Exam 1: What Is Physical Anthropology

Observations of living primates inform our efforts to understand our evolutionary past.

A family friend tells you that she just completed a summer internship where she helped law enforcement to identify human remains using dental records,x-rays,and other indices of gender,height,and ethnicity.She is most likely to be studying:

Margaret Mead was an early physical anthropologist who worked in Papua New Guinea.

The scientific method:

What is anthropology? What are the four branches of anthropology?

While your mother is at the bookstore looking for something new to read,she mentions that she is interested in learning more about what her daughter is currently writing,an ethnography.The clerk asks for a more detailed description of an ethnography,so your mother phones you asking for more information.Your response includes which of the following?

Physical anthropology does NOT include:

Charles Darwin:

Your professor passes around a skull and tells you that you can tell this individual lived after hominids began making and using tools for food processing.How can you tell?

Physical anthropology:

Current evidence indicates that the earliest hominids lived in Africa 1-3 mya.

The hypothesis that the origin of human bipedalism was linked to a shift from life in the trees to life on the ground in the grasslands of Africa:

Forensic anthropologists:

Recent studies have refuted Darwin's hypothesis that the earliest hominids originated in grasslands.