One of the goals of physical anthropology is to figure out how humans differ from other animals, and to explain why these differences exist.

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What is Physical Anthropology?

CLARK SPENCER LARSEN

E S S E N T I A L S O F PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY SECOND EDITION

CHAPTER

What is Physical Anthropology?

Questions addressed in this chapter:
What is anthropology?
What is physical anthropology?
What makes humans different from other animals?
How do physical anthropologists know what they know about human biology?

Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we the way we are? These are the kinds of questions we will address in this class. They are some of the most profound questions humans have ever dared ask about themselves. Though humans have struggled with these questions for millennia, this class will investigate how science has approached these questions, and what the science of physical anthropology has discovered about human origins and evolution. We will begin the semester examining the fundamentals of evolution, genetics, and human variation. We will then learn about our primate cousins. Finally, we will dive into the deep past and explore the human fossil record.

We will start today’s class with an introduction to the discipline of anthropology, and one of the four subfields of anthropology: physical anthropology. Because anthropologists study humans, we will then examine how humans differ from the other animals. Finally, I will introduce you to the diverse topics that anthropologists study, and how physical anthropologists find out what they know about human evolution and human biology.

Physical Anthropology. An Introduction

Who are we?
Where do we come from?
Why are we the way we are?
An example from St. Catherines Island, Georgia, USA

Like all scientists, physical anthropologists are driven by questions. The author of your book (Clark Larsen), for instance, is interested in how humans in North America adapted to two major events: 1) the advent of agriculture, and 2) the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. To answer these questions, Dr. Larsen has worked on an island off the coast of Georgia, called St. Catherines, for several decades. He has been part of a team that has excavated old skeletons in an effort to understand how humans there biologically adapted through time. His findings were both fascinating and surprising. Many scientists hypothesized that the shift to agriculture had positive benefits on human health. But Larsen has found the exact opposite. The Native Americans who inhabited St. Catherines thousands of years ago originally practiced a hunter and gatherer strategy, in which they hunted for their food, fished, and moved from place to place. However, they eventually domesticated corn and formed farming villages. When this happened, instead of their health improving, there is evidence in the bones that Larsen and his team are finding that the people actually became shorter and had more infections. This health decline became more dramatic as European contact introduced diseases into the population. Although Larsen’s work is focused on a small population on a small island, it has broader implications for understanding how the human body adapts bioculturally to environmental changes. What Larsen is doing is the science of anthropology.

What is Anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of humankind. There are four different kinds of anthropologists—often referred to as the four “fields” of anthropology. These are: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and physical (or biological) anthropology. Cultural anthropologists (far left of chart) study present day societies and focus on culture—learned behavior transmitted in a non-genetic manner from person to person. Often, cultural anthropologists focus their efforts on non-Western societies, though this is not always the case. Related work is done by linguistic anthropologists (second to right in chart), who study language and its impact on society. Archaeologists (second to left in chart) are interested in artifacts, and how these material remains of past peoples can be used to reconstruct their lives. Finally, physical, or biological, anthropologists (far right in chart) study human biology, both past and present, to better understand human origins, human evolution, and human biological variation. Of course, humans are both biological and cultural beings and therefore many researchers study humans through all of these lenses. This is called the biocultural approach.

What is Physical Anthropology?

Physical Anthropology: The study of human biological evolution and biocultural variation
Two key concepts:
All humans are a product of their evolutionary history.
All humans are a product of their individual life history.

In this class, we will focus on the subfield of physical, or biological, anthropology. This is the study of human biological evolution and biocultural variation. Physical anthropology embraces two key concepts about humans. First, all humans are a by-product of a long evolutionary history. In this class, we will go back 6 million years to the first upright walking human ancestors (called hominins). But, we will also go back 20 million years to the first apes (called hominoids), and 50 million years to the first primates, and 200 million years to the first mammals. Like all organisms, humans are a mosaic of anatomies that have accumulated over the millennia. But, we are not solely a product of our evolutionary history. All humans are also a product of their own individual life histories. The food we eat, our activity patterns, our socioeconomic status, where we live, and even when we live, all have an impact on our biology. There is a false idea out there that humans, human behavior, and human anatomy is either a product of our genes (nature) or the environment (nurture). This is simply not true. Humans are a product of BOTH: nature and nurture.

What Do Physical Anthropologists Do?

So, what is it that we actually do as physical anthropologists? Well, it depends on the questions we are interested in answering. Some physical anthropologists specialize in forensics and can identify human remains, like the individuals shown in the images to the top left, and middle right. Others have expertise in molecular genetics and use DNA to understand human variation and how humans are related to other primates (image top right). Some physical anthropologists study the biology of living humans. In the image shown to the middle left of this slide, researchers are studying the energetics of a woman in the Amazon, Brazil. Other physical anthropologists study the bones of past populations (lower left image). Sometimes these remains are recent enough that they are still real bone; other times these remains have been in the ground long enough to turn to rock—these are called fossils. Other anthropologists, called primatologists, study non-human primates. Studying our closest living relatives gives these scientists, like Jane Goodall (bottom right image), some insight into why humans have evolved the way we have. It is difficult to precisely define what a physical anthropologist does, because there are so many ways to study human biology, both past and present! One thing that all physical anthropologists rely on is knowledge of sciences other than anthropology. In this way, anthropology is interdisciplinary. A good anthropologist works with scientists in other fields. Those studying human fossils work with paleontologists and geologists. Those interested in human heredity work with molecular biologists and chemists. Primatologists work with ecologists and biologists. Anthropology is not an isolated field, but is one that relies heavily on knowledge from many other scientific disciplines.

What Makes Humans Different?

Six Big Events

Bipedalism

~6 million years ago

One of the goals of physical anthropology is to figure out how humans differ from other animals, and to explain why these differences exist. There are six key anatomical and behavioral differences between humans and our closest ape relatives that we will explore in detail in this class. Six big events that sent us on our evolutionary path. The first has to do with how we move. We walk on two legs—also known as bipedalism. Other animals certainly can get up on two legs occasionally, but humans are the only mammals to walk on two legs all of the time. Why we evolved this ability is not clear, but what is clear is that this is a very old adaptation. Fossils as old as 6 million years show evidence of upright walking, indicating that this is one of our lineage’s oldest adaptations.

Six Big Events

2. Loss of honing canine

~5.5 million years ago

What Makes Humans Different?

We also differ from our ape cousins in having a small, nonhoning canine tooth. Most primates have large, sharp canine (or fang) teeth—especially in the males of the species. This large, sharp canine is used by the males to defend territory and compete for access to mates. When these animals close their mouths, the canine rubs against the bottom bicuspid (or premolar) tooth and sharpens, or hones. Humans do not have this. Instead, humans have a very small canine tooth, the tip of which contacts the bottom tooth row directly and wears from the top down. This means that our canines become duller with age. Fossil evidence reveals that the canine started to reduce in size and lose its honing capacity quite early in human evolution, perhaps as early as 5.5 million years ago. These fossils suggest that human ancestors underwent an evolutionary change in our diet, and, perhaps more importantly, our mating and social strategy quite early in our lineage.

Six Big Events

3. Material culture and tools ~2.6 million years ago

What Makes Humans Different?

By 4 million years ago, a new kind of ape was on the African scene. It could walk on two legs and no longer used its large honing canines for male-male competition. But, this animal was not a “human” as we think of humans today. A major behavioral change that helped our ancestors survive, and become more human-like, began approximately 2.6 million years ago. They started to make stone tools. Tool use itself is not unique to humans. Chimpanzees will fashion “fishing poles” out of long reeds and use them to extract termites from their nests as is shown in the image on the bottom right of this slide. But the use of stone to make a sharp edge useful for many things, including cutting meat from bone, was a critical behavioral innovation. Simple stone tools, like the one shown in the bottom left of this slide, first appear in the fossil record 2.6 million years ago. These tools were the start of a long progression of technological innovations that allowed humans to survive and, ultimately, populate the globe. When we think of technology, we thing of iPads and spaceships. But those things were only possible because of earlier innovations like clothing, hammers and nails, and stone tools.

Six Big Events

4. Hunting

~1 million years ago?

What Makes Humans Different?

Although there is evidence that the oldest stone tool makers were cutting meat from bone, there is little evidence that they were actually hunting. This behavioral change probably occurred later, perhaps 1 million years ago, with a species we will learn much more about: Homo erectus. As with many other “unique” features of humans, hunting itself is not entirely unique to humans. Large cats hunt, and even chimpanzees will form large groups and hunt monkeys in their forest. However, only humans regularly use sophisticated tools to hunt, and hunting is an important part of a larger uniquely human behavior: the sexual division of labor, in which males hunt and females gather. Hunter-gatherer life, while rare in human groups today, was how humans lived their lives for hundreds of thousands of years.

Six Big Events

5. Speech

<2 million years ago?

6. Domestication

~10,000 years ago

What Makes Humans Different?

Two additional adaptations have launched humans on their evolutionary path: language and the domestication of plants and animals. Because language itself does not fossilize, it is quite difficult to pinpoint when speech evolved. And, most likely, the ability to produce language evolved gradually. However, anatomical evidence for speech, such as the shape of a bone in the neck called the hyoid, or the relative size of different regions of the brain important for speech, suggests that speech may have evolved as early as 2 million years ago. Being able to not only verbally communicate but to pass along symbolic representations of thought from generation to generation was a critical part of survival for our ancestors. By 10,000 years ago, humans began to manipulate and control the breeding of the plants and animals around us. We began to domesticate cattle, pigs, goats, and dogs, and began to selectively breed crops that would yield the highest bounty of food. This shift to agriculture was a recent, but profound, transition from a hunter-gatherer way of living, to village life. As the data from St. Catherines Island already showed, it had a measureable impact on our biology.

What Makes Humans Different?

The last four human adaptations—stone tool manufacturing, hunting, speech, and domestication of food—are all related to one big evolutionary trend: brains. For 2 million years, our ancestors’ brains got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Today, our brains are on average three times the volume of the brain of our closest ape relatives (chimpanzee and orangutan shown in this image between the human and a monkey). As we’ll learn, the brain is energetically costly—it burns 20% of the fuel that we take into our bodies in the form of food, even though it amounts to only 2% of our total weight. Large brains are therefore not easy to evolve, and must have been quite beneficial. Of course, the brain itself is not valuable, it is what the brain can do that evolution favored. Those individuals with slightly larger brains may have been more adept at stone tool making, may have been more skilled hunters, may have communicated better, and therefore may have survived to pass on those enlarging brains to the next generation. Image of primate skulls courtesy of Wikicommons creative license.

Science. How We Know What We Know.

Science: A question-driven, evidence-based understanding of the natural world
Evidence
Hypothesis
Theory

How do we know these things? In a word: science. But do not think that science is just a collection of facts. Advances in scientific knowledge happen because of great questions, not just answers. Science is a question-driven, evidence-based understanding of the natural world. Scientists make observations about the world around them, and then ask questions. Why is the sky blue? Why are plants green? What makes people sick? Why do I walk on two legs? Some of the simplest questions, questions that a young child would ask, are great scientific questions. These are the kinds of questions that lead to research and the collection of data and evidence that can be used to test hypotheses, or find possible explanations for these questions. Sometimes the data support the hypothesis; sometimes the data refute the hypothesis. This process is known as the scientific method. When a number of related hypotheses all fit together in a manner that can explain a natural phenomenon, we call that a theory. Unfortunately, the word “theory” has taken on a different meaning in everyday language: It sometimes is thought of as a wild guess; but not in science. A “theory” in science is a robust idea that explains the natural world and predicts the results of future investigations. Some theories in science include the theory of gravity, cell theory (that living organisms are made of cells), germ theory (that diseases are caused by germs), and the theory of evolution. However, nothing, absolutely nothing, in science is set in stone. Old ideas can be rejected as new data is collected, as new questions are asked, and as new discoveries are made. Science is therefore a self-correcting process.

Origin of bipedalism
Darwin’s hypothesis
Environmental change
Freed hands for tool use
Data
Upright walking evolved in forest habitats
Stone tools millions of years later
Hypothesis rejected

Science. How We Know What We Know.

For example, Charles Darwin (shown here to the right), who we will learn more about in the next chapter, made many wonderful observations, asked great questions, had many brilliant hypotheses. Most of these hypotheses have been supported by 150 years of evidence and can be unified under the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. However, some of his hypotheses were also flat-out wrong. One such erroneous idea was his explanation for why humans evolved upright walking. Darwin hypothesized that upright walking evolved as a result of an environmental change and that tree-dwelling apes took to upright walking when the forests receded and a savanna ecosystem emerged. He also hypothesized that upright walking evolved to free the hands for stone tool manufacturing and use in hunting. Darwin was right about a great many things, but was wrong about the origins of upright walking. New fossil evidence reveals that the earliest upright walkers lived in forested environments, and upright walking predates stone tool use and hunting by millions of years. But, in science, disproving one hypothesis opens the door to others. Darwin proposed a testable explanation that has been evaluated with fossil data and shown to be incorrect. So what now? Well, by knowing what is not right, scientists can now generate new testable explanations for why upright walking evolved. Look at the images of upright walking shown at the bottom of this slide and try to think of other hypotheses for why upright walking may have evolved. We will eventually get to that topic in human evolution in this class. But before we head down that path, we’ll first examine the big idea that Charles Darwin was most certainly right about—biological evolution.

For more learning resources, please visit the
StudySpace site for Essentials of Physical Anthropology
http://books.wwnorton.com/studyspace

What Is Physical Anthropology?

Clark • Spencer • Larsen

Essentials of Physical Anthropology

Second Edition

CHAPTER

This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for:

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