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Marvin Harris, a historian of anthropology, begins The Rise of Anthropological Theory with the statement that anthropology is "the science of history". [10] He is not suggesting that history be renamed to anthropology, or that there is no distinction between history and prehistory, or that anthropology excludes current social practices, as the general meaning of history, which it has in ...
The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor.. Homo sapiens is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. [1] Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as bipedalism, dexterity, and complex language, [2] as well as interbreeding with other hominins (a tribe of the African hominid subfamily), [3] indicating ...
Early humans were social and initially scavenged, before becoming active hunters. The need to communicate and hunt prey efficiently in a new, fluctuating environment (where the locations of resources need to be memorized and told) may have driven the expansion of the brain from 2 to 0.8 Ma. Evolution of dark skin at about 1.2 Ma. [39]
The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology.
While the history of evolutionary thinking with regard to humans can be traced back at least to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, early sociocultural-evolution theories – the ideas of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) – developed simultaneously with, but independently of ...
By the early 1860s, as summarized in Charles Lyell's 1863 book Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, it had become widely accepted that humans had existed during a prehistoric period—which stretched many thousands of years before the start of written history. This view of human history was more compatible with an evolutionary origin ...
Political economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Three main areas of interest rapidly developed. The first of these areas was concerned with the "pre-capitalist" societies that were subject to evolutionary "tribal" stereotypes.
paleoanthropology and paleontology of both human and non-human primates; primatology and primate ethology; the sociocultural evolution of human behavior, including phylogenetic approaches to historical linguistics; the cultural anthropology and sociology of humans; the archaeological study of human technology and of its changes over time and space