Introduction to Anthropology

• Modern humans are products of both culture and biology, with our evolutionary history better suited to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle than modern urban living.

Relevance of Studying Anthropology

• Understanding past societies' development and failures, as highlighted by Jared Diamond, prepares us to face future challenges and build a sustainable future by learning from historical mistakes and successes.
• The rise of obesity in affluent countries is linked to the human biological past, adapted for physically active hunter-gatherers with diets low in fat, sugar, and salt, unlike sedentary modern lifestyles.
• Studying our biological past enhances understanding of modern health issues.
• Humans possess a unique capacity to question, enabling learning from the past, which motivates anthropological study and a biocultural perspective on human evolution.

Scope of Anthropology

• Anthropology examines the breadth of human experience, using multiple perspectives to study what it means to be human.
• It encompasses social relationships, religion, ritual, technology, subsistence, and economic/political systems.
• Anthropology studies the biological and evolutionary dimensions of humans, covering genetics, anatomy, adaptation, growth, nutrition, and evolutionary processes.
• Anthropology integrates science and the humanities, using the scientific method alongside interpretive methods to understand human qualities like love, identity, compassion, and ethnicity.

The Biocultural Approach

• Biocultural evolution posits that humans are products of biology and culture, which have together shaped our evolutionary history over millions of years.
• Understanding the interaction between biology and culture, both past and present, explains what we are, how we evolved, and the successes/failures along the way.
• Culture is a crucial element in human evolution, essential in understanding modern humans and impacting the future.
• Culture is a strategy for adapting to natural and social environments, encompassing technologies, subsistence patterns, housing, and clothing.
• Culture shapes people’s perceptions of the external environment, or worldview, differing across societies through religion, values, social organization, language, kinship, marriage rules, and gender roles.
• Culture is learned, not biologically determined, and acquired through enculturation from family, peers, and society.
• Enculturation experiences shape worldviews more than genetic ancestry.
• Human behavior is primarily learned and thus culturally patterned.
• Evolution involves changes in the genetic makeup of a population from one generation to the next, either resulting in new species formation or extinction of species over time.
• Biocultural interactions in human evolution have led to increased brain size, neurological reorganization, decreased tooth size, and language development.
• Social and sexual norms may affect the HIV evolutionary rate, influencing how it spreads in developed and developing countries.

Distinguishing Anthropology

• Anthropology studies the biological aspects of humankind, including adaptation and evolution, integrating the role of cultural factors.
• The human capacity to assimilate and function within a culture is influenced by biological factors.

Defining Anthropology

• Anthropology is described as the study of humankind, integrating findings across disciplines like sociology, economics, history, psychology, and biology
• The subfields of anthropology include cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.

Cultural Anthropology

• Cultural anthropology (or social anthropology) studies all aspects of human behavior, originating from the Enlightenment era.
• Early cultural anthropologists studied traditional societies, now mostly extinct, producing descriptive ethnographies on religion, ritual, myths, subsistence, technology, gender roles, and kinship.
• The focus shifted in the 20th century due to global social, political, and economic changes, where ethnographic techniques are applied to study diverse subcultures within metropolitan areas (urban anthropology).
• Urban anthropology addresses relationships between ethnic groups, aspects of traditional societies maintained by immigrants, poverty, labor relations, homelessness, healthcare access, and issues facing the elderly.
• Medical anthropology explores how cultural attributes relate to health and disease, focusing on how different groups view disease processes and their effect on treatment.
• Applied anthropology applies cultural anthropology, sometimes archaeology and physical anthropology, to practical applications both inside and outside academia.

