Introduction to Anthropology Exam Notes

 Australopithecus  Small diastema in jaw  Longer arms  Bones of its fingers are slightly curved, and toes are much longer  Retained significant tree climbing abilities  400 –550 cubic centimeter brain capacity  Large cheek teeth, but small and lightly built faces  Used fire to cook  No stone tools  Homo  Cranial capacity –range from 510 -750 cm3  No diastema in jaw  Cranium had thinner bone and more rounded  Expansion in brain size not accompanied by expansion in body size, thus natural selection  Stone tools  Cannibalism – nead  Burials- religion?  Care for others  Weaponry, language  Culture as a buffer for selection pressures that  Bone Harpoons Key terms: Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis – explain key behavioral and morphological features of each species  Homo habilis: the species of large-brained, gracile hominins 2.4-1.5 million years old and younger  Cranial capacity –range from 510 -750 cm3  cranium had thinner bone and more rounded  Expansion in brain size not accompanied by expansion in body size, thus natural selection  Oldowan tools: cores, tennis, flaked off  Homo erectus: the species of large-brained, robust hominins that lived between 1.8 and 0.4 mya; cranial capacity is 1000 cm3  Tall, slim body build, dark skin, largely hairless  Less developed thoracic canal, unsure if H. erectus had ability for complex vocalizations  Heavy brow ridges, five-sided cranial profile, nuchal crest at rear of skull  Molars reduced in size, jawbones less robust than early Homo  Postcranial skeleton slightly more robust than modern humans  Sexual dimorphism reduced – males are only 20-30% larger than females -> implications for behavior  Acheulean stone tools: hand-ax the most characteristic tool in African and European H. erectus  H. erectus in China used stone tools that lack large bifaces, mostly flakes, suggesting the use of bamboo  H. erectus used fire in Israel, China, and southeast Africa  Endurance running crucial to hominin evolution?  Homo neanderthalensis: date range is 500,000 years  Shorter and more robust than modern H. sapiens  massive skulls, continuous brow ridges, chinless faces  Larger teeth than H. sapiens; retromolar space  1,520 cm3average cranial capacity (H. sapiens –1400 cm3)  Neanderthal pubic bone is longer and thinner than that of modern humans  Limbs were heavily muscled  Unusually powerful grip due to hand morphology  Weaponry  Language  Symbolic though  Cannibalism  Burials- religion?  Mousterian tools: flake, retouched to make scrapers and points  hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death  racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages What are the 4 fields of American Anthropology?  Biological o European expansion led to the development of race as a way to make sense of differences in physical appearance of people around the world, hoping to find distinct sets of biological attributes o Carolus Linnaeus classified humans into 4 major races based on skin color and mental and moral attributes to create a hierarchy:  American (reddish)  European (white)  Asian (yellow)  Negro (black) o Scientific Racism  included influential natural scientists o o o  Louis Agassiz  Samuel George Morton  Francis Galton  Paul Broca  assumed that biological races were real and that they could be ranked in a hierarchy  Embarked on a program of scientific research (sometimes called scientific racism) that sought material evidence that would define racial boundaries and explain why the racial hierarchy existed  Example: ranked different populations of the world in terms of brain size; found the brains of “white” Europeans and North Americans to be larger and saw the other races as representing varying grades of inferiority, with Africans ranked at the bottom  Findings were used to justify social practices we now call racism: the systematic oppression of members of one or more socially defined “races” by another socially defined “race” that is justified in terms of the supposed inherent biological superiority of the rulers and the supposed inherent biological inferiority of those they rule Johann Blumenbach  “father of physical anthropology”  trained as a physician  identified five different races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, American, Ethiopian, and Malayan)  assumed races of “mankind” were fixed and unchanging subdivisions of humanity Modern ANT  Scientists learned more about biological variation in human populations, traits traditionally used to identify races (skin color) did not correlate well with other physical and biological traits, let alone mental and moral traits  “race” was a cultural label invented by human beings to sort people into groups and that races with distinct and unique sets of biological attributes simply did not exist  Franz Boas founded the first department of anthropology in the United States, at Columbia University; uncomfortable with racial classifications in ANT; debunking racist stereotypes, using both their knowledge of biology and their understanding of culture Contemporary ANT  Sherwood Washburn  Leader in North American ANT  developed “new” physical ANT at UC, Berkeley  repudiated racial classification and shifted attention to patterns of variation and adaptation within the human species as a whole     led to specialty as biological anthropology, different from older “physical anthropology” devoted to racial classification o primatology (the study of the closest living relatives of human beings, the nonhuman primates) o paleoanthropology (the study of fossilized bones and teeth of our earliest ancestors) o human skeletal biology (measuring and comparing the shapes and sizes—or morphology—of bones and teeth using skeletal remains from different human populations) o Ancient molecules from also from ancient artifacts (casein, a protein found in milk, leaves residues in the containers people used to store milk products such as cheese)- info about ancient dietary practices, reconstructing the human past share many methods and theories used in the natural sciences — biology, ecology, chemistry, and geology the holistic, comparative, and evolutionary perspective part of the overall study of human nature, human society, and the human past.  