Deep Time Games / Anthropology
Section one · four games
Bone by bone and layer by layer — what a skeleton can tell you, what a trench can tell you, and how much of it is inference.
Anthropology is a four-field discipline, and these games are built out field by field — all four are now represented. Everything below uses fictional sites, cases and genealogies; no real excavation, collection or individual is described.
Forensic anthropology: name the bone and side it, build a biological profile from a real skeletal inventory, and read what happened after death from the bone itself.
Play → New · evolutionClassify the primate order, watch genetic drift fix an allele across twelve populations, read diagnostic traits off the hominin record, and model why skin colour tracks latitude rather than ancestry.
Play →Where the games sit in the discipline — and, honestly, where the gaps still are.
Field one
Where we sit in the primate order, the mechanisms that change populations, the hominin fossil record, and human variation today. Then the skeleton itself — the biological profile, its limits, and taphonomy.
Field two
Excavation and provenience, artifact vs. ecofact vs. feature, the Harris matrix, what each dating method actually dates, and the ethics and law of the record — NAGPRA, ARPA, Section 106.
Field three
Kinship and descent, marriage and residence, subsistence and exchange, ritual and belief, and the fieldwork methods themselves — participant observation, emic and etic, cultural relativism.
Field four
How language carries culture — structure and change, dialect and register, language endangerment and revitalisation, and why losing a language loses more than vocabulary.
Several geology games do real anthropological work. Order of Ages carries a hominin deck running Sahelanthropus to Homo sapiens against the same timeline as the extinctions and orogenies. Correlate teaches superposition and cross-cutting on an outcrop — the identical logic you apply to a trench profile. And Match & Dig ships with a dig skin: trowel, sherd, point, bone.