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To ordinary folks like me on the streets of Nairobi, an anthropologist is someone like the late Margaret Leakey, or her husband Louis, scouring the bushes in the Rift Valley looking for bones of early humans.
We are years behind, because anthropology has moved on to a totally different plane. Two anthropologists, Kevin Kniffin of the University of Wisconsin and David Wilson of the State University of New York, have just spent 18 months studying a subject with absolutely no bones in it gossip. Yes, gossip.
Their findings will be published in the journal, Human Nature, next month. The Independent on Sunday previewed the article, and reports that Kniffin and Wilson found that gossip is good for you.
Previously dismissed as harmful or trivial, the study found that gossip can stamp out bad behaviour, strengthen friendships, and circulate important information not available anywhere else.
The anthropologists say they were surprised to find that gossip was actually central to human society. There were quite a few surprises indeed.
For starters, they found that we spend between 30 to 60 per cent of our daily conversation gossiping. Then, that men indulge in gossip as long as and on the same subjects as women.
But there were differences. Men were more egocentric, 60 per cent of the time talking about themselves, while women talked about themselves only 30 per cent of the time, preferring to talk about others the rest of the time. Male and female gossip also sounded different.
Women were more animated in their storytelling, piling on detail and encouraging feedback from listeners. With us guys (watch us in the pub), we interrupt the bloke who is talking, say our piece, and move on.
The serious science comes in when the two authors say that when people huddle to share information about an absent person, it is a deep-seated instinct, the equivalent of "social grooming" among our monkey ancestors.
Monkeys pick fleas off each other, even when clean, and thus help with relationship building, group bonding, clarifying social status and reinforcing shared values.
Prof Kniffin told The Independent on Sunday: "Gossip is about reputation, and that has been intensely important throughout human history, no matter how primitive or sophisticated a society is. People fear for their own reputations, so if they misbehave, they have real reason to fear gossip."
We all know that feeling: Few things are as terrifying as walking into a room full of your friends and you know they have been gossiping about you, because they all fall silent. If that doesnt encourage you to abandon wayward ways, then I dont know what will.
We know what will drive almost any woman to murder. Or at least we thought we did until news came from a hospital in Concordia, Argentina, that sent two mothers home with each others baby.
Good thing is that they found out their mistake. Bad thing is that they discovered the error a few days ago, five years later!
The hospital apologised and offered the mothers huge compensation. What happened next was unexpected.
The women said "no, thank you," and have decided to keep the "mistake" children.
I find that impossible to understand, for which reason I shall move on to a less complicated matter sports.
A world record has been set in golf. A Norwegian golfer was playing on a course on the Swedish-Finnish border whose 14th hole is divided by the frontier line. The chap scored a hole-in-one (this is the term golfers use when they hit a tee shot and it goes into the hole without making various stops along the way like a matatu).
The sports pages were breathless, noting that it was the first hole-in-one ever to be teed off in one country (Sweden) and holed out in another (Finland).
And here is the really sweet part. Since Finnish time is an hour ahead, his ball technically took more than an hour to land.
And lest I forget, something unusual caught my eyes. New York City is supposed to be the most happening place in the world. Well, apparently not. There is evidence that its also the loneliest city. Two weeks ago the US Census Bureau revealed that of the nearly 740,000 households in Manhattan, the soul of New York, singles living alone occupy 48 per cent of them.
The women of famine-ravaged Niger are lonely too, but for very different reasons. Its reported that in the midst of starvation and disease, many men in rural Niger are hoarding relief food, leaving their wives and children to suffer.
In some villages, men have stopped women making contact with Unicef officials who are distributing food and treating the sick, insisting that only they were entitled to speak for the community.
There have also been many cases of men selling food given as aid, or passing it on to male members of extended families. Thus a guy takes away food from his wife and children, and instead gives it to his uncle in the next village.
This behaviour has puzzled outsiders, who have called it "extraordinary". At first, there were those who thought it could be accounted for by Nigers "predominantly Muslim" and patriarchal culture. Only problem is that neighbouring countries - Mali, Mauritania and Bourkina Faso - that have also been hit by famine have the same cultural make-up but the women are not being sidelined.
Now, sometimes I am ashamed to be an East African. Many times, however, I am very proud to be one.
Try and think of what a shrewd Ugandan or Kenyan man in the village would do in this situation. He certainly wouldnt ask his wife not to go to the food distribution centre. Instead, he would go and register himself alone, and ask his wife to register separately as a widow with eight children to feed (even though they have only four children).
For good measure, if he has a grown-up daughter, he will also get her to register her "household". In this way, when everyone returns in the evening, one family would have the supplies of three homes.
Our men are no angels. They would still sell the food in order to get some booze money, but their homes would still be better off. The wife and children would still have a double portion left.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Groups managing editor for Convergence and New Products.
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