Human Evolution and Culture
Chapter 1: The Importance of Anthropology
1. Anthropology - A discipline that studies humans, focusing on the study of differences and similarities, both
biological and cultural, in human populations. Anthropology is concerned with typical biological and cultural
characteristics of human populations in all periods and in all parts of the world.
2. The Scope of Anthropology
A. Anthropology is concerned explicitly and directly with all varieties of people throughout the world, not just
those close at hand or within a limited area. It is also interested in people of all periods. Every part of the
world that has ever contained a human population is of interest to anthropologists.
3. The Holistic Approach
A. Holistic - Refers to an approach that studies many aspects of a multifaceted system.
B. In the past, individual anthropologists tried to be holistic and cover many subjects. Today, as in many other
disciplines, so much information has been accumulated that anthropologists tend to specialize in one topic
or area.
4. The Anthropological Curiosity
A. In studying a human population anthropologists tend to focus on typical characteristics (traits, customs) of
that population.
B. Anthropologists are curious about the typical characteristics of human groups- how and why populations
and their characteristics have varied around the glove and throughout the ages.
5. Fields of Anthropology
A. Biological (Physical) Anthropology - The study of humans as biological organisms, dealing with the
emergence and evolution of humans and with contemporary biological variations among human
populations.
B. Cultural Anthropology - The study of cultural variation and universals in the past and present.
1. 3 major subfields: archaeology, linguistics, and ethnology
C. Biological Anthropology
1. Seeks to answer 2 distinct sets of questions. The first set includes questions about the emergence of
humans and their later evolution
2. Human Paleontology/Paleoanthropology - The study of the emergence of humans and their later
physical evolution.
3. Fossils - The hardened remains or impressions of plants and animals that lived in the past
4. In attempting to clarify evolutionary relationships, human paleontologists may use not only the fossil
record but also geological information on the succession of climates, environments, and plant and
animal populations. They're also interested in the behavior and evolution of our closest relatives
among the mammals (primates)
5. Primates - A member of the mammalian order Primates, including prosimians, monkeys, apes, and
humans
6. Primatologists - People who study primates.
7. The second set includes questions about how and why contemporary human populations vary
biologically
8. Human Variation - The study of how and why contemporary human populations vary biologically.
9. Homo Sapiens - All living people belong to one biological species, Homo sapiens, which means that all
human populations on earth can successfully interbreed. The first Homo sapiens may have emerged
by 200,000 years ago.
10. To understand the biological variations observable among contemporary human populations,
biological anthropologists use the principles, concepts, and techniques of at least 3 other disciplines:
human genetics (the study of human traits that are inherited), population biology (the study of
environmental effects on, and interaction with, population characteristics), and epidemiology (the
study of how and why diseases affect different populations in different ways)
D. Cultural Anthropology
1. Cultural anthropology focuses on universals and variation in culture in the past and present.
2. 3 main branches:
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Chapter 1: The Importance of Anthropology
a. Archaeology - The branch of anthropology that seeks to reconstruct the daily life and customs
of peoples who lived in the past and to trace and explain cultural changes. Often lacking written
records for study, archaeologists must try to reconstruct history from the material remains of
human cultures.
b. Anthropological Linguistics - The anthropological study of languages
c. Ethnology - The study of how and why recent cultures differ and are similar.
3. The term culture refers to the customary ways of thinking and behaving of a particular population or
society.
4. Archaeology
a. The archaeologist seeks not only to reconstruct the daily life and customs of peoples who lived
in the past but also o trace cultural changes and to offer possible explanations for those
changes. This concern is similar to that of the historian, but the archaeologist reaches much
farther back in time (pre-history, that is, pre-written records of societies)
b. Prehistory - The time before written records.
c. Historical Archaeology - A specialty within archaeology that studies the material remains of
recent peoples who left written records.
d. In trying to understand how and why ways of life have changed through time in different parts
of the world, archaeologists collect materials from sites of human occupation. Usually, these
sites must be unearthed.
5. Anthropological Linguistics
a. Linguistics, or the study of languages, is a somewhat older discipline than anthropology, but the
early linguists concentrated on the study of languages that had been written for a long time-languages such as English that had been written for nearly 1,000 years.
b. Linguists study changes that have taken place over time, as well as contemporary variations
c. Historical Linguistics - The study of how languages change over time.
i.
Usually look at only written languages
d. Descriptive/Structural Linguistics - The study of how languages are constructed.
i.
Typically concerned with discovering and recording the principles that determine how
sounds and words are put together in speech.
e. Sociolinguistics - The study of cultural and subcultural patterns of speaking in different social
contexts.
i.
Interested in what people speak about and how they interact conversationally, their
attitudes toward speakers of other dialects or languages, and how people speak different
social contexts.