Cultural o specialty of anthropology that shows how variation in the beliefs and behaviors of members of different human groups is shaped by sets of learned behaviors and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society—that is, by culture o AKA sociocultural or social anthropology, or ethnology o racial biology could not be used to explain diversity o something other than biology had to be responsible for these variations: culture o ANT Margaret Mead -biology of sexual difference could not be used to predict how men and women might behave or what tasks they would perform in any given society o Social organization, comparing different forms of human social life o study of “civilized” industrial societies and labeled ANT as the study of all other societies, lumped together as “primitive;” Today, by contrast, ANTs study all human societies; reject labels civilized and primitive for same reason reject biological race o Contemporary anthropologists do research in urban and rural settings around the world, among members of all societies, including their own o Kinship (links people to one another on the basis of birth, marriage, and nurturance) o Patterns of material life: variations in clothing, housing, tools, and techniques for getting food and making material goods o Fieldwork: collect data during extended period of close involvement in the everyday routine of those among whom they live, with the people in whose language or way of life they are interested. involvement. o o o o o o o o Informants: people who share information about their culture and language with anthropologists have traditionally been called informants; however, used less today  respondents, collaborators, teachers, “the people I work with” emphasize equality and reciprocity Participant observation: participating with members in social activities; observing those activities as outsiders write about what they have learned in scholarly articles or books and sometimes document the lives of the people they work with on film or video Ethnography: (ethnographers) a description of “the customary social behaviors of an identifiable group of people” Ethnology: (ethnologists) the comparative study of two or more such groups reconstructing the history of ANT, tracing, for example, how anthropologists’ fieldwork practices have changed over time and how these changes may be related to wider political, economic, and social changes within the societies from which they came and within which they did their research globalization: the reshaping of local conditions by powerful global forces on an ever- intensifying scale; world full of movement and mixture, contacts and linkages, and persistent cultural interaction and exchange; no longer possible to presume that peoples and cultures are firmly attached to specific geographical locations.  ANT attention to the migrations undertaken by peoples all over the globe-struggles with contradictory social practices and ambiguous identities; expand ethnographic focus  difficult to find research projects by contemp. ANTs that don’t acknowledge ways global processes affect local communities where they work Cybernetics: technologies that connected people and machines in intimate way  Donna Haraway: biologist, radical feminist, “A Cyborg Manifesto”- 1980 The human species been around for 200,000 years Scientific racism: influential natural scientists such as Louis Agassiz, Samuel George Morton, Francis Galton, and Paul Broca assumed that biological races were real and that they could be ranked in a hierarchy, so they then embarked on a program of scientific research (sometimes called scientific racism) that sought material evidence that would define racial boundaries and explain why the racial hierarchy existed. For instance, they ranked different populations of the world in terms of brain size; they found the brains of “white” Europeans and North Americans to be larger and saw the other races as representing varying grades of inferiority, with Africans ranked at the bottom (Gould 1996). These findings were used to justify the familiar social practices we now call  racism: the systematic oppression of members of one or more socially defined “races” by another socially defined “race” that is justified in terms of the supposed inherent biological superiority of the rulers and the supposed inherent biological inferiority of those they rule  human intelligence  individuals who could do well at formal schooling and succeed in commerce  there is actually no single, accurately measurable substance called intelligence in which some people have more than others  in addition to linguistic and logic, mathematical intelligence, human beings possess different types of intelligence, including bodily– kinesthetic (athletes, dancers), inter/intrapersonal (understanding of social relations or own psyches), musical, spatial, and naturalist intelligence (plants and animals)  enhanced in all individuals, given the right kind of environmental support  measured in Western societies  IQ tests  tests developed in