Physical Anthropology

• Physical anthropology studies human biology within an evolutionary framework, focusing on the interaction between biology and culture.
• The origins of physical anthropology lie in 19th-century curiosity among natural historians regarding the mechanisms of modern species development.
• Discoveries of Neandertal fossils raised questions about human origins and antiquity.
• Paleoanthropology, the study of human evolution through the fossil record, is a major subfield, with thousands of specimens spanning at least 4 million years providing insight into early hominin species, their relationships, and adaptations.
• Research in paleoanthropology seeks to identify early hominin species, determine their chronological relationships, and understand their adaptations and behaviors to clarify human origins.
• Observable physical variation was another point of interest that led to body measurements to distinguish people.
• Anthropometry is used in studying living groups and skeletal remains, as well as the design of airplane cockpits and office furniture.
• Anthropologists study human variation for its adaptive significance and to identify evolutionary factors.
• Traits evolve as biological adaptations to environmental conditions like infectious disease, geographical isolation, or descent from small founding groups.
• Physiological responses to environmental stresses, nutritional studies, and research on human fertility, growth, and development are closely related to nutrition and essential for understanding adaptation in modern human populations.
• Genetics is crucial for physical anthropologists to understand evolutionary processes.
• Molecular anthropologists use technologies to study evolutionary relationships between human populations and between humans and nonhuman primates. Genetic technologies improve understanding of human evolution, adaptation, and relationships with other species.
• Primatology studies nonhuman primates, helping understand the factors shaping modern human behavior and advocating for their survival. By studying fossil primates and comparing them with anatomically similar living species, primate paleontologists can learn a great deal about such things as diet or locomotion in earlier life-forms.

Osteology

• Osteology involves the study of bone structure; researchers can also make assumptions about social behavior in some extinct primates
• It is central to physical anthropology, crucial for fossil analysis and understanding skeletal structure and function.
• Bone biology and physiology are essential to understanding skeletal remains from archaeological sites by emphasizing measurements.
• Paleopathology studies disease and trauma in ancient skeletons, revealing information about trauma, infectious diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and conditions, offering insights into past individual and population lives and disease history.

Forensic Anthropology

• Forensic anthropology applies anthropological techniques such as osteology and archaeology to legal matters.
• Forensic anthropologists identify skeletal remains from mass disasters or other situations by contributing to cases with significant legal, historical, and human consequences.
• Anatomical studies in physical anthropology link bones and teeth to surrounding muscles and tissues with professorships in anatomy departments at universities and medical schools.

Archaeology

• Archaeology understands the human past through examining material remains such as artifacts.
• Anthropological archaeology applies archaeological methods to understanding human origins and diversity, covering the archaeological record of hominin tools and sites to modern trash cans.
• Archaeology operates under the assumption that patterns in human activities and their by-products reflect the behaviors, values, and beliefs of their creators.
• Archaeology is a historical science that applies the scientific method to data firmly anchored in time and space. It is also rooted in the humanities, using interpretive tools to understand cognitive and symbolic aspects of the past.
• Archaeologists study cultures before writing (prehistory), using the archaeological and documentary record of past cultures that left written evidence known as historical archaeologists, or conduct research with modern people to achieve archaeological goals known as ethnoarchaeologists.
• Modern archaeology grew out of the Enlightenment in Europe, emphasizing the discovery of human history.
• Thomas Jefferson conducted the earliest systematic archaeological excavation in 1782, excavating a prehistoric burial mound on property in Virginia not to find artifacts, but to discover how it was constructed
• Archaeology matured methodologically in the late twentieth century and archaeologists also sought to understand how the people who created these sites lived

Advances in Archaeology

• Innovations such as dating techniques, computing, and theoretical change in anthropology throughout the twentieth century have expanded questions that are asked to measure the relative sequence of events in the human past and to explain how and why past cultures changed.
• Contemporary research utilizes remote-sensing technology, geology, and soil science.
• Archaeometry involves collaboration with physicists, chemists, and engineers.
• Public archaeology involves wider audiences through community outreach.
• CRM (cultural resource management) archaeologists evaluate sites threatened by development on public lands, using prehistorians, field technicians, illustrators, and laboratory specialists.

Archaeology Goals

• The first goal is to reconstruct culture history, the second goal is to reconstruct and describe ancient lifeways, and the third is to understand the general processes of culture change.
• The fourth goal is to analyze past cultures' cognitive and symbolic aspects.
• Priorities, theories, and philosophical underpinnings are negotiated within the discipline.

Linguistic Anthropology

• Linguistic anthropology studies human speech and language, tracing historical ties between languages and identifying language families.
• There is much interest in the relationship between language and culture: how language reflects the way members of a society perceive phenomena and how the use of language shapes perceptions in different cultures.
• Language dialects encode meanings, including geographical origins, identity, and social class that influence how a person is treated.