Sapiens

In SAPIENS’ final year of publishing new stories, the magazine honors 10 standout contributions that carried anthropology into the hearts and minds of readers worldwide. ✽ As SAPIENS publishes its final stories, we reflect with gratitude on the remarkable community of anthropologists, journalists, poets, and readers who have made the magazine a home for exploring humanity in all its complexity. In 2025, our contributors wrote about connection and care, loss and return, the voices and conditions

An archaeologist studying 1,000-year-old dog burials reflects on the need for imagination in archaeology. ✽ WITH STEADY HANDS, a crouching archaeologist brushes away centuries of soil, revealing the curved edge of a human skull. As they excavate deeper, the slender bones of a dog emerge. The archaeologist pauses, scanning the stillness of this shared grave. The bones offer the illusion of a story—a villager and his beloved pet, a warrior with her guard dog, or a dog deposited as a spiritual guid

SAPIENS’ 2025 poet-in-residence situates her listening in Kashmir and Germany during and after her fieldwork, contextualizing her contributions to SAPIENS this year. If you missed Uzma Falak’s previous SAPIENS poems, you can find them here. ✽ Anatomy of Silence In the city of lashed tongues gashed throats bleeding ears LED screens and projectors wired to sound amplifiers blare the Minister of Stolen Time’s Independence Day speech across empty streets lashed tongues gashed throats bleedin

An archaeologist unspools the story of a female leader buried over 1,000 years ago on the Tibetan Plateau. A TOMB IN THE HIGHLANDS In 2005, a truck rumbled down a dirt road in western Tibet, its heavy wheels collapsing ground as it passed. When monks came to clear the debris, they found fragments of a wooden coffin, human bones, and traces of silk. The accident revealed a tomb beneath the road and a doorway into a forgotten world. Nearly a decade later, archaeologists returned to excavate the si

An anthropologist traces how transgender women navigate state-sponsored religious programs aimed at “rehabilitating” LGBTQ+ Muslims. ✽ Dora and I walked through the quiet nighttime streets of Chow Kit, a downtown neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. (All names have been changed to protect people’s privacy. ) Pungent food smells mingled with the sweet scent of fruit and flowers from a nearby market. Abandoned rainbow-colored confetti shivering under the dim, yellowish streetlights reminded us of some c

An anthropologist delves beyond simplistic portrayals of the anti-natalist movement to understand what motivates its adherents. ✽ Growing up in the atheistic milieu of China’s Cultural Revolution, my dad has always believed that death is the end. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when people around him began dying, he hired a lawyer and planned for his own life’s conclusion. When I finally saw him after three years of the pandemic, my dad had grown older, balder, and more impatient. He still thinks

Isotopes in fossil teeth suggest ancient animals traveled less than once thought—making researchers rethink past human societies and future conservation. ✽ Hundreds of hooves thunder, announcing the herd’s approach. A cloud of dust rolls closer. The low mooing of wildebeest is within earshot. Every year, when the seasons change in Eastern Africa, millions of large herbivores journey to find food and water. Along the way, zebras, gazelles, elephants, and other animal icons evade predators, cross

A poet and aspiring anthropologist in Indonesia reflects on the values reflected in rice cultivation in a traditional village in Lebak, Banten, Indonesia. ✽ I WROTE “PADI NYAWA URANG,” which translates as “Rice Is Our Lifeblood,” to reflect on a weeklong stay for a school program at a traditional village in Lebak, Banten, Indonesia. It was a 9-hour trip from my hometown, Bandung. We alternated between bus rides and finally a minibus with our rucksacks tied on the vehicle roof guarded only with r

An environmental anthropologist investigates deep-time, mythical, and contemporary relations between seals and Orkney Islanders. SEAL SONG One gray afternoon, I saw a seal lying on a rock, eyes half-closed, head tilted toward the wind. It made a low, melodic sound—somewhere between a sigh and a song. Was it calling out? Mourning? Remembering? Every now and then, I spot the mammals bobbing in the surf or lounging along the shores of Orkney, a Scottish archipelago, north of the mainland. Their pre

An anthropologist-poet listens to echoes of laughter and other sounds of crossings in Kashmir. In the house once occupied by soldiers laughter echoes as three women sing Yamberzal sutures a song Banafsha, her daughter, gathers a distich and urges her aunt, Sombul, to carry it on ( Names of the interlocutors have been changed to respect their anonymity.) Outside, dark enfolds the mountains thousands of stars gather in clandestine assemblages a brook gushes inconsolably bright yellow flowers murm