Western societies purporting to measure individuals’ intelligence quotient (IQ) traditionally have equated high scores on verbal and mathematical reasoning with high intelligence  links gender and race to intelligence  average IQ score for African Americans is below that of European Americans, which is below that of Asian Americans  far from clear that there is a single, accurately measurable substance called “intelligence” that some people have more of than others. Performing well on paper-and-pencil tests tells us nothing about problem-solving skills and creativity, which might equally deserve to be called “intelligence”  even if intelligence is such a measurable substance, we do not know that IQ tests actually measure it  IQ scores are not phenotypic traits uniquely determined by genes but that they are powerfully affected by a range of environmental factors over the course of the human life cycle  Stereotype threat  Causes an achievement gap between certain groups of people in intelligence tests  Stereotype that women are bad at math  Asian women good at math stereotype  Boys and girls score the same in tests in childhood but as the get into teenage years, boys become a bit better in performance on tests  Study: if you tell them sth. abt the test to remind them of the grp they belong to, it will show a gender difference in the results; if not, the gap decreases or even disappears  Study: students are given a question before the test about race or other social groups that carry stereotypes or after; the ones given the question after show disappearance or decrease in achievement gap between races  Study: Asian women told to write abt their identity as an Asian (higher scores than control), as a woman (lower scores than control), or none (control)  Study repeated: no difference seen in women at Berkeley; difference seen in the US South  Reason? More diversity at Berkeley than in the south  Class that was told intelligence was a fixed trait- students showed no improvement; taught scores can change with effort and motivation- scores increased  Dr. Dorothy Roberts TED Talk  BiDil  A pill used to treat heart failure in self-identified African American patients  Cardiologist developed it without regards to race or genetics, but was targeted at African Americans for commercial reasons  Racism has both direct and indirect effects on health  Social differences can become biology because they shape the emerging nervous system  Gravlee advises against using genetics and biology interchangeabl  Diagnostic tool developed by a physician during the slave era tightly linked to justifications for slavery  Dr Samuel Cartwright graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School  Practiced in the Deep South before the Civil War  Well-known expert on Negro medicine  Promoted racial concept of disease- people of diff. races suffer from different diseases and experience common diseases differently  Argued-1850s- slavery beneficial to black people for med reasons  Claimed that bc black people had lower lung capacity than whites, forced labor was good for them  Perfected medical device called spirometer for measuring breathing to show presumed lung deficiency in black people  Doctors still uphold Cartwright claims today- use spirometer with button labeled race to adjust measurement based on race  Anti-blackness in medical research  Stereotypes: brown and black people feel less pain and are more prone to drug addiction; exaggerate their pain  specialty as biological anthropology, different from older “physical anthropology” devoted to racial classification  Assumptions: Basic, unquestioned understandings about the way the world works; if scientists’’ observations are guided by incorrect assumptions about the way the world works, their measurements will be meaningless and the conclusions they draw from those measurements will be misleading  Evidence: What is seen when a particular part of the world is examined with great care. Scientists use two different kinds of evidence: material and inferred.  Material: facts or data; consists of things—material objects— themselves, information recorded about them, or scientific measurements made of them  can be inspected by anyone who wants to examine them.  cannot speak for themselves  Ex: bones and stones- can be submitted for lab analysis; records (photos); ritual performances observed  Inferred: interpretation put on material evidence; material evidence plus interpretation  begins with description of individual objects or events  followed by description of patterns of distribution of similar objects and events  final stage: elaborate explanatory frameworks that link many different objects or events to one another by drawing on findings from many different fields of knowledge  Hypothesis: Statements that assert a particular connection between fact and interpretation; predictions about future data based on data already in hand  Objectivity: the separation of observation and reporting from the researcher’s wishes; a judgment about some feature of the world that is free of individual idiosyncrasies  Essentialism  Plato  the belief, derived from Plato, in fixed ideas, or “forms,” that exist perfect and unchanging in eternity. Actual objects in the temporal world, such as cows or horses, are seen as imperfect material realizations of the ideal form that defines their kind.  