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Introduction
Right now, someone somewhere is excavating an ancient relic — perhaps a stone tool a million years old or the remains of an ancient Greek wine jug. That one artifact may not be much, but it’s a piece in the vast jigsaw puzzle of humanity’s ancient past.
Right now, someone somewhere is interviewing a hunter–gatherer — maybe in the Arctic or in Africa. That one interview — maybe about why the hunter-gatherer is going to split away from the main group with his family — may not be much, but it’s a page in the encyclopedia of human cultural behavior.
Right now, someone somewhere is decoding ancient Neanderthal DNA, trying to identify how living humans are related to this fascinating proto-human species. The fragment of DNA is microscopic, but it can tell humanity a tremendous amount about our biology and evolution.
And right now, someone somewhere is studying a rapidly vanishing language — maybe in Polynesia or Southeast Asia — by learning it from a tribal group’s elders. The words and phrases she’s learning are short, but each language provides a new way to understand the world in a uniquely human way.
All of those someones are anthropologists, like me — people who professionally study the human species in all its aspects, from biology to culture. Of course, it’s not just anthropologists who love to learn about humanity; people from every culture and walk of life have an interest in what humanity is today and what it’s been in the past.
And that’s why I’ve written Anthropology For Dummies — to share what remarkable things anthropologists have discovered and continue to discover with folks like you who are fascinated with the human species (or at least fascinated with passing your Intro to Anthropology class). Join me for a grand tour of the human species, across the world and through millions of years. If that doesn’t get your blood going, I can’t help you!
About This Book
The study of humanity today (and for the past few million years) has created a vast storehouse of anthropological knowledge printed in millions of pages of research reports and thousands of books. Even professional anthropologists simply can’t keep up with the speed and volume of published research. I can’t possibly recount what all this research has revealed, but I can — and in this book I do — boil down 150 years of anthropological discoveries into a nuts-and-bolts reference describing the essentials of human evolution, both cultural and biological. I also describe just how anthropologists work so you can understand the pros and cons of different methods.
If you’re taking an introductory course in anthropology, this book can help clarify some ideas that can be pretty confusing and aren’t often clearly explained, even in textbooks. If you’re reading this book out of sheer curiosity, let me assure you that I’ve trimmed away a lot of technical material that may otherwise get in the way of your understanding the essential lessons of anthropology. Lots of popular-science books cover some aspects of anthropology, but few if any really cover anthropology as a whole in a clear, no-nonsense way. I’ve worked hard to provide just such a handbook in Anthropology For Dummies.
Each chapter is divided into concise sections, and each section breaks down the essentials of anthropology, including
Terms and definitions
The lowdown about competing theories
How anthropology understood certain topics in the past and how it understands them today
I’ve written this book so that you can start anywhere; if you’re most interested in human language, you can jump to that chapter and understand it without knowing about human evolution. But because every aspect of humanity is tied to some other aspect, I’d be surprised if you don’t eventually end up reading it all!
Finally, you should be aware of a few conventions I follow throughout the text:
It’s tough to write a book about humanity without using the collective term we, so when I use it, keep in mind that I’m talking about humanity at large and not anthropologists (unless otherwise noted).
I often refer to the past because humanity is an old species, and we can learn a lot from our past. When I do this, I often use the convention BP for “before present” (which basically means years ago). When talking about the history of Western civilization, I use the conventional terms BC for “Before Christ” and AD for “Anno Domini” (which marks the year of Christ’s birth); some people instead use BCE (“Before the Common Era”) and CE (“Common Era”) to avoid valuing the timescale of Western civilization, but these terms still just point exactly to BC and AD. Because so much information about the past uses BC and AD, I stick with this convention. Don’t worry, I’m not pushing a religion or valuing one timescale over another; I’m just using a common way to indicate the passage of time.
The term hominin refers to any of the many species of large, bipedal (walking on two legs) primates; this includes modern humans and all our ancestors and relatives back to the time of our split from the lineage that led to modern chimpanzees. Some earlier texts use the term hominid, but that term is largely replaced today with hominin, and I follow that convention in this book.
Anthropologists often use the terms society and culture interchangeably. I do this as well. It’s an old convention that’s not technically accurate, but unless you’re studying for your PhD, the difference isn’t that important. (Don’t worry; I define both society and culture in the book so you’re aware of the difference.)
When I refer to the scientific names of various life forms, I capitalize the genus but don’t capitalize the species, or subspecies. For example, modern humans are all Homo sapiens sapiens. I don’t always use subspecies names (like the second sapiens), and sometimes, for convenience, I just indicate the genus with a capital letter while writing out the species name, as in H. sapiens. Don’t worry, this kind of terminology isn’t a large or important point of this book, and these designations will all be very clear when you come upon them.
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and you want to visit one of these web pages,
