THE SCIENCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
(1) Through various methods of research, anthropologists try to fit together the pieces of the human puzzle—to discover how humanity was first achieved, what made it branch out in different directions, and why separate societies behave similarly in some ways but quite differently in other ways. (2) Anthropology, which emerged as an independent science in the late eighteenth century, has two main divisions: physical anthropology and cultural anthropology. (3) Physical anthropology focuses on human evolution and variation and uses methods of physiology, genetics, and ecology. Cultural anthropology focuses on culture and includes archaeology, social anthropology, and linguistics. (4)
Physical anthropologists are most concerned with human biology. Physical anthropologists are detectives whose mission is to solve the mystery of how humans came to be human. They ask questions about the events that led a tree-dwelling population of animals to evolve into two-legged beings with the power to learn—a power that we call intelligence. Physical anthropologists study the fossils and organic remains of once-living primates. They also study the connections between humans and other primates that are still living. Monkeys, apes, and humans have more in common with one another physically than they do with other kinds of animals. In the lab, anthropologists use the methods of physiology and genetics to investigate the composition of blood chemistry for clues to the relationship of humans to various primates. Some study the animals in the wild to find out what behaviors they share with humans. Others speculate about how the behavior of non-human primates might have shaped human bodily needs and habits.
A well-known family of physical anthropologists, the Leakeys, conducted research in East Africa indicating that human evolution centered there rather than Asia. In 1931, Louis Leakey and his wife Mary Leakey began excavating at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where over the next forty years they discovered stone tool and hominid evidence that pushed back the dates for early humans to over 3.75 million years ago. Their son, Richard Leakey, discovered yet other types of hominid skulls in Kenya, which he wrote about in Origins (1979) and Origins Reconsidered (1992).
Like physical anthropologists, cultural anthropologists study clues about human life in the distant past; however, cultural anthropologists also look at the similarities and differences among human communities today. Some cultural anthropologists work in the field, living and working among people in societies that differ from their own. Anthropologists doing fieldwork often produce an ethnography, a written description of the daily activities of men, women, and children that tells the story of the society’s community life as a whole. Some cultural anthropologists do not work in the field but rather at research universities and museums doing the comparative and interpretive part of the job. These anthropologists, called ethnologists, sift through the ethnographies written by field anthropologists and try to discover cross-cultural patterns in marriage, child rearing, religious beliefs and practices, warfare—any subject that constitutes the human experience. They often use their findings to argue for or against particular hypotheses about people worldwide.
A cultural anthropologist who achieved worldwide fame was Margaret Mead. In 1923, Mead went to Samoa to pursue her first fieldwork assignment—-a study that resulted in her widely read book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Mead published ten major works during her long career, moving from studies of child rearing in the Pacific to the cultural and biological bases of gender, the nature of cultural change, the structure and functioning of complex societies, and race relations. Mead remained a pioneer in her willingness to tackle subjects of major intellectual consequence, to develop new technologies for research, and to think of new ways that anthropology could serve society.
Glossary:
- primates: the order of mammals that includes apes
- humans hominid: the family of primates of which humans are the only living species