The Great Chain of Being  Judeo-Christian/Aristotelian  a comprehensive framework for interpreting the world, based on Aristotelian principles and elaborated during the Middle Ages, in which every kind of living organism was linked to every other kind in an enormous, divinely created chain. An organism differed from the kinds immediately above it and below it on the chain by the least possible degree  Continuity: attributes of one organism overlap with the organism clasest to it; no sharp breaks  Plenitude: God created all organisms, so n gaps; all organisms are linked  Unilinear Gradation: God is perfect; creatures arranged in hierarchy based on how they depart from divine ideal  Uniformitarianism  Charles Lyell  the notion that an understanding of current processes can be used to reconstruct the past history of the earth, based on the assumption that the same gradual processes of erosion and uplift that change the earth’s surface today had also been at work in the past  Catastrophism  Georges Cuvier  the notion that natural disasters, such as floods, are responsible for the extinction of species, which are then replaced by new species.  Transformational Evolution  Jean Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck  Also called Lamarckian evolution; assumes essentialist species and a uniform environment; each individual member of a species transforms itself to meet the challenges of a changed environment through the laws of use and disuse and the inheritance of acquired characters  Race: a cultural label invented by human beings to sort people into groups; races with distinct and unique sets of biological attributes simply did not exist  Racism: the systematic oppression of members of one or more socially defined “races” by another socially defined “race” that is justified in terms of the supposed inherent biological superiority of the rulers and the supposed inherent biological inferiority of those they rule  Charles Darwin: English naturalist who came up with the theory of evolution by means of natural selection  Natural Selection: a two-step, mechanistic explanation of how descent with modification takes place: (1) every generation, variant individuals are generated within a species because of genetic mutation, and (2) those variant individuals best suited to the current environment survive and produce more offspring than other variants  Genotype: the genetic information about particular biological traits encoded in an organism’s DNA  Phenotype: the observable, measurable overt characteristics of an organism. Neanderthals  An archaic species of Homo that lived in Europe and western Asia from 130,000 to 35,000 years ago  anatomically modern people invented the Aurignacian industry in southwestern Asia and brought it with them into central and western Europe 40,000–35,000 years ago  Skeletons of anatomically modern human beings appear at European sites about this time, when the ice sheets had begun to melt and the climate was improving.  Arrival in Europe of both modern human beings and Aurignacian culture during the same time period seems too well correlated to be an accident. No Aurignacian assemblages found in eastern Europe, which suggests Upper Paleolithic developed differently there  What happened to them? There is no evidence that the replacement of Neandertals by modern people involved conquest and extermination, although this has been proposed from time to time.  European Neandertals may have disappeared because they evolved into anatomically modern people, developing Aurignacian culture as they did so, in line with the regional continuity model  This hypothesis, however, runs afoul of the fact that Neandertals and moderns apparently originated on different continents and coexisted in southwestern Asia for 45,000 years, both of them making and using Mousterian tools.  European Neandertals may have disappeared as they interbred with the in-migrating modern people and as their descendants adopted Aurignacian culture  Evidence from ancient DNA also shows that Neandertals did interbreed with other nonNeandertal populations during the Pleistocene, and Neandertal genes make up 1% to 4% of our modern nuclear genome. However, Y-chromosome DNA recently extracted from a Neandertal skeleton is distinct from all known modern human Y-chromosome lineages, which suggests that this lineage has gone extinct. If so,  Its disappearance could be due to genetic drif, but the researchers also suggest another possibility:  genetic incompatibilities in the genomes of male fetuses with Neandertal fathers and anatomically modern human mothers rendered these fetuses unviable or infertile. If this second possibility were the case, it might have contributed to reproductive isolation between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans  Neandertals may have retreated as modern people spread throughout Europe, decreasing in number until, around 30,000 years ago, they simply died out  the archaeological evidence is no more able than the fossil or genetic evidence to resolve disputes about the fate of the Neandertals. bipedalism  About 10 mya, when the Miocene epoch was drawing to a close, grasslands increased at the expense of forests and many species of hominoids became extinct throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa.  Some African hominoids seem to have adapted to the changed conditions by spending more time on the ground, a move that apparently exposed them to new selective pressures favoring bipedalism—walking on two feet rather than four.  The skeletons of all primates allow upright posture when sitting or swinging from the branches of trees.  Because bipedalism requires upright posture, primates have already, so to speak, taken a step in the right direction; hominoid morphology for upright posture that evolved in an arboreal context was exapted for hominin bipedalism in a terrestrial context. What sort of selective pressures might have favored bipedal locomotion in hominoids? To answer this  Moving easily on the ground might have improved hominoids’ ability to exploit food resources outside the protective cover of the shrinking Miocene forests. Upright posture would have made it easier for them to spot potential predators in open country, and skillful bipedal locomotion would have made it easier for them to escape. Finally, walking upright simultaneously reduces the amount of skin surface exposed to the sun, allows greater distances to be covered (albeit at slow speeds), and is more energy efficient (Day 1986, 189; Foley 1995, 143). Michael Day (1986) suggests that this greater stamina may have permitted bipedal hominins to become “endurance hunters,” slowly tracking game over long distances as they moved into the previously vacant ecological niche of daylight hunting (190). However, endurance walking would have been equally important in enabling the first hominins to cover long distances between widely scattered sources of plant food or water. Indeed, the teeth of these hominins suggest that they were probably omnivorous, not carnivorous; that is, they ate a wide range of plant and animal foods. Equipped with just a simple digging stick, their diet might have included “berries, fruits, nuts, buds, shoots, shallow-growing roots and tubers, fruiting bodies of fungi, most terrestrial and the smaller aquatic reptiles, eggs, nesting birds, some fish, mollusks, insects, and all small mammals, including the burrowing ones. This diverse diet . . . is very close to that of the Gombe National Park chimpanzees . . . and living gatherer/hunters” (Mann 1981, 34). As the forests retreated and stands of trees became smaller and more widely scattered, groups of bipedal hominins appear to have ranged over a variety of environments (Isaac and Crader 1981, 89; see also Freeman 1981, Mann 1981). They would have been able to carry infants, food, and eventually tools in their newly freed hands (Lewin 1989, 67–68).  focuses primarily on the archaeological record—material evidence of human modification of the physical environment.  study the material remains left by our ancestors to interpret cultural variation and cultural change in the human past  Surveys  Excavation  Digital (GIS)- Geographic Information Systems (Katrina); Ground Penetrating Radar (Lucy); 3D Grid System  Johnston Institute in ATL was a preparatory college for newly free people that was destroyed because of Jim Crow- now there is a landfill on top of it  NAGPRA: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act  requires all federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funds to inventory all American Indian/Native Hawaiian human remains in their possession and establish whether they have a connection with any living indigenous groups; if so, required to notify group and offer to return, repatriate; if indigenous groups believe that they have connection to remains they may request even if the institution is not convinced  protects American Indian graves and cultural objects on all federal and tribal lands; requires that anyone carrying out archaeological research on federal or tribal lands must consult with the Native American people who are affiliated or may be affiliated with those lands regarding the treatment and disposition of any finds  Importance  made it necessary for archaeologists to take seriously the rights and attitudes of native peoples toward the past  cooperative agreements with Native American groups that are interested in developing their own museums and archaeological and historical research programs  replacement (Out of Africa) model  The hypothesis that only one subpopulation of Homo erectus, probably located in Africa, underwent a rapid spurt of evolution to produce Homo sapiens 200,000–100,000 years ago. After that time, H. sapiens would itself have multiplied and moved out of Africa, gradually populating the globe and eventually replacing any remaining populations of H. erectus or their descendants.  Factor triggering this evolutionary spurt is pattern of fluctuating climate and environmental change caused by the repeated advance and retreat of ice sheets during the Late Pleistocene  regional continuity model  the hypothesis that evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens occurred gradually throughout the traditional range of H. erectus. Denisovans  A population of Pleistocene hominins known only from ancient DNA recovered from three tiny 41,000-year-old fossils deposited in Denisova Cave, Russian Siberia. Denisovans and Neandertals are thought to share a common ancestor that lef Africa 500,000 years ago. Parts of the Denisovan genome resemble the genomes of modern humans from New Guinea  new evidence of interbreeding between Neandertals and their neighbors has come to light from Asia.  extracted both mtDNA and nuclear DNA from two tiny fossils found at Denisova Cave in Siberia. When the Denisova sequences were compared with those of Neandertal and modern sequences, three key findings emerged:  (1) although they lived between 400,000 and 30,000 years ago, the Denisovans were genetically distinct from Neandertals;  (2) the Denisovans and Neandertals shared a common ancestor who had lef Africa nearly half a million years ago; and  (3) the Denisovan genome was very similar to the genome of modern humans from New Guinea  Denisovan and Neandertal populations must have split apart afer leaving Africa, but that about 50,000 years ago, the Denisovans interbred with anatomically modern humans, who took some Denisovan DNA with them when they moved into South Asia.  genetic information from ancient DNA indicates not only that Neandertals apparently exchanged genes with a previously unknown “Denisovan” population in Russian Siberia, but also that ancient mitochondrial DNA from the Denisovans appears closely related to ancient mitochondrial DNA from a fossil from Sima de los Huesos in Spain  Bands  The characteristic form of social organization found among foragers; small, usually no more than 50 people, and labor is divided ordinarily on the basis of age and sex. All adults have roughly equal access to whatever material or social valuables are locally available  Tribes  A society that is generally larger than a band, whose members usually farm or herd for a living. Social relations in a tribe are still relatively egalitarian, although there may be a chief who speaks for the group or organizes certain group activities.  