6. Ethnology (Cultural Anthropology)
a. Ethnologists seek to understand how and why peoples today and in the recent past differ in
their customary ways of thinking and acting.
b. It is concerned with patterns of thought and behavior, such as marriage customs, kinship
organization, political and economic systems, religion, folk art, and music, and with the ways in
which these patters differ in contemporary societies.
c. Ethnographer - A person who spends some time living with, interviewing, and observing a group
of people to describe their customs.
d. Ethnography - A description of a society's customary behaviors, and ideas.
e. Ethnohistorian - An ethnologist who uses historical documents to study how a particular culture
has changed over time.
f. Cross-Cultural Researcher - An ethnologist who uses ethnographic data about many societies to
test possible explanations of cultural variation to discover general patterns about cultural traitswhat is universal, what is variable, why traits vary, and what the consequences of the variability
might be.
E. Applied Anthropology
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1. Applied/Practicing Anthropology - The branch of anthropology that concerns itself with applying
anthropological knowledge to achieve practical goals, usually in the service of an agency outside the
traditional academic setting.
6. Explanation and Evidence
A. Explanations
1. Explanation - An answer to a why question. In science, there are 2 kinds of explanation that
researchers try to achieve: associations and theories.
B. Associations or Relationships
1. One way of explaining something (an observation, an action, a custom) is to say how it conforms to a
general principle or relationship.
2. Variables - A thing or quantity that varies.
3. Laws - Associations or relationships that are accepted by almost all scientists.
4. In the social sciences, associations are usually stated probabilistically; that is, we say that 2 or more
variables tend to be related in a predictable way, which means that there are usually some
expectations.
5. Statistical Association - A relationship or correlation between 2 or more variables that is unlikely to be
due to chance.
C. Theories
1. Even though laws and statistical associations explain by relating what is to be explained to other
things, we want to know more: why those laws or associations exist.
2. Theories - Explanations of associations or laws.
D. Why Theories Cannot Proved
1. Although some theories may have considerable evidence supporting them, no theory can be said to
be proved or unquestionably true.
2. Theoretical Construct - Something that cannot be observed or verified directly.
3. Perhaps the main advantage of a theory as a kind of explanation is that it may lead to new
understanding or knowledge.
4. Although theories cannot be proved, they are rejectable. The method of falsification, which shows
that a theory seems to be wrong, is mainly how theories are judged.
5. Hypothesis - Predictions, which may be derived from theories, about how variables are related.
E. Evidence: Testing Explanations
1. In any field of investigation, theories are generally the most plentiful commodity, apparently because
of the human predisposition to try to make sense of the world.
2. The strategy in all kinds of testing in science is to predict what one would expect to find if a particular
interpretations were correct, and then to conduct an investigation to see if the prediction is generally
consistent with the data.
F. Operationalization and Measurement
1. Operational Definition - A description of the procedure that is followed in measuring a variable.
2. Specifying an operational definition for each variable is extremely important because it allows other
investigators to check a researcher's result. Science depends on replication, the repetition of results.
Only when many researchers observe a particular association can we call that association or
relationship a law.
3. Measure - To describe how something compares with other things on some scale of variation.
G. Sampling
1. After deciding how to measure the variables in some predicted relationship, the investigator must
decide how to select which cases to study to see if the predicted relationship holds. If the prediction is
about the behavior of people, the sampling decision involves which people observe.
2. A random sample is one in which all cases selected had an equal chance of being included in the
sample.
H. Statistical Evaluation
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Chapter 1: The Importance of Anthropology
1. When researchers have measured the variables of interest for all the sample cases, they are ready to
see if the predicted relationship actually exists in the data.
2. Statisticians have devised various tests that tell us how "perfect" a result has to be for us to believe
that there is probably an association between the variables of interest, that one variable generally
predicts the other.
7. The Relevance of Anthropology
A. The idea that it is impossible to account for human behavior scientifically, either because our actions and
beliefs are too individualistic and complex or because human beings are understandable only in otherworldly terms, is a self-fulfilling notion.
B. If we aim to understand humans, it is essential that we study humans in all times and places. We must study
ancient humans and moderns humans. We must study their cultures and their biology.
C. Anthropology is relevant because it helps us avoid misunderstandings between peoples. If we can
understand why other groups are different from ourselves, we might have less reason to condemn them for
behavior that appears strange to us. We may then come to realize that many differences between peoples
are products of physical and cultural adaptations to different environments.
D. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected or globalized, the importance of understanding and
trying to respect cultural and physical differences becomes necessary. Misunderstandings can cause people
to go to war, and war with modern weapons of mass destruction can kill more people than ever before.
E. Knowledge of our past may bring both a feeling of humility and a sense of accomplishment. If we are to
attempt to deal with the problems of our world, we must be aware of our vulnerability so we do not think
that problems will solve themselves.
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