Economists are poor sociologists, argues the Yale economics professor and 2013 Nobel laureate, Robert Shiller. He chooses five books that help in the search for the ultimate causes of things.

What role did culture play in human evolution? Why did human brains get so big so quickly? When and why did inequality first emerge in human society? Harvard professor and author Joe Henrich picks some of the best books for understanding ‘cultural evolution.’

‘There was a research study done in the 1960s that identified that people will open themselves up to a stranger on a train and tell them deep personal information they would never tell their closest friends, partially because they have this sense that they can confess.’

Think of Darwinian natural selection and you may think of selfish or competitive behaviour, but this is far from the whole story, says economist Paul Seabright.

Will it be possible to live forever? Is there such a thing as the soul, or immortality in one’s legacy? The author of a new book on immortality explores the eternal questions, from elixirs of life to modern-day cryonics

There's a lot more to the story of colonists and Native Americans than the tale of the first Thanksgiving taught in school, says history professor Colin Calloway.

Paleoanthropologist Tim White tells us about his work investigating the origins of homo sapiens and explains what a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton he found in Africa tells us about our common past.

The journalist, author and editor of the journal Public Archaeology, explains why the history of archaeology is a surprisingly bloody affair – 80% of the Polish archaeological profession died one way or another during WW2

The emeritus professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of Speak of the Devil says the Dinka and the Nuer are famous in anthropology for not being preoccupied with misfortune