Social organization and subsistence activities organized by rules of kinship  Chiefdoms  A form of social organization in which a leader (the chief) and close relatives are set apart from the rest of the society and allowed privileged access to wealth, power, and prestige; not egalitarian  States  A stratified society that possesses a territory that is defended from outside enemies with an army and from internal disorder with police. A state, which has a separate set of governmental institutions designed to enforce laws and to collect taxes and tribute, is run by an elite that possesses a monopoly on the use of force; not egalitarian social stratification  a form of social organization in which people have unequal access to wealth, power, and prestige  Natufian society developed social divisions  is an important sign of social complexity  Evidence: Natufian burials  In early Natufian times, the dead were buried together in small groups, that corresponded to subgroups of a larger community.; relatives lived in the same area for several generations  genetically recessive trait, third-molar agenesis (failure of the third molars, or wisdom teeth, to develop  group burials: decorative and valuable objects with no identifiable practical use; In other cases, elaborate grave goods were buried with children; both these burial practices indicate the differentiation of subgroups and inherited status differences; position depended on which group a person belonged to, rather than on a communitywide set of social standards  In late Natufian times, there were still differences in grave goods from one burial to the next, but the dead were buried individually in cemeteries; old boundaries around descent groups destroyed and replaced by a new pattern in which resources controlled by an entire community and stratification communitywide. high-status positions that crosscut subgroup boundaries.  Natufian social organization had come to resemble what is called a “chiefdom” in anthropological literature. Chiefdoms, you will recall, are societies in which a leader (the chief) and close relatives are set apart from the rest of the society and allowed privileged access to wealth, power, and prestige  Oldowan  A stone-tool tradition named after the Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania), where the first examples of these tools were found. The earliest Oldowan tools are 2.6 million years old and were found in Gona, Ethiopia. Until recently, Oldowan tools were considered the oldest stone tools made by hominins, although this status is now claimed by Lomekwian tools, found in West Turkana, Kenya. (Lomekwian tools are stylistically different, and they are 3.3 million years old.)  Chopper with flakes removed  Tools consist of cores (tennis ball sized rocks w/ flakes knocked off to produce cutting edges) and flakes (chipped off pieces of rock)  Acheulean  A Lower Paleolithic stone-tool tradition associated with Homo erectus and characterized by stone bifaces, or “hand axes.”  hand-ax the most characteristic tool in African and European H. erectus  Mousterian  a Middle Paleolithic stone-tool tradition associated with Neandertals in Europe and southwestern Asia and with anatomically modern human beings in Africa.  Flake tools  Named after the Le Moustiercave in France where first samples were found  Describes archaic human stone tool tradition during the Middle Paleolithic (Europe), Middle Stone Age (Africa)  Primarily flake tools that were retouched to make scrapers and points (this is the Levallois technique of core preparation)  Phyletic Gradualism: a theory arguing that one species gradually transforms itself into a new species over time, yet the actual boundary between species can never be detected and can only be drawn arbitrarily  Punctuated Equilibrium: a theory claiming that most of evolutionary history has been characterized by relatively stable species coexisting in an equilibrium that is occasionally punctuated by sudden bursts of speciation, when extinctions are widespread, and many new species appear Key Terms: Evolution  A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to place their observations about human nature, human society, or the human past in a temporal framework that takes into consideration change over time in the physical features and life processes of human beings and their ancestors. Topics of interest include both human origins and genetic variation and inheritance in living human populations  Evolutionary theory: the set of testable hypotheses that assert that living organisms can change over time and give rise to new kinds of organisms, with the result that all organisms ultimately share a common ancestry  individual organisms do not evolve genetically; barring mutations (or genetic engineering), individual organisms are stuck with the genes they are born with, but the populations to which individuals belong can evolve as each generation contributes different numbers of offspring to the generation that comes after it. Put another way, from a Darwinian perspective, the only biological effect an individual can have on its population’s evolution is in terms of the number of offspring that it bequeaths to the next generation. More (or fewer) offspring mean more (or fewer) copies of parental genes in the next generation. This is why Darwinian population biologists traditionally track evolutionary change by measuring changes in gene frequencies over time  Principle of variation: No two individuals in a species are identical in all respects; they vary in such features as size, color, and intelligence.  