Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 12

For a long time the answers to profound questions about humanity came largely from religious texts. For example, when European explorers realized that the New World wasn’t India, the Native Americans — millions of people nobody was expecting to find — were explained from a biblical perspective as remnants of the lost tribes of Israel.

But since the late 19th century AD another perspective has emerged, the scientific study of humanity called anthropology. At first, anthropology was a quaint and pretty simple affair, studied as a hobby by all kinds of Naturalists and pseudoscientists. But when people started to realize how much anthropology could teach humanity about itself, they began to take it more seriously. Anthropology became a science, the science of humanity at large.

In Chapter 2, you can explore anthropology’s history and how it changed over time from being a pseudoscience to today’s highly technical study of human DNA, ancient fossils, the evolution of the mind, and how cultures change through time. In Chapter 3, you can find more detail about how anthropology has developed over time, affecting how it goes about learning about humanity in the first place.

The questions that anthropologists have asked (and ask today) are in part a reflection of the times. For example, today a lot of people are investigating the effects of climate change on ancient human populations. This isn’t to say that climate change isn’t an issue today, but we should be careful with projecting our anxieties on the past. Knowing the potential for bias, anthropologists are careful about making assumptions. My mentor, professor Ken Ames, taught me a great lesson, early in my grad-school career: Be most skeptical of your favorite hypothesis. I try to remember that advice any time I think I have something figured out!