• Anthropology is the study of mankind or human kind.
• The term Anthropology comes from the Greek word
Anthropos which means “man or human” and logos
which means “the study of.”
• Anthropologists study various aspects about humans
• Anthropology are interested in where, when, and how did humans
appear on earth.
• How and why they have changed since then.
• How and why modern human populations vary in certain physical
features.
• How and why societies in the past and present have varied in their
customary ideas and practices.
• Applied and practicing anthropologists put anthropological
methods, information, and results to use, in efforts to solve
practical problems.
• One different between anthropology and other disciplines
concerned with humans is that anthropologists travel to
study various groups of people or do archeological digs to
answer questions about mankind.
• Anthropology is concerned explicitly and directly with all
varieties of people throughout the world, as well as
people from all periods. Beginning with the immediate
ancestors of humans.
• Anthropologists trace the development of humans until
the present.
• In the past anthropologists only concentrated on nonwestern cultures, today Anthropologists focus on both.
• In addition to the worldwide and historical scope of
anthropology, another distinguished feature or its
discipline is its holistic, or multifaceted, approach to the
study of human beings.
• Anthropologists don’t only study all varieties of people
but many aspects of the human experience as well.
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the history of the area in which they live,
the physical environment,
the organization of family life,
the general features of their language,
their political and economic systems,
their religion,
their diet, or
their styles of art and dress.
• In the past, individual anthropologists tried to be holistic
and cover all aspects of a subject. Today, so many
information has been accumulated, anthropologists start
to focus more on one subject or areas.
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Physical Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Archeology
Anthropological Linguistics
• Physical (Biological) Anthropology seek the answers to
two set of questions:
• Questions about the emergence of humans and their evolution (the
focus is called human paleontology, or Paleoanthropology).
• How and why contemporary human populations vary biologically
(this focus called human variation).
• In order to reconstruct human evolution, human
paleontologists search for and study fossils of humans,
prehumans, and related animals.
• In addition to using fossil records anthropologists also
use geological information on the succession of climates,
environments, and plant and animal populations.
• When reconstructing the past of humans, paleontologists
are also interested in the behavior and evolution of our
closest relatives, other primates, such as apes, monkeys
and chimpanzees.
• Anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists who
specialize in the study of primates are called
Primatologists.
• One especially popular subject of study is the
chimpanzee, which bears a close resemblance to human
behavior and physical appearance, has a similar blood
chemistry, and is susceptible to many of the same
diseases.
• Koko the gorilla
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=480keuakN6c
• Koko gets new Kittens
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fffuQ6VIOyA
• From primates study anthropologists try to find
characteristics that are distinctly humans, as opposite to
those that might be part of the primate heritage. With
this information, they may be able to infer what our
prehistoric ancestors were like. The inference from
primates are checked against fossil records.
• Physical anthropologists piece together pieces bits of
information obtained from different sources. They
construct theories that explain the changes observed in
the fossil record and then attempt to evaluate their
theories by checking one kind of evidence against the
other.
• The second major focus of physical anthropology is the
study of human variation, investigating how and why
contemporary human populations differ in biological or
physical characteristics.
• All living people belong to one species, Homo sapiens,
for all can successfully interbreed. But there are much
variations among human population.
• Anthropologists ask questions such as:
• Why are some peoples taller than others?
• How have human populations adapted physically to their
environmental conditions?
• Are some peoples, such as Inuit (Eskimos), better equipped than
other peoples to endure cold?
• Does darker skin pigmentation offer special protection against the
tropical sun?
• To better understand the biological variations observable
among contemporary human populations, biological
anthropologists use the principles, concepts, and
techniques of at least three 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.
• Epidemiology: the study of how and why diseases affect
different populations in different ways.
• Cultural anthropology are interested in how population
or societies vary in their cultural features.
• To an anthropologist, the term culture refers to the
customary ways of thinking and behaving in a particular
population or society.
• Archeologists seek to
• Reconstruct the daily life and customs of peoples who lived in the
past.
• Trace cultural changes and to offer possible explanations of those
changes.
• The different between an archeologist and a historian is
that a historian deals only with societies that left written
records and limited to the last 5,000 years of human
history. Archeologists go much farther back in time.
• Archeologists try to reconstruct history from the remains
of human cultures.
• Most Archeologists deal with prehistory, the time
before written records.
• To understand how and why life has changed through
time in different parts of the world, archeologists collect
artifacts.
• Linguistics or the study of languages is an older discipline
than anthropology, but the earlier linguists concentrated
on the study of languages that existed for a long time.
• Anthropological linguistics concentrate on the study of
languages that has not yet been written.
• Because language must be heard in order to be studies, it
does not leave any traces once its speakers have died.
• Linguists interests in reconstructing the history of
unwritten languages must begin in the present, with
comparisons of contemporary languages. On the basis of
these comparisons, they draw inferences about the kinds
of change in language that may have occurred in the past
and may account for similarities and differences observed
in the present.