Principle of heredity: Offspring tend to resemble their parents.  Principle of natural selection: Different variants leave different numbers of offspring  Testable  Unified  Fruitful Evolutionary fitness  A measure of an organism’s ability to compete in the struggle for existence. Those individuals whose variant traits better equip them to compete with other members of their species for limited resources are more likely to survive and reproduce than individuals who lack such traits  Some people have assumed that the biggest, strongest, toughest individuals must be, by definition, fitter than the smaller, weaker, gentler members of their species. Strictly speaking, however, Darwinian, or biological, fitness is nothing more (and nothing less) than an individual’s ability to survive and leave offspring  No such thing as “absolute” fitness: those who leave more offspring behind are fitter than those who leave fewer offspring behind, but any organism that manages to reproduce in that environment is fit Aptation, adaptation, and exaptation  Aptation: the shaping of any useful feature of an organism, regardless of its origin; primary, historically unmodified relation of suitedness between phenotype and environment—that of any newly arisen variant, positive or negative in its functional effects  Example: sickle cell; no origin or use; simply that the red blood cell was shaped differently  Example: insect appendages are/appear as a trait in insects  Adaptation: the shaping of useful features of an organism by natural selection for the function they now perform; successive refinement of phenotypic suitedness by selection of newer variants  Example: the sickle cell trait becomes useful for people with malaria; the trait is triggered and in certain populations becomes dominant  Example: insect appendages not yet wings had the adaptive advantage of body cooling  Exaptation: the shaping of a useful feature of an organism by natural selection to perform one function and the later reshaping of it by different selection pressures to perform a new function; originally had one evolutionarily advantageous function but now has another; co-opting of a phenotypic feature by selection for a new function, as in the modification of skull-jaw joint bones toward the ossicles of vertebrate ears  Example: the trait is still there but no longer needed for the same previous function; can still be used but for another function  Example: insect appendages later exapted as wings for the function of flying, once they had reached a certain size or shape Polygeny and pleiotropy  Polygeny: the phenomenon whereby many genes are responsible for producing a phenotypic trait, such as skin color.  Pleiotropy: the phenomenon whereby a single gene may affect more than one phenotypic trait  the allele that causes the feathers of chickens to be white also works to slow down their body growth  showed that genes do not produce traits in isolation Mutation  The creation of a new allele for a gene when the portion of the DNA molecule to which it corresponds is suddenly altered  explains how genetic inheritance can be unchanging and still produce the variation that makes evolutionary change possible  is random with respect to the adaptive challenges facing the organism in which it occurs: mutations do not occur because the organism “needs” them  apart from mutation, genes are inherited unchanged from parent organisms and that it is impossible for an organism’s experiences or “needs” to feed back and reshape the genetic information in the sex cells  Natural selection can act only on randomly produced variation, which makes evolution by natural selection a two-step process. First, random genetic variation is produced. Second, those organisms whose variant traits better equip them to meet environmental challenges survive and produce more offspring than those whose traits equip them less well  Heat, chemicals, cosmic radiation can change structure of DNA in the sex cells and be passed on to offspring  Can be harmful, helpful, have no effect at all (neutral)  most of the genetic variation in multicellular organisms comes from the shuffling of existing genetic sequences at different stages of the developmental process, rather than from mutation  Generative entrenchment: phenomenon in which more and more different developmental events become dependent on the same DNA sequences, these sequences become more resistant to evolutionary change DNA and Genome  human genome contains approximately 20,000 genes, but these account for less than 2% of the entire genome  DNA: the structure that carries the genetic heritage of an organism as a kind of blueprint for the organism’s construction and development  Chromosomes made up of this  4 bases: A-T; G-C  Genome: the sum total of all the genetic information about an organism, carried on the chromosomes in the cell nucleus Cline  A pattern of gradually shifting frequency of a phenotypic trait from