Anthropology’s main purpose is to teach us about others—other cultures and people from other times. The study of the other was meant to show us human diversity and similarities. This helps us figure out what stems from culture and what lies in our biology, often with a focus on the shared biology that makes us human.
Anthropology is a wondrous field with research that takes us from the depth of the Amazonian jungle, where Napoleon Chagnon conducted his groundbreaking research on the “fierce people” (the Yanomami), to the Siberian steppes, where anthropologists discovered tattooed ice mummies of the Iron Age buried with their horses. In order to draw conclusions about their discoveries, anthropologists integrate, form bonds with, and converse with those whom they are studying. They also practice archaeology, one of the four subfields of anthropology, which includes, in its data, structures as grand as the Giza pyramids in Egypt and the slender bone needle found in Idaho’s Buhl Burial, which is over 10,000 years old.
Archaeology is the science of what’s been left behind. Physical anthropologists, now often called biological anthropologists, look at fossils such as those of our nearly two-million-year ancestors Homo erectus to reconstruct past lives—the lives of those who couldn’t leave a written record. All of these aspects of traditional anthropology, and the many more I haven’t covered, are fascinating, data-driven, and reveal clearly why anthropology is a true social science.
Anthropologists have provided us with better ways to extract DNA from badly deteriorated human remains. Techniques used in Neanderthal studies are now employed in all sorts of fields, including forensics. Anthropologists have also helped us understand the origins of diseases, for example through their work on the prion diseases (like mad cow and Kuru) tied to cannibalism. Anthropologists have brought us together by figuring out adaptive purposes and other causes of human variation, thereby explaining away discriminatory myths about human differences.
Throughout the U.S., biological anthropology has been a popular choice for students looking to fulfill their science general-education requirement. Cultural anthropology and archaeology often fulfill other general-education requirements, too. Thus, in the U.S., many students of all majors take at least one anthropology class.
Hellbound and Down 