Anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster contrasts the independent, forest-roaming childhood of the BaYaka hunter-gatherers in Congo with the heavily supervised, digitally-dominated childhoods of Western children. He argues that lack of physical freedom has driven youth to seek autonomy online, where they find unmoderated digital spaces rather than the peer-led independent worlds that characterized human childhood throughout evolutionary history.
This 2018 essay explores evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich's argument that human success depends not on individual rationality but on cultural knowledge accumulated over generations. Using the example of cassava processing techniques developed by indigenous Amazonians to safely consume a potentially toxic plant, the author illustrates how traditional practices encode survival wisdom that individuals alone could never discover.
A major research initiative has cryptographically secured 2,504 human genomes from the 1000 Genomes Project by timestamping them on the Bitcoin blockchain to preserve authentic genetic diversity records. The effort aims to protect this foundational resource—which represents human genetic variation across populations and ethnicities—from future alteration by AI or other actors, ensuring biomedical researchers and historians can rely on the data with confidence.