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.

✽ 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 guide in the afterlife.

If you missed Uzma Falak’s previous SAPIENS poems, you can find them here.

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 site now known as Gurugyam (གུ་རུ་གྱམ།) Cemetery.

✽ Dora and I walked through the quiet nighttime streets of Chow Kit, a downtown neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. 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 celebration that took place earlier. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chow Kit was a bustling red-light district. Today only around 15 to 20 sex workers can be seen on any given night, according to Dora.

✽ 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 what matters is this life rather than the next, but he makes a concession for his grandchildren.

✽ 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 treacherous rivers, and risk deadly diseases. The largest of these mass migrations, a 300-mile loop across Kenya and Tanzania, has been nicknamed the .

✽ 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 Southern Banten, West Java, 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 rope and an experienced minibus roof-climber.

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 presence feels both ordinary and otherworldly, part of an entangled life where humans and seals have long shaped each other’s survival.

An anthropologist-poet listens to echoes of laughter and other sounds of crossings in Kashmir.