Arcl 140 Biological Anthropology
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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 dont 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