Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 36

One of Charles Darwin’s great contributions to civilization was to demonstrate that humanity was part of the world of living things, not separate from it. For thousands of years, Western civilization, backed up by the biblical story of creation, held humanity as a special creation fundamentally different from all other living things. By Darwin’s time, many were beginning to question this assessment, but the cultural pressure to conform to the dominant religion prevented most from saying so out loud. But Darwin’s ideas and the many it fertilized set the foundation for a new study: the study of humans as living, evolving creatures in many ways no different from the rest of animal life. Today, anthropologists have countless reams of data, much of it based on studies of DNA — the molecule that shapes all Earth life — that confirm the essence of Darwin’s claims, made back in 1859.

That evolutionary perspective allows the discipline of physical anthropology, the study of humanity as a biological phenomenon. What species are we most and least like? Where and when did we fist appear? What were our ancestors like? Can we learn about human behavior from the behavior of our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas? Is our species still evolving? How do modern human genetics, population growth, and other current issues play out from a biological perspective? These are all issues that physical anthropologists investigate.