Modification of the genitals is one of the older subjects in cultural anthropology, and one of the most carefully documented. Across published ethnography, researchers describe practices that alter, mark, or remove parts of the external female anatomy, carried out for reasons a community explains…

Almost everyone recognizes the drawing: a man with four arms and four legs, stretched inside a circle and a square, staring out from posters, textbooks, and the Italian one-euro coin. Far fewer people know what Leonardo's Vitruvian Man was for — or what it was, and was not, claiming about the human…

Walk down almost any street in Roman Pompeii and you would meet the same image again and again — carved above a doorway, set into a paving stone, cast in bronze and hung at a shop's entrance. To a Roman eye, the phallus was not primarily an erotic picture. It sat closer to a road sign, a lucky…

Every society that keeps records has held opinions about the human body, and almost none of those opinions agree. What one community reads as a sign of wealth, health, or fitness to lead, another reads as a warning.

Quiz Challenge Start Challenge /* ---- LOCAL THEME TOKENS (edit these to retheme the whole quiz) ---- */ .qz-wrap{ /* Neutral "museum vitrine" pastels — calm, archival, non-clichéd */ --qz-accent: #6E8FA0; /* dusty slate-teal — primary…

In 1777, on the third of his Pacific voyages, Captain James Cook watched a group of Tongan hosts refuse to sit or eat in his presence and explain, by way of apology, that they were "taboo." He wrote the word down. It was one of the few Polynesian terms to pass into global vocabulary, and Cook…

On the sacred island of Delos, a theatre producer once celebrated a winning play by erecting a monument to a body part. The Stoivadeion, the island's sanctuary of Dionysus, still holds the base of two pillars that each once carried an outsized marble phallus. An inscription records that the…

Roughly a third of the world's men carry the mark of a rite that has been performed for at least four thousand years — and almost none of the cultures performing it explain it the same way.

In a limestone cave in the Swabian Jura of southern Germany, an archaeological team lifted six fragments of carved mammoth ivory out of the dirt in September 2008. Assembled, they formed a female figure roughly 6 cm (2.4 in) tall, headless, with a small carved ring where a head might have been — a…