Biological anthropology
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Biological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is a natural science discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective.[1] This subfield of anthropology systematically studies human beings from a biological perspective.
Branches
[edit]As a subfield of anthropology, biological anthropology itself is further divided into several branches. All branches are united in their shared orientation and/or application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of human biology and behavior.
- Bioarchaeology is the study of past human cultures through examination of human remains recovered in an archaeological context. The examined human remains are usually limited to bones but may include preserved soft tissue. Researchers in bioarchaeology combine the skill sets of human osteology, paleopathology, and archaeology, and often consider the cultural and mortuary context of the remains.
- Evolutionary biology is the study of the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth, starting from a single common ancestor. These processes include natural selection, common descent, and speciation.
- Evolutionary psychology is the study of psychological structures from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution.
- Forensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition.
- Human behavioral ecology is the study of behavioral adaptations (foraging, reproduction, ontogeny) from the evolutionary and ecological perspectives (see behavioral ecology). It focuses on human adaptive responses (physiological, developmental, genetic) to environmental stresses.
- Human biology is an interdisciplinary field of biology, biological anthropology, nutrition and medicine, which concerns international, population-level perspectives on health, evolution, anatomy, physiology, molecular biology, neuroscience, and genetics.
- Paleoanthropology is the study of fossil evidence for human evolution, mainly using remains from extinct hominin and other primate species to determine the morphological and behavioral changes in the human lineage, as well as the environment in which human evolution occurred.
- Paleopathology is the study of disease in antiquity. This study focuses not only on pathogenic conditions observable in bones or mummified soft tissue, but also on nutritional disorders, variation in stature or morphology of bones over time, evidence of physical trauma, or evidence of occupationally derived biomechanic stress.
- Primatology is the study of non-human primate behavior, morphology, and genetics. Primatologists use phylogenetic methods to infer which traits humans share with other primates and which are human-specific adaptations.
History
[edit]Origins
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Biological anthropology looks different today than it did even at the end of the 1990s. Even the name is relatively new, having been known as 'physical anthropology' since before 1900, with some practitioners still applying that term.[2] Biological anthropologists look back to the work of Charles Darwin as a major foundation for what they do today. However, if one traces the intellectual genealogy back to the beginnings of physical anthropology—before the discovery of much of what we now know of the hominin fossil record—the focus shifts to human biological variation. Some editors, see below, have rooted the field even deeper than formal science.
Attempts to study and classify human beings as living organisms date back to Ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428–c. 347 BC) placed humans on the scala naturae, which included all things, from inanimate objects at the bottom to deities at the top.[3] This became the main system through which scholars thought about nature for the next roughly 2,000 years.[3] Plato's student Aristotle (c. 384–322 BC) observed in his History of Animals that human beings are the only animals to walk upright[3] and argued, in line with his teleological view of nature, that humans have buttocks and no tails to give them a soft place to sit when they are tired of standing.