December 2015
Dear Students,
Welcome to Introduction to Physical Anthropology! My name is Kerry Dore, and I
have been teaching this course at Marist College for four years. I will also be
teaching this class (online) at Eastern Kentucky University beginning this spring. I
completed my Ph.D. in Physical Anthropology two years ago. My research expertise
is in ethnoprimatology, or the study of the dynamic relationships between people
and nonhuman primates. More specifically, I work in the Caribbean and study the
relationship between people and the invasive African green vervet monkey, which
came to the region from West Africa over 300 years ago during the slave trade. You
can read more about my research on my website:
http://kerrymdore.weebly.com
This course is going to teach you about human evolutionary history, starting with
the basics: evolution, DNA and heredity, moving on to our nonhuman primate
relatives, and finishing with our history, from ~6 million years ago to modern times.
As I’m sure you realize, we are going to be squeezing a 16-week course into 4 weeks,
so it’s going to go VERY quickly. I am not going to try to teach you every detail that I
teach my students in a traditional course; I am going to focus on the most important
details. Still, you must keep up with the reading! The core readings will come from
your textbook: Introduction to Physical Anthropology (Jurmain et al. 2014: ISBN #
978-1111297930). As I have already explained in an email to you, I have not made
the book available at the bookstore because you can find it for much less online. You
might also want to consider renting the book. In addition to these readings, I will
assign you short magazine articles, newspapers articles and videos to read and
watch each week to complement this material and make it more interesting.
The iLearn site for this course will be published on Thursday, December 17th, and
the class will begin on Saturday, December 19th. Our schedule will be very routine:
our week will begin every Saturday, when I will present the new material. This
material will be located in both the “lessons” and “resources” sections of our iLearn
site. Forum posts (~500 words) will be due each week on Wednesday by the end of
the day (11:59 PM). You will need to post thoughtful responses (~300 words) to at
least two of your classmates’ posts on Thursday by the end of the day (11:59 PM).
Finally, you will take an exam related to the previous week’s material on Friday of
each week. Exams must be completed by Friday at 11:59 PM. Your course grade is
comprised of 20% for four weekly forum post scores (each out of 50 points 25
points for each your post and your responses) and 80% for your weekly exams
(20% per exam).
You will see on the syllabus that I DO NOT ACCEPT late quizzes or assignments!!
This is a four-week course; you MUST keep on top of your work!
Please take the time to introduce yourself to your fellow classmates on the
“Introductions” forum sometime during the first week. (This is REQUIRED!)
I look forward to working with all of you this winter. Please let me know if you have
any questions or concerns.
All the best,
Kerry M. Dore, Ph.D.
School of Science
Marist College
Kerry.dore@marist.edu