Anthropology Archeology - Professor Dave

Anthropology/Archeology

The 4 subfields of anthropology are:
- Biological anthropology - the study of human biology in an evolutionary framework, includes paleoanthropology which is the search for and study of hominid fossils, primatology which is the study of non-human primates and how their behaviour and morphology relates to our own species, forensic anthropology which is the application of human biology and osteology in legal investigations.
- Archeology - the study of material culture of past people groups.
- Cultural anthropology - the study of human societies in the present or recent past, including governments, religions, taboos/customs, gender roles.
- Linguistic anthropology - the study of language and how it interacts with social systems.
Anthropology combines the biological and social.
Biological anthropology exemplifies the importance of multi-disciplinary science and collaboration.

We are a highly intelligent bipedal ape developed over 7 million years in the East African Rift Valley.
Darwin recognised homology links humans with primates/mammals/tetrapods. This present can be seen in the beginning of development using comparative embryology. These similarities extended to the mental traits. Darwin saw altruism and cleverness in other animals, and argued that modern civilisation emerged from other primitive states.
This was inconsistent with the idea that Western civilisation was a created ideal and deviations from it was undesirable.
Darwin found human behaviours and cognitive abilities are not fundamentally different from those of animals but rather exist on a continuum.
Darwin supported the idea of monogenism (all humans come from a single common ancestor) over polygenism (human races have different origins), at a time when polygenism was used to justify racial superiority. One of the reasons was that all human races are interfertile.
Genetics would provide material for Darwin's mechanism of evolution and cement the continuity of the human species with the rest of the tree of life.