population to population across geographic space  gradually shifting distribution of differences in human skin color from the equator to the poles  are NOT groups  Each is a map of the distribution of a single trait  trait distributions they map do not coincide in ways that neatly subdivide into distinct human subpopulations; clinal distributions are not concordant  Since the biological concept of “race” predicts exactly such overlap, or concordance, it cannot be correct; clinal analysis tests the biological concept of “race” and finds nothing in nature to match it Microevolution and Macroevolution  Microevolution: A subfield of evolutionary studies that devotes attention to shortterm evolutionary changes that occur within a given species over relatively few generations of ecological time  Macroevolution: a subfield of evolutionary studies that focuses on long-term evolutionary changes, especially the origins of new species and their diversification across space and over millions of years of geological time. Niche construction  When organisms actively perturb the environment in ways that modify the selection pressures experienced by them, subsequent generations of organisms, and other neighboring organisms  the enduring consequences of efforts organisms make to modify the environments in which they live  control of fire and the invention of clothing made it possible for early humans to colonize cold environments that were inaccessible to earlier ancestors, who lacked these cultural skills  buffers us from experiencing some selection pressures, but exposes us to others. Gene frequency, gene pool, genetic flow, genetic drif  Gene frequency: the frequency of occurrence of the variants of particular genes (i.e., of alleles) within the gene pool  Gene pool: all the genes in the bodies of all members of a given species (or a population of a species)  Genetic flow: the exchange of genes that occurs when a given population experiences a sudden expansion caused by in-migration of outsiders from another population of the species  Genetic drif: random changes in gene frequencies from one generation to the next caused by a sudden reduction in population size as a result of disaster, disease, or the out-migration of a small subgroup from a larger population Human Genome Project  Goals  identify all the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes in human DNA  determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA  store this information in databases  improve tools for data analysis  transfer related technologies to the private sector  address the ethical, legal, and social issues that may arise from the project  Was a collaborative team effort  Used to address societal concerns and creates ethical and social considerations  Can be used to study and handle preventative measures for genetic diseases  But insurance ethical issues arise  Government may use these genomes- question of whether this is ethical or not Phenotypic plasticity  Physiological flexibility that allows organisms to respond to environmental stresses, such as temperature changes  A fertilized human egg (or zygote) has its own phenotype, and the zygote’s phenotype can respond to environmental influences—such as those encountered in a woman’s uterus—even before its own genes are active  “the ability of an organism to react to an environmental input with a change in form, state, movement, or rate of activity”  all living organisms exhibit it  incorrect to assume that genes “direct” the development of organisms or “determine” the production of phenotypic traits; much of the “action” that goes into producing adult organisms with distinctive phenotypes goes on during development Subsistence and subsistence strategies  Subsistence: term often used to refer to the satisfaction of the most basic material survival needs: food, clothing, and shelter  Subsistence Strategies: the different ways that people in different societies go about meeting subsistence needs  Food Collectors- foragers (gather, fish, or hunt)  Small-scale  Complex  Food Producers (depend on domesticated plants or animals or both)  Herders  Farmers- Agriculture a. Intensive (much more land under cultivation at any one time and produces significant crop surpluses; plows, draft animals, irrigation, fertilizer, etc) b. Extensive (emphasizing the extensive use of land as farm plots are moved every few years; depend on human muscle power and simple tools; clear plot of uncultivated land and burn the brush and plant crops in rich soil) c. Mechanized industrial (found in societies in which farming, or animal husbandry has become organized along industrial lines. Agribusiness “factories in the field” or animal feedlots transform food production into a large-scale, technology- dependent industry of its own; contemporary Western societies, widescale land use) Agriculture  The systematic modification of the environments of plants and animals to increase their productivity and usefulness Domestication  Human interference with the reproduction of another species, with the result that specific plants and animals become more useful to people and dependent on them. Guest speaker, outside of class articles  Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies; a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery  a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education  The United States is one of only 13 countries in the world where the rate of maternal mortality — the death of a woman related to pregnancy or childbirth up to a year after the end of pregnancy — is now worse than it was 25 years ago For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including