Of the 8.7 million species on Earth, why are human beings the only one that paints self-portraits, walks on the Moon and worships gods? For decades, many scholars have argued that the difference stems from our ability to learn from each other. But extensive data has emerged suggesting that other animals, including bees, chimpanzees and crows, can also generate cultural complexity through social learning.

In her recent book Primate Socioecology: Shifting Perspectives, Lynne A. Isbell presents a new way of classifying primate social organizations. Primates are unusual among mammals in having a wide diversity of social organizations, including living alone, in pairs, in small cohesive groups, in large cohesive groups, and in groups whose members split up and come back together repeatedly.

Historian Lisa Materson’s new book, Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico's Independence (UNC Press, 2024), tells the story of an unlikely activist and radical pacifist from South Dakota who followed her conscience to Puerto Rico in the 1940s to join the independence movement.

How do pilgrimages and rituals arise? How do people become convinced to try something new? What makes a place so special that it persists through time, drawing people to it again and again? UC Davis anthropologists Cristina Moya and Nicolas Restrepo Ochoa are answering these questions at the ground floor.

Tariffs have a long complicated history in the U.S. that stretches back to before the nation's founding. Two UC Davis economists discuss what tariffs are, how they can be used and how they might impact the U.S. economy.

For the past five years, economist Santiago Pérez has studied the socioeconomic makeup of students at elite institutions. A new working paper shows that neither free tuition nor the introduction of standardized testing had any impact on the backgrounds of students attending elite institutions for the last hundred years.

Historian Gregory Downs explains the complicated history of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, including subsequent laws that undermined equal protections it guaranteed, as well as the court case affirming the definition of birthright citizenship we take for granted today.

As historian Traci Parker writes a new biography, she is learning just how much Coretta Scott King contributed to her husband’s ideas and actions, and how his story is also very much her own.

Edmond Dédé's four-act opera, “Morgiane," written in 1888, is the oldest known opera composed by an African American. Sally McKee, now a retired history professor at UC Davis, helped unearth his story in a biography on Dédé in 2017. Now, in 2025, the work is finally being performed in full.

Men and women alike are drawn to younger partners, whether or not they realize it. The conclusion came from a University of California, Davis, study of 4,500 blind dates of people seeking a long-term partner.