ANTH151: Human Evolution and Diversity

The 2014 version of my first-year course in human evolution and diversity -- note: it's taught in a department that's predominantly social, cultural, developmental and applied anthropology, not biological anthropology.

A Companion to Biological Anthropology, 2nd Edition, 2023

While biological anthropology intersects with science education via numerous topics, and many practicing biological anthropologists are college or university faculty members, studies of biological anthropology pedagogical best practices at the undergraduate level are scarce. The purpose of this chapter is to (1) outline obstacles and opportunities in teaching two content areas in biological anthropology perceived as "controversial": human evolution and human variation (sometimes understood as "race") and (2) present evidence-based recommendations for pedagogical best practices and approaches that US college and university faculty members can use when teaching these topics in undergraduate classrooms.

Anthropology News , 2002

The Science of Difference. Anthropology is the science of human difference, although at present it is a rather shamefaced, ambivalent science. No other field of inquiry has expanded and systematized our understanding of human diversity to the extent that anthropology has accomplished. Yet, like a timid host, we find ourselves stammering apologies for what we do best: "I really didn't mean to suggest that people are all that different. .. certainly, despite cultural variation, people share a fundamental nature, etc., etc." For decades we have been caught up in a dilemma: our heartfelt urge to celebrate a human diversity we have done so much to establish is brought up short by our duty to avoid supplying material for racists and demagogues to feed upon. An anthropological discussion of the concept of race puts us on the horns of this intellectual and moral dilemma. We react in a typically ambivalent manner by proclaiming an underlying uniformity of human nature while emphasizing the cultural diversity of human groups. Either way, we manage to cling to a politically correct egalitarianism.

Phi Delta Kappan, 2003

SURELY WE'VE all heard people say there is only one race-the human race. We've also heard and seen overwhelming evidence that would seem to contradict this view. After all, the U.S. Census divides us into groups based on race, and there are certainly observable physical differences among people-skin color, nose and eye shape, body type, hair color and texture, and so on. In the world of education, the message of racial differences as biological "facts" is reinforced when we are told that we should understand specific learning styles and behavior patterns of black, Asian, Native American, white, and Latino children and when books such as make pseudoscientific claims about race and learning. The Bell Curve 1 How can educators make sense of these conflicting messages about race? And why should they bother? Whether we think of all human beings as one race, or as four or five distinct races, or as hundreds of races, does anything really change? If we accept that the concept of race is fundamentally flawed, does that mean that young African Americans are less likely to be followed by security guards in department stores? Are people going to stop thinking of Asians as the "model" minority? Will racism become a thing of the past? Many educators understandably would like to have clear information to help them teach students about human biological variability. While multicultural education materials are now widely available, they rarely address basic questions about why we look different from one another and what these biological differences do (and do not) mean. Multicultural education emphasizes respecting differences and finding ways to include all students, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Multicultural education has helped us to understand racism and has provided a rich body of literature on antiracist teaching strategies, and this has been all to the good. But it has not helped us understand the two concepts of race: the biological one and the social one. In this article, we explain what anthropologists mean when they say that "races don't exist" (in other words, when they reject the concept of race as a scientifically valid biological category) and why they argue instead that "race" is a socially constructed category. We'll also discuss why this is such an important understanding and what it means for educators and students who face the social reality of race and racism every day. And finally, we'll offer some suggestions and resources for teachers who want to include teaching about race in their classes.

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1993

Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 2005

Anthropology is the study of human diversity, its history, and its origins. For most of the past two centuries, the study of human diversity has often involved cataloging of this variation into a small number of largely geographic groups called races. While modern biological anthropologists see more value in the study of the genetics of human diversity and the evolutionary history of our species, the nature and significance of human races i s a controversial issue of tremendous political importance. It is also a topic which biological anthropologists are particularly qualified to address. In response to the recent publication of a series of books on race that have received wide publicity and very mixed reception from the public and the scientific community, we solicited essay reviews for the four books listed on the left, from two biological anthropologists, Dr.

