content to a commissioned report questioning anthropology's rigour, Agustín Fuentes asks what the discipline should do now. His answer is to do more anthropology, and to do it together. He identifies three avenues. Teaching counters the delegitimation of knowledge. Collaboration counters the isolation and defunding of scholars. And the recognition of new modes of scholarship counters the narrowing of what is allowed to count. Against a politics that drives inequality, oppression and hopelessness, he argues that anthropology offers grounded, evidence‐based hope, and that the discipline should use it more forcefully, intentionally and communally.
