Arcl 140 Biological Anthropology

ARCL 140: Biological Anthropology

Midterm #1

Chapter One: What Is Biological Anthropology?

Biological Anthropology- study of humans as biological organisms in an evolutionary framework

Anthropology is divided into four:

Biological Anthropology- studying evolution as it relates to humans

Cultural Anthropology- Studying human societies in a cross cultural perspective

Ethnography- written accounts of cultural practices

Ethnology- Study of human societies and their behaviors

Medical Anthropology- understand those factors which influence health and well being

Socio-cultural Anthropology- studies the rules of being human, such as how we calculate who we are related to (kinship), how we make a living, how we organize the world, and all of the beliefs that are part of religion, science, and the arts

3. Linguistic Anthropology- origins of language and speech. Relationship between culture and language

4. Archaeology- how people used to live based on artifacts

- Pre-Historic- study of populations with no written accounts

- Historical- study go populations with written accounts

Biological Anthropology is divided into 5 subfields

Paleoanthropology

study of evolution using the fossil record

Skeletal Biology and Human Osteology

study of human skeletal material

anthropometry- detailed measurement of human body parts

Paleopathology and Bioarchaeology

Paleopathology- study of diseases in ancestral human populations

Bioarchaeology- study of human remains in archaeological context

Forensic Anthropology

study of human remains in a legal context

identifying skeletal remains and concluding how the person may have died

Primatology and Human Biology

Primatology- study of biology and behavior or non-human primates

Jane Goodall- chimpanzees

Brute Galdikas- orangutans

Dian Fossey- Gorillas

Human Biology- study of human growth and development, adaptation to environments, and human genetics

Biomedical Anthropology- how cultural practices influence spread of disease

Effects of westernization

Molecular Anthropology- understanding the difference in the genome between humans and primates

Chapter Two: Origins of Evolutionary Thought

Aristotle

Great Chain of Being- graded scale of perfection

Immutability of Species- species don't evolve, they are fixed

Thinking the earth was young prohibited evolutionary thoughts

The Scientific Revolution

Christopher Columbus- earth is flat

Fernidad Magellen- brings back penguin from South America

Juan Sebastian Elcano- renaissance age, first to circumnavigate the world

Thought earth was center of world

Copernicus

Heliocentric thinker

On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres- dies same day as this book is published

It was taken out of circulation because heliocentric

Galileo Galilei

heliocentric thinker

allowed to publish book as long as he provided an argument for geocentric

didn’t comply

put on house arrest until death

Galen of Pergamon

anatomical observations based on animal dissection

first autopsist

soul in brain

Andreas Vesalius

founder of wonder human anatomy

human autopsy

SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION WAS IMPORTANT BECAUSE PEOPLE STARTED TO CHALLENGE BIAS

The Naturalists

John Ray

concept of species and genus

Carolus Linnaeus

concept of class and order

George-Louis Leclerc (Come de Buffon)

species can be unique to certain areas/climates

animals change through migrating

The Natural History

new animals are weaker than old die to poor environmental conditons

Erasmus Darwin

all warmblooded creatures from common ancestor

Zoonomia and Temple of Nature

diversity comes from sea/mud

Chevalier de Lamark

all organisms make adjustments to their environment that can be passed down

Baron Georges Cuvier

opposed evolution

phylla

Animals from fossil record are extinct

Catastrophism- some catalytic disaster wiped out earlier forms of life

James Hutton

challenged