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ARCH 131 (HUMAN ORIGIN) MIDTERM AND FINAL EXAM NOTES SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
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ARCH 131 (HUMANORIGIN) MIDTERM AND
FINAL EXAM NOTES
SIMON FRASER
UNIVERSITY.
,Week 1 lecture notes
Physical anthropology or biological anthropology
Archaeology - study of past / extinct cultures through that part of their material culture that survives in
the archeological record
● Things they made and used and left behind and survived e.g. stone tools, pottery, architecture
physical/biological anthropology - human biological evolution and variability
● Paleoanthropology - mix between archaeology and biological anthropology
● Primatology
Cultural anthropology - study of living cultures
● Studying homelessness
Linguistics - study of languages
● The study of the evolution of languages and the role languages play in cultures
What role did this technology play in our ability to adapt starting 3 million years ago?
Why do biological anthropology?
- Reconstructing the history of human evolution
- Understanding the human condition
- Why we behave the way we do
- All of our shared stories
Unit 1 - introduction to human origins
The Earliest Scientists
Development of the scientific framework in Europe
Started in the 1500’s and developing even more in the 1600’s
Stage of Enlightenment
Situation in Europe:
Questions left up to the Church
Every aspect of a person’s life - strong authoritarian by religion
Irish Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656)
●
● “The world began in 4004 BC” - when Adam and Eve were born
,The Enlightenment (mid-1600s to early 1800s)
● Humanism - ethics should be based on logic, empathy and reason, not derived from
supernatural gods or divine revelation, only natural forces
● Liberalism - value of individual human life and individual freedom, tolerance, respectful of others
beliefs, individual freedom, human rights
● Rationalism - knowledge gained through logic and rational thought
● Empiricism - knowledge comes primarily from experience and observation of the natural world
Science
- Norms, institutions, methodologies that foster reason
- Free speech - individuals are free to develop hypotheses but others are free to criticize any
hypotheses.
- Peer review - researchers review each other’s hypotheses
- Empirical testing and standards of evidence: hypotheses are tested against data from the natural
world
- Recognition of inherent biases - methodologies were developed to avoid these problems
- No individual is the smartest or the wisest
- Following these ideals have collectively made us smarter than any individual
Advances in the Natural Sciences
- Adoptions of these philosophies resulted in fast advances
- Huge diversity in life on the planet
- The earth is far older than we know
- History of the world
- Not the product of divine creation
- Rational structure to the national world that followed physical laws that could be understood
Advances in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Huge diversity of people and cultures and religions
- Historical ties between different cultures and languages
- All languages can be traced to a common ancestor in language
- Archaeologists making it clear that these historical relationships went back into very distant time
into prehistory
- The world was nothing like the current version of things
- Dramatic improvements in health and medicine, political system
Contributions to the conditions of the modern world
, - Life expectancy was 30 years prior to 1800’s, now 70
- Dramatic decrease in malnutrition
- Massive increase in food production mostly through scientific advances in agriculture can
produce far more food per acre than people could in the past
- Product has increased 200x since the 1800’s
- Exponential growth in product
- Massive drop in conflict between major powers since 1650’s
- Low rates of violence
- Massive increase of acceptance in homosexuality
- High literacy rate across the world
- Less hours worked per week, massive increase in leisure time
- Higher measure of happiness
- Global suicide rates dropped by 20%
The birth of Biological Anthropology and Archaeology
Problems and Change in the 1700s and 1800s
- Many layers of geology - kilometers thick of sediments
- Feldhofer Cave, Germany, 1856 - found remains of early human
- Johann Fuhlrott - bones of Neandarthal 1
- Hermann Schaaffhausen - significant differences from modern human skeletons
- Represented clear evidence that humans had been undergoing evolution
- Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) father of cathology
- Didn’t believe in evolution, thought they were the same as other human bones
Three Important Changes in Our Understanding of the World
1. Scientists had to understand the extreme age of the earth, far older than 6000 years
- James Hutton (1726-1797) Law of uniformitarianism
- “Ancient geological conditions were the same as those of today”
- Charles Lyell (1797-1875)
- 1835 - “Extreme antiquity of the earth”
- Surmised that the earth may be as old as 300 million years
2. Extreme Age of Human History
- People have been around for longer than 6,000 years
- Millions of years of stone tools deposited in Europe
- Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868)
- Found flint objects buried deep in gravels in the rivers of Northwestern France
- “Flint objects are generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by
the circumposed humour” - Tollius, 1649 (they are created by lightning)
- Hugh Falconer (1808-1865) British geologist and paleontologist
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