Ours is a biocultural species. More than any other life form on the planet, humans rely on their culture, the sum of accumulated knowledge, ideas, and practices that we are exposed in our lives, to survive. Our reliance on culture made us extremely efficient in occupying environments that are beyond our biological means to be able to survive. Through our innovations, we are able to protect ourselves from the harshest conditions on the planet. Even more than that: we are able to change the environments around us to serve our needs. We domesticated plants and animals, created machines to mass produce tools and goods, and unified the planet by creating ways to exchange information across continents in miliseconds.

Our reliance on culture makes us a unique life form on the planet. But not unique because we are separated from other life. Nor are we unique because we are better than other species. We are unique because we took characteristics that are shared by other species and took them to a whole new level of development. The diversity we see across the globe in shapes, forms, languages, ideas, and values, is the result of our long evolution. And evolution is all about context. What were the environments that shaped our development as a species? How were we able to spread across the planet? What allowed us to invest in remarkable, albeit expensive, large brains? What allowed us or forced us to develop the tools that facilitate our lives? All these questions can only be answered if we understand the context that surronded the evolution as our species.

No other discipline is better suited to study and understand the context of the human species as biological anthropology, dedicated to the study of the study of the biocultural diversity of humans, from its origins among our remote ancestors to the miriad of ways through which this diversity manifested itself across time and throughout the planet. We believe that learning about biological anthropology is crucial for students of any background and age, and that it is a central role of any professional in the discipline to create effective ways to teach about it.

We created DEM3 to develop a better way to teach Biological Anthropology to our college students. We were looking for something that would allow us to estimulate critical thinking and curiosity among students from different backgrounds and interests, facilitating interactive component that would allow students actively engage with our content.

We wanted something that would cater to both in-person and online students, and that offered students different ways to explore and engage with topics of human variation, evolution, and diversity This webpage showcases the outcome of our work together. Explore and see the different resources we have gathered as a team, and if you have any suggestions, ideas, or want to reach out to, don't be shy!