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"It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today."
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Exlpore more Anthropology quotes

"Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is."

"I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology."

"Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo."

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

"Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology."

"If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology."

"Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess."

"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."

"Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities."

"One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson

"If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way."

"Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can."

"Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old."

"Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be."

"The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it."

"It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can."

"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."

"Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
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