Society for Applied Anthropology (www.sfaa.net) lists its mission as promoting “… interdisciplinary scientific investigation of the principles controlling the relations of human beings to one another, and the encouragement of the wide application of these principles to practical problems.” Essentially, this means applying what anthropologists have learned about human culture at large — and the culture in question specifically — to policy statements and implementation. In effect, applied anthropology remedies the solution of distant bureaucrats making momentous decisions about a culture’s way of life from on high. Rather, this bottom-up approach recognizes that simply imposing change is less effective and respectful than working with people to stimulate change that works for them.
Anthropologists have played important roles in all kinds of applications of their knowledge, but serious ethical considerations inevitably come into play when researching human beings and applying the information gathered. In the 1960s, the U.S. Army commissioned anthropologists to study and explain how warfare was carried out in Central America. Many anthropologists objected that this information would be little more than intelligence used to better plot warfare in the interest of the United States, and the ensuing Camelot Affair drove the American Anthropological Association to draft its first Statement on Ethics in 1967.
On the other hand, many anthropologists have been pivotal in using anthropology to better human life. You can find out more about these issues throughout Part 4 of this book.
Part 2
Physical Anthropology and Archaeology
IN THIS PART …
Explore the primate family tree.
Discover how archaeologists learn about the past.
Find the origins of humanity in the ancient fossil record.
Identify the distinctive features of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Follow the early dispersal of modern humans across the globe.
Understand when and where farming was first invented.
Observe the evolution of humanity’s first civilizations.
Chapter 4
The Wildest Family Reunion: Meet the Primates
IN THIS CHAPTER
There are millions of kinds of living things (some estimate that millions more are undiscovered in the jungles and oceans), and making sense of them has been the labor biologists for centuries. (Check out the “Biological classification” sidebar in this chapter for more on this process.) Among these swimming, hopping, and crawling life forms are the primates, a group of about 200 kinds of animal that share some distinctive anatomical and behavioral characteristics. This is the Primate order, our home in the biological world.
To better understand the human species, anthropology has taken up the study of our closest relatives: Where do they come from? How long have they been living there? Why do they eat the things they eat? This chapter gives you an overview of what that family is like and how you fit in.
Monkey Business: Primate Origins
The earliest proto-primates have been traced from fossils of the Paleocene epoch some 65 million years ago; most anthropologists agree that the Primate order was well underway by 60 million years ago. The number 65 million may ring a bell as the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the rise of primates is related to the demise of the dinosaurs. Early mammals, from which the primates evolved, appear somewhat earlier, but when the dinosaurs became extinct, the way opened up for other life forms to flourish. Many more mammals show up after 65 million years ago, and among them are the first primates.
Many fossils of early primates are found in Europe and North America, which is a little jarring, because there aren’t natural primate populations in these areas — well, except for humans! — today. This is because at this time, the continents were differently arranged than they are today.
In addition to the fossil evidence for primate origins, today we have a tremendous paleogenomic (ancient DNA) record. This evidence largely corroborates what the fossils have been telling us for over a century. It also provides fascinating new details, such as a detailed chronology of the evolution of different lineages. The DNA record, for example, tells us that the New World primates (those of South and Central America) split from the Old World primates about 35 million years ago, which ties up nicely with geological evidence for continental drift around this time.
The fossils of the earliest primates show two main features:
Small body size, averaging roughly 150 to 3,000 grams, or about 1⁄3 pound to about 6 pounds
Teeth indicating an insectivorous diet (one specializing in insects)
So our earliest primate relatives were small, insect-eating mammals, in many ways physically similar to squirrels. You can see a reconstruction of one of these first primates in Figure 4-1. Skeletal analysis suggests that these early primates were arboreal (lived in trees) and that’s very common in the living primates.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 4-1: An early primate. My reconstruction is based on the fossil evidence, which indicates a squirrel-like creature adapted for an arboreal (tree-dwelling) life.
BIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION
