Know-It-All Anthropology: The 50 Extraordinary Human Innovations and Events, Each Explained in Under a Minute

By Simon Underdown

An informative reference containing concise explanations for the major anthropological discoveries in human physical, cultural, and social history.

Who are we? What is it about our species that sets us apart from every other living creature, past and present, on this planet?

These are perennially compelling questions about human evolution and development that continue to cudgel the best brains on earth. Know-It-All Anthropology seeks to understand the roots of our common humanity, the diversity of cultures and world-views, and the organization of social relations and practices.

If you only have under a minute, that is enough time—by reading this book—to meet the ancestors and master the basic ideas, personalities, controversies, and future directions of the study of humankind.

The Know It All takes a revolutionary approach to learning about the subjects you really feel you should understand but have never gotten around to studying. Each book selects a popular topic and dissects it into the fifty most significant ideas at its heart. Each idea, no matter how complex, is explained in three hundred words and one picture, all digestible in under a minute.

Other titles in this series include: Know It All Chemistry, Know It All Classical Music, Know It All Energy, Know It All Fashion, Know It All Great Inventions, Know It All Jazz, Know It All Medicine, Know It All Shakespeare, Know It All Whiskey, Know It All Wine, Space In 30 Seconds, Sports in 30 Seconds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780760361191

Book preview

Know It All Anthropology: The 50 Most Important Ideas in Anthropology, Each Explained in Under a Minute

Know It All

ANTHROPOLOGY

The 50 Most Important Ideas in Anthropology, Each Explained in Under a Minute >

Editor Simon Underdown

Contributors

Russell Adams

Sue Black

Brad K. Blitz

Jason Danely

Ken Dark

Jan Freedman

Charlotte Houldcroft

Marta Mirazón Lahr

Michael Bang Petersen

Joshua Pollard

David Shankland

Simon Underdown

Djuke Veldhuis

CONTENTS

Introduction

Evolution

GLOSSARY

The Hominins

Brain Development

Tools

Fire

The Neanderthals

Homo sapiens

Profile: Richard Leakey

Ancient DNA

The Human Species

GLOSSARY

Race

Variation

Dispersal & Distribution

Profile: Margaret Mead

Is Anyone Indigenous?

Africa

Asia

Europe

The Americas

Australasia

Materials

GLOSSARY

Clay

Profile: Franz Boas

Bronze Age Metallurgy

Industry & Mining

Craft

Discoveries

Socialization & Communication

GLOSSARY

Domestication

Settlement

Profile: Bronislaw Malinowski

Linguistics

Language

Symbols

Ritual & Ceremony

Death

Art & Artifact

Why Do We Care?

Migration

GLOSSARY

Navigation

Trade

Profile: Clifford Geertz

Borders

Economic Migrants

Refugees

Ideas

GLOSSARY

Religion & Belief

Identity

Politics

Profile: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Hierarchy & Leadership

Kinship

Dunbar’s Number

Gender

Modern Peoples

GLOSSARY

Ethnicity

War & Aggression

Artificial Intelligence

Ethics

Genetic Engineering

Profile: Paul Farmer

The Human Age

Globalization

Forensic Anthropology

Appendices

Resources

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Simon Underdown

Anthropology is the study of the most complex and contradictory species on the planet—us. Humans are not easy to understand and are even more difficult to explain. On paper, we are a relatively large, naked form of ape with a big brain and an odd way of walking on two legs. Yet we have taken our ability to use culture, such as tools, to solve biological problems and conquered the world. Around 2 million years ago our ancestors started to look and behave in a recognizably human way. From then on, our ability to shape the environment intensified to the level we find ourselves at today.

This book is an instruction manual for human beings. It will help you understand how we evolved from a chimplike ancestor to being able to send rockets to Mars. Humans are unquestionably special and occupy a unique place in the history of the planet. Our brains are the most complex thing in the known universe and nothing approaches the intricacy and sophistication of human thought. But when we compare our behavior to that of other primates, the gulf is perhaps not as great as we might like to think. Chimps and many other species of primates use tools and display highly advanced levels of intelligence. Yet the gap in ability and achievement remains insurmountable. Humans today can be found on every continent, and, alongside our technology, we have developed a bewilderingly large range of religions, beliefs, and cultural practices. No other species comes close to being as odd as us. This is what anthropology tries to explain, and it is, perhaps, one of the most difficult questions in science.

We share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, but our genetic similarity is offset by the gulf in intelligence and culture between us and our evolutionary cousins.

What’s in a Name?

Anthropology is broadly split into two subdisciplines: social anthropology and biological anthropology. Social anthropology explores societies and cultures in all their diversity and is a largely self-sufficient subject that draws on its own methods. Biological anthropology blurs the lines between traditional academic subjects, and it uses methods from areas as diverse as genetics, physics, and archaeology to explain human beings within the context of evolution—especially how our biology interacts with our culture. Traditionally, anthropology is not a subject with good PR and outside of universities it is not well known or well understood. Anthropology still conjures up images of men in pith helmets somewhere exotic. But despite this misapprehension, anthropology is done by a wide range of people, both at home and abroad, who may not use the label but are still doing anthropology. Historically, the fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus was perhaps the first anthropologist and his, albeit sometimes fictional, accounts of foreign cultures and behaviors has a distinctly anthropological theme. The roots of the subject as an academic discipline belong to the nineteenth century, when ethnographers began to study people in the expanding European empires—often as means of reinforcing ideas of European supremacy. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a backlash against such outmoded thinking has created a context in which today human variation is championed and our shared evolutionary heritage is celebrated.

Herodotus wrote about the known world in a distinctly anthropological way—identifying variation and reflecting on shared traits.

How This Book Works

This book presents 50 of the most important ideas and concepts in twenty-first-century anthropology. Each section has three parts: the main entry describes a key anthropological concept in detail, the 3-minute descent places the idea in the wider context of being human, and the 3-second origin provides the essence of the idea in a single sentence.

The book is divided into seven chapters that provide an overview of how we have become human and what being human means. Evolution explores the evolutionary history of humans and creates a context for understanding the roots of modern human biology, culture, and diversity. The Human Species demolishes the idea of different human races before explaining how we understand patterns of variation and diversity in the modern world. Materials examines how we use culture and technology to help shape the world around us and manipulate the environment. Socialization & Communication considers the complex ways in which humans organize themselves into groups and how we interact with each other using verbal and nonverbal means of communication. Humans are one of the most widely distributed species on the planet, and in Migration we are concerned with how humans have moved around the world in the past and how modern movement contributes to our thoughts about identity and belonging. Ideas are the foundation upon which humans have shaped the planet and guided our cultural evolution, and this chapter examines key lines of thinking and how they have shaped who we are. The book concludes with Modern Peoples, which contemplates the future of our species and how we deal with the challenges created by our shared evolutionary journey into the twenty-first century.

Overall, the aim of the book is not to provide an exhaustive list of everything anthropology is and everything anthropologists do—honestly, that would be a very dull read. Instead, we have offered you a reflection of what has influenced our evolution and development as humans and how we can try to understand our place in a dynamic and unstable world.

Each generation of humans has developed increasingly sophisticated technology to assist in every aspect of life—with cutting-edge ideas quickly being surpassed by those of future generations.

EVOLUTION OF HOMININS

EVOLUTION

EVOLUTION

GLOSSARY

Acheulean handaxe A type of stone tool technology that first appeared around 1.8 million years ago in Africa and was typified by being worked on both sides and by its teardrop shape.

apex predator An organism that sits at the top of a food chain or web that nothing else preys on. Humans became apex predators around 2 million years ago.

Australopithecines A genus of hominin that evolved in East Africa around 4 million years ago, spreading as far as South Africa, before becoming extinct around 2 million years ago. Six species are currently known, but their exact relationship to the genus Homo remains a source of great debate in anthropology.

Broca’s Area Named after the French anatomist Paul Broca, who first associated it with language, Broca’s Area is part of the frontal lobe of the hominin brain. It is generally found in the dominant hemisphere of the brain and is linked to aspects of speech production.

Denisovan hominin Name given to a species of the genus Homo from the Altai mountains in Siberia. Only tiny fragments of fossils have been found, and the species is known almost entirely from ancient DNA, which shows that the Denisovans interbred with both us and the Neanderthals.

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid is a chainlike structure found in the chromosomes of almost every living thing apart from a handful of viruses. As the primary genetic material of an organism it controls the production of proteins and transmits inherited traits, acting as the blueprint for development.

DNA chain DNA is arranged in a double- elix chainlike structure. The model was first proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Chains of DNA—called polynucleotides—are held together by hydrogen bonds.

genome All the genetic material of an individual organism.

genus (pl genera) The name given to a group of closely related species. Genera, along with the species, are part of the binomial naming system developed by Carl Linnaeus.

great apes Also known as the hominids, they are a family in the Linnaean classification system that includes humans, chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.

Homo erectus The first human hominin appeared around