2019

Learning Objectives • Define anthropology and the main anthropological approaches • Describe the origins and early development of anthropology • Identify the four subdisciplines of anthropology and specify the focus of each one • Define biological anthropology, describe its key questions, and identify major subfields • Explain key components of the scientific method • Differentiate between hypotheses, theories, and laws • Differentiate science from other ways of knowing The first time one of the authors [Katie Nelson] heard of biological anthropology, she was a first-year college student at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, taking her first-ever anthropology course. Before she enrolled in the class she didn't really know what anthropology meant. She knew it had something to do with people, but didn't know how it all fit together. The course description appealed to her, so she signed up. She quickly learned that anthropology was the study of humans and that it was an incredibly broad discipline that included explorations of cultural diversity, human origins, past human societies, and human languages, among a great many other subjects. She had always been interested in learning about people. She enjoyed observing the different ways people interacted in public spaces, like the mall or the zoo. She enjoyed learning Spanish in high school and loved listening to how people who spoke different languages produced different sounds. She was curious about how people inherited unique characteristics from their parents and was especially intrigued by immigration and migration and what caused people to uproot themselves and move to another part of the world. During the second week of class she began to learn about biological anthropology and some of the leading theories for how and why ancient humans left Africa and migrated throughout the world. As she sat in class, she vividly remembers imagining a small group of ancient humans walking barefoot together through the African savannah. She imagined what they wore, what their language sounded like, how they held hands, how they shared food, and so on. She wondered why they were migrating and what they would miss about their homeland. She was hooked on anthropology! WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY? Why are people so diverse? Some people live in the frigid Arctic tundra, others in the arid deserts of sub-Saharan Africa, and still others in the dense forests of Papua New Guinea. Human beings speak more than 6,000 distinct languages. Some people are barely five feet tall while others stoop to fit through a standard door frame. In some places, people generally have very dark skin, in other places, people are generally pale. In some societies, eating pig is strictly prohibited; in others, pork is a rather ordinary food. What makes people differ from one another? What do we all share in common? How are humans different from other primates? How have primates adapted to different places? How and why did humans develop in the first place? These are some of the questions anthropologists try to answer.

The evolution of modern humans was a complex process, involving major changes in levels of diversity through time. The fossils and stone tools that record the spatial distribution of our species in the past form the backbone of our evolutionary history, and one that allows us to explore the different processes—cultural and biological—that acted to shape the evolution of different populations in the face of major climate change. Those processes created a complex palimpsest of similarities and differences, with outcomes that were at times accelerated by sharp demographic and geographical fluctuations. The result is that the population ancestral to all modern humans did not look or behave like people alive today. This has generated questions regarding the evolution of human universal characters, as well as the nature and timing of major evolutionary events in the history of Homo sapiens. The paucity of African fossils remains a serious stumbling block for exploring some of these issues. However, fossil and archaeological discoveries increasingly clarify important aspects of our past, while breakthroughs from genomics and palaeogenomics have revealed aspects of the demography of Late Quaternary Eurasian hominin groups and their interactions, as well as those between for-agers and farmers. This paper explores the nature and timing of key moments in the evolution of human diversity, moments in which population collapse followed by differential expansion of groups set the conditions for transitional periods. Five transitions are identified (i) at the origins of the species, 240–200 ka; (ii) at the time of the first major expansions, 130–100 ka; (iii) during a period of dispersals, 70–50 ka; (iv) across a phase of local/regional structuring of diversity, 45–25 ka; and (v) during a phase of significant extinction of hunter–gatherer diversity and expansion of particular groups, such as farmers and later societies (the Holocene Filter), 15–0 ka. This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.

Archaeopress Archaeology, 2020

Conversations in Human Evolution is an ongoing science communication initiative seeking to explore the breadth and interdisciplinarity of human evolution studies. This volume reports twenty interviews (referred to as ‘conversations’ as they are informal in style) with scholars at the forefront of human evolution research, covering the broad scientific themes of quaternary and archaeological science, Palaeolithic archaeology, biological anthropology and palaeoanthropology, primatology and evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary genetics. This project features academics at various different stages in their careers and from all over the world; in this volume alone, researchers are based at institutions in seven different countries (namely the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States of America, Germany, Denmark, India, and China), covering four continents. Having arisen at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, Conversations in Human Evolution aims to encourage engagement with both human evolutionary studies and the broader socio-political issues that persist within academia, the latter of which is particularly pertinent during this time of global uncertainty. The conversations delve deeply into the study of our species’ evolutionary history through the lens of each sub-discipline, as well as detailing some of the most current advances in research, theory and methods. Overall, Conversations in Human Evolution seeks to bridge the gap between the research and researcher through contextualisation of the science with personal experience and historical reflection.

Incorporating culture into an expanded theory of evolution will provide the foundation for a universal account of human diversity. Two requirements must be met. The first is to see learning as an extension of the processes of evolution. The second is to understand that there are specific components of human culture, viz. higher order knowledge structures and social constructions, which give rise to culture as invented knowledge. These components, which are products of psychological processes and mechanisms, make human culture different from the forms of shared knowledge observed in other species. One serious difficulty for such an expanded theory is that social constructions may not add to the fitness of all humans exposed to them. This may be because human culture has existed for only a relatively short time in evolutionary terms. Or it may be that, as some maintain, adaptation is a limited, even a flawed, aspect of evolutionary theory.