What is biological anthropology?

In order to answer this question, we first have to look at anthropology as a whole. So, just for a moment, let’s start with the more general question, “What is anthropology?”

Anthropology is the scientific study of humankind. The main purpose of anthropology is for us to understand human biological and cultural diversity, and the origins of humans. So, the humans that anthropologists study can be modern or ancient and can span across the globe. Anthropologists are unique in that they study the entirety of human existence over time and space.

What is the anthropological perspective?

The anthropological approach to study humans differs from other fields of study in some key ways. It employs a holistic and evolutionary perspective, and comparative methods while emphasizing the need for field-based research to collect data.

Holistic Perspective

Anthropologists try to understand humankind through the complex interrelationships of all aspects of human existence. Anthropologists contend that we can only understand humans if we examine their whole experience. For example, human biology must be examined within the context of human cultures and vice versa. In addition, all of this must be examined within the context of the environment and historical processes. To be holistic, anthropology is often an interdisciplinary field that crosses over into other fields such as history, geology, and ecology.

This holistic perspective enables anthropologists to be relativistic, meaning that judgments, truths, or moral values have no absolutes, and can only be understood relative to the situation or individuals involved. For anthropologists, this means that they accept that all cultures are of equal value and must be studied from a neutral point of view. A good anthropologist must disregard their own beliefs, morals, and judgments when examining another culture. They must, instead, examine each culture within the context of its own beliefs.

Evolutionary Perspective

Using various types of data, from fossils to living beings, anthropologists document and explain the human experience over time and space. Biological change is explained using the tenets of the biological theory of evolution, which you will learn more about later in this book, while cultural change is explained using multiple theories including ecological, material, social, and psychological explanations. You can learn more about the theories employed in anthropology from the Department of Anthropology (The University of Alabama).

Comparative Methods

“Generalizations about human nature, human society, and the human past requires evidence from the widest possible range of human societies” (Lavenda and Schultz 2015, 5). Anthropologists do not compare as a judgment value, but to explore the similarities and differences and try to explain why we see the similarities and differences. Cross-cultural comparisons help anthropologists better understand their data and to identify patterns of human behavior.

Field-based Research

Anthropologists maintain that researchers need to be close to their research subject to really understand what has happened or is happening to the subject. To do this, anthropologists spend a fair amount of time in the field collecting data. Many return to the same field sites for years to collect data. Whether an archaeologist studying ancient ruins, a primatologist studying chimpanzees at the Gombe reserve, a linguistic anthropologist documenting a dying indigenous language, a cultural anthropologist studying the effects of migration on family structure, or an applied anthropologist working with a Native American tribe to regain federal recognition, field research connects the researcher directly to the lived experience of people or primates.

Fields of Study in Anthropology

There are five fields of study in anthropology: cultural (or sociocultural) anthropology, biological (or physical) anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and applied anthropology.

Sociocultural Anthropology

Sociocultural anthropologists examine social patterns and practices across cultures, with a special interest in how people live in particular places and how they organize, govern, and create meaning. A hallmark of sociocultural anthropology is its concern with similarities and differences, both within and among societies, and its attention to race, sexuality, class, gender, and nationality. Research in sociocultural anthropology is distinguished by its emphasis on participant observation, which involves placing oneself in the research context for extended periods of time to gain a first-hand sense of how local knowledge is put to work in grappling with practical problems of everyday life and with basic philosophical problems of knowledge, truth, power, and justice. Topics of concern to sociocultural anthropologists include such areas as health, work, ecology and environment, education, agriculture and development, and social change.

Biological (or Physical) Anthropology

Biological anthropologists seek to understand how humans adapt to diverse environments, how biological and cultural processes work together to shape growth, development and behavior, and what causes disease and early death. In addition, they are interested in human biological origins, evolution and variation. They give primary attention to investigating questions having to do with evolutionary theory, our place in nature, adaptation and human biological variation. To understand these processes, biological anthropologists study other primates (primatology), the fossil record (paleoanthropology), prehistoric people (bioarchaeology), and the biology (e.g., health, cognition, hormones, growth and development) and genetics of living populations.

Archaeology

Archaeologists examine past peoples and cultures, from the deepest prehistory to the recent past, through the analysis of material remains, ranging from artifacts and evidence of past environments to architecture and landscapes. Material evidence, such as pottery, stone tools, animal bone, and remains of structures, is examined within the context of theoretical paradigms, to address such topics as the formation of social groupings, ideologies, subsistence patterns, and interaction with the environment. Like other areas of anthropology, archaeology is a comparative discipline; it assumes basic human continuities over time and place, but also recognizes that every society is the product of its own particular history and that within every society there are commonalities as well as variation.

Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is the comparative study of ways in which language reflects and influences social life. It explores the many ways in which language define patterns of communication, formulate categories of social identity and group membership, organize large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and, in conjunction with other forms of meaning-making, equip people with common cultural representations of their natural and social worlds. Linguistic anthropology shares with anthropology in general a concern to understand power, inequality, and social change, particularly as these are constructed and represented through language and discourse.

Applied Anthropology

A fifth field has been emerging over the past couple of decades. Applied anthropologists use the knowledge collected through anthropological research to address contemporary social issues and problems. To accomplish this, applied anthropologists may help in developing such things as economic programs or policy initiatives that address the issue at hand. Anthropologists from all of the other fields of study may become involved in applied anthropology by working with non-governmental organizations, governmental organizations, the health care industry, cultural resource management firms, historic preservation organizations, community development organizations and more. Many applied anthropologists refer to this work as “practicing anthropology.” It is also referred to as “public anthropology, advocacy anthropology, collaborative anthropology, cultural brokerage, and action anthropology” (Willigen 2013, 25).

While the sheer scope of anthropological study requires people to choose a field and specialization within that field many anthropologists integrate multiple fields in their work. It is common to find biological anthropologists working with cultural anthropologists to examine things such as disease patterns and archaeologists to look at migration patterns in the past. This is just one example of the many types of collaborations across the anthropological fields of study.

What is Biological Anthropology?

Biological anthropology is the study of the biology of humans and their nearest biological relatives. “Biological relatives” include both humankind’s ancestors and our nearest living relatives, the non-human primates.

Biological anthropologists fall under 4 major categories:

1) Human biology (human biological diversity, genetics, adaptations to environmental stressors, etc.)

2) Primatology (non-human primate biology, evolution, behavior, ecology, etc.)

3) Paleoanthropology (human origins and human evolution)

4) Forensic anthropology (identification of human remains for legal purposes)

This course focuses on the first three categories and is divided into three units:

Unit 1: In this unit, you’ll learn the basic toolkit you’ll need (evolutionary theory) to understand the rest of the course. This unit also covers human biology.

Unit 2: This unit covers primatology from the first appearance of primates in the fossil record to living primates.

Unit 3: This unit covers human evolution from earliest hominin found to date from the late Miocene to anatomically modern humans in the Upper Pleistocene.

 

Resources

“What is Anthropology?” 2015. American Anthropological Association. Accessed May 7, 2015. http://www.aaanet.org/about/WhatisAnthropology.cfm.

Haviland, William A., Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, and Bunny McBride. 2014. Anthropology: The Human Challenge. 14th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Lavenda, Robert H. and Emily A. Schultz. 2015. Anthropology: What Does It Meant to be Human? 3^rd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Longcore, Matthew. 2019. “The Return of the Comparative Method in Anthropology.” Human Relations Area Files. Accessed November 8, 2022. https://hraf.yale.edu/the-return-of-the-comparative-method-in-anthropology/.

Society for Applied Anthropology. n.d. Accessed November 9, 2022. https://www.appliedanthro.org/.

Willigen, John van. 2013. “Applied Anthropology.” In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, edited by R. Jon MsGee and Richard L. Warms, 25-28. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA