"Culture in Code: The Evolution of Humanity in the Digital Age" by Sunwoo Choi

We often think of evolution as something that happens in the distant past — a story written in fossils and bones. Yet human evolution continues, encoded not just in DNA but in data. Every message we send, every image we post, every trend we follow becomes a digital artifact — a new kind of fossil record. Anthropology, now paired with computation, reads this record to uncover how technology reshapes what it means to be human.

Computational anthropology views humanity through both stories and statistics. Where early anthropologists mapped kinship by hand, modern researchers use algorithms to trace patterns of migration, social networks, and linguistic shifts across billions of data points. Machine learning can reveal how dialects evolve in online spaces or how memes spread like cultural genes, mutating as they cross digital borders.

But the goal is not just to quantify culture — it is to humanize data. Behind every dataset lies a community, a choice, a lived experience. Algorithms, like ancient tools, mirror the intentions of their makers. When anthropologists study digital systems, they also study bias, inequality, and power — how the code we write shapes who gets seen and who is silenced.

In this sense, computational anthropology is both mirror and microscope: a way to observe humanity’s digital evolution and to question the values embedded within it. Just as stone tools once reflected survival, today’s algorithms reflect connection — our desire to organize, predict, and belong.

To study humanity now is to decode both language and code, myth and model. The past echoes through every click, every dataset, every cultural algorithm. Beneath the numbers, the human story continues — adapting, transforming, and reminding us that evolution has never truly stopped.