Chapter Two

Sub-fields of Anthropology

Section 2:
Evolutionary and
Anthropological Perspectives
on Human Origin,
 Evolutionary and Paleo-anthropological
perspectives on human origin
⧫One of the major questions anthropologists grapple with is the origins
of humankind.
➢The fossil record preserves evidence of past life on Earth, tracing a
progression of simple one-celled organisms to increasingly diverse
forms.
How did these different forms of life emerge and new species arise?
⧫Evolution refers to a process and gradual change in specie over time.
✓In fact, evolution is used to describe the cumulative effects of three
independent facts.
Replication: The fact that life forms have offspring;
Variation: The fact that each offspring is slightly different from its
parents, and its siblings; and
Selection: The fact that not all offspring survive, and those that do tend
to be the ones best suited to their environment.
 Evolutionary Cont.
➢The scientific explanation of human origin and the concept of
evolution:
Charles Darwin (1809-1882), theory of natural selection in the
evolution of species and the idea of survival of the fittest.
⧫One of Charles Darwin’s contributions to civilization was that he
demonstrated that humanity was part of the world of living things.
✓Set the foundation for a new study: the study of humans as living,
evolving creatures in many ways no different from the rest of animal
life.
⧫Anthropologists study humanity as a biological phenomenon by raising
questions such as:
❑ What species are we most and least like?
❑ Where and when did we fist appear?
❑ What were our ancestors like?
❑ Can we learn about human behavior from the behavior of our nearest
relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas?
❑ Is our species still evolving?
 Anthropological perspectives on racial types and human
physical variation
⧫How human populations have adapted to their varying environments
by the same evolutionary process that shapes all living things from the
perspective of race?
Race: is a group of organisms of the same species that share similar
physical (and genetic) attributes and specific geographic regions.
: a classification of people into groups on the basis of supposedly
homogeneous and superficial biological traits such as skin color or
hair characteristics.
✓Just like any other living thing, human beings adapt to their
environments through an evolutionary process.
(Our species adapts mainly through cultural means)
⧫We survive our environments not because we’ve adapted to them
biologically, but with artifacts and complex behavior.
➢Adaptation: a process (behavioral and/or biological) that increases the
likelihood of survival for an organism.
 Cont.
✓ The ability of humans in making tools as a means of adaptation to a
particular environment cannot be passed on genetically but rather
culturally.
➢ Biological adaptation to a particular environment:
a) Skin color: Darkest skin and Lightest skin (an adaptation to the
geographical conditions of Africa and Europe, respectively)
✓Biological adaptations are not instantaneous. They take place over
the span of generations.
b) Body stature:
Arctic: e.g. Inuit – have a short and stocky build
East Africa: e.g. Maasai – have a taller and more slender bodies
⧫In biology, Bergmann’s rule: in colder regions, warm-blooded animals
will have stockier bodies than their counterparts from warmer regions
(Stockier bodies are more efficient at retaining body heat.) ✓Body
stature: is an adaptation to the geographical conditions of hot African and
the cold Arctic.
Carl Bergmann (1814-1865)
Bergmann Rule: is an ecological principle
stating that body mass increases with colder
climate.
 Human Races: The history of racial typing
➢First records of humans classifying others as certain “types” come
from ancient Egypt (1350BC classifying humans by skin color)
➢By the 16th century, during the Age of Discovery:
✓Europeans voyaging around the world were encountering many
previously unknown peoples: weren’t Christian and didn’t share
European culture and values, so the Europeans labeled them Savages.
➢ By the mid-1800s, naturalists began using a method of describing the
shape of the head called the cephalic index, a ratio measurement of
the length and width of the head.
Dolichocephalic peoples had long and narrow heads (like most northern
Europeans), and
Brachycephalic peoples tended to have broad heads — like many
southern Europeans.
 Cont.
✓The root problem: biological determinism, the idea that physical traits
were somehow linked to behavior.
✓With behavioral characteristics “linked” to genetic characteristics in
the minds of many (including scientists), some in the 19th and early
20th centuries even advocated for state regulation of marriages,
family size, and whether to allow an individual to reproduce. This
practice became known as eugenics.
e.g. Nazi Germany: the concept of a Master race
 The Grand Illusion: Race, turns out, is arbitrary
⧫Over the years, various anthropologists have attempted to classify the
human species into various races, such as Caucasian, Black African,
Asian, and so on.
➢Any attempt to classify human races raises a number of questions.
What do you do with people who look, well, partly Asian and partly
European? And does “European” end in the Middle East, where some
African traits are present? Where does Africa even begin, genetically
speaking? Who’s going to draw up the lines between “black” and
“white” (and what qualifies that person for the job, anyway)?
⧫For most professional anthropologists today, human “race” is an
antiquated concept.
✓For biomedical reasons (and sometimes forensic identification of
bodies), the reality of genetic ancestry can be important, but color coded
races, loaded with behavioral traits, are basically arbitrary.
 What Anth.sts can say for sure about Human Races?
⧫Homo sapiens sapiens does feature geographically based differences
within the species.
1. These genetic differences don’t mean a lot, biologically. Because all
healthy humans can mate and have healthy offspring, we’re all in
Homo sapiens sapiens, biologically speaking.
➢For most physical anthropologists race is nearly meaningless when
applied to humanity.
Rather than talk about races, physical anthropologists more commonly talk today of
ancestry, a more general term that recognizes the reality of some geographically
specific human adaptations but doesn’t turn them into loaded; black-and-white
races.
2. Cultural behavior isn’t genetically linked to those geographical
differences.
✓Most of human behavior isn’t biologically determined or filtered in
through the natural environment - most of it is culturally learned.
It’s culture that really drives behavior, not the genes.
 Human socio-cultural and biological diversity and
similarities: What is to be human?
⧫By studying evolution, the change of species through time,
anthropologists treat humanity as one of the biological species in the
animal kingdom.
In this respect, human biology and culture have evolved over millions of
years and they will continue to evolve together.
✓Human biology affects human culture; and similarly, human culture
affects human biology.
➢This is why anthropologists use the term bio-cultural to describe the
dual nature of human evolution: both biological and cultural dimensions.
✓Human beings are described as a bio-cultural animal.
✓Humanity evolves both as a result of biological factors and cultural
factors.
 The Bio-cultural Animal
⧫Although humans survive by using both their biology and cultural
information, all other animals survive mainly through their biology and
by relying on instinct rather than such cultural information.
➢Paleo-anthropologists are concerned with understanding how cultural,
non-cultural, and bio-cultural evolutionary factors shaped humanity
through time.
The meaning of humanity from the anthropological perspective:
Humanity is the most common term we to use to refer to human beings.
Humanity stands for the human species, a group of life forms with the
following characteristics:
• Bipedalism (walking on two legs);
• Relatively small teeth for primates of our size;
• Relatively large brains for primates of our size;
• Using modern language to communicate ideas; and
• Using complex sets of ideas called culture to survive.
 Cont.

➢Humanity is a general term that doesn’t specify whether you’re