Brief Background about Biological Anthropology

What is Biological Anthropology?

Biological anthropology (also called physical anthropology), then, is an interesting mixture of social studies and biological studies; several other ingredients make it even more fascinating. The two primary concept areas that tend to hold biological anthropology together are human evolution and human biosocial variation; there are many topics that can be studied within these two concept areas.

In order to grasp how humans evolved from earlier life forms, we can look at our closest relatives, the primates. Primates include us (Homo sapiens), the apes, the monkeys, and prosimians, such as the lemur. We can learn about primate behavior by studying them in the wild, as Jane Goodall did with chimpanzees in Africa, or by studying them in small captive colonies. These studies by primatologists are particularly important now because many primates are endangered animals, and our knowledge of their behavior and environment may help them, and us, to survive in the future.

Australopithecus afarensis

Australopithecus aethiopicus

Homo erectus

Homo neanderthalensis

Neanderthal

Cro-magnon

Modern Sapiens

We can use the techniques of archaeology to uncover the skeletal remains of our ancestors from the distant past. The exciting findings of human paleontology (the study of fossils) have pushed back our ancestry as tool-using humans who walked on two legs to several million years ago. As Louis Leakey showed us, our early human ancestors probably hunted and foraged for food on the continent of Africa long before North and South America or Australia were inhabited by people. Although we have learned a great deal about our ancestors within the last few decades, we are far from having a clear picture of our evolutionary history, and there is still much more to learn.

The knowledge that biological anthropologists gather on living populations falls into several overlapping categories. Again, evolution and biosocial variation are underlying themes in studies that deal with nutrition, child growth, health in societies, the genetics of human populations, and adaptation (adjustment) to the environment. For example, we try to understand how Eskimos have survived in the harsh cold of the Arctic using clever behavioral adaptations as well as biological adaptations. As another example, the presence of a strange disease in New Guinea natives led to the discovery of a whole new class of infectious organisms, and also won its discoverer, Dr. Carlton Gajdusek, the Nobel Prize.