Web Credit: This course description was prepared by Professor Janet Spector, University of Minnesota Anthropology Department, for her independent study course of the same name. An Introduction to Anthropology 1101: Human Origins This course is designed to introduce you to the fields of physical anthropology and archaeology, the subdisciplines of anthropology concerned with the study of human origins and human evolution. The scope of this course is very broad, spanning over ten million years and covering prehistoric developments on all parts of the earth. Several major questions serve as the focus of this course and structure the assigned readings and written assignments. The first set of questions addresses the nature of being and becoming human -- what it means to be human and how these biological and behavioral characteristics emerged over the past several million years. In this part of the course you will be introduced to some basic principles of evolution and genetics. You will learn about the techniques and methods used by researchers to study the physical and cultural remains of our earliest primate ancestors and about those used in the study of nonhuman primates, both living and fossil forms. The second set of questions addressed in this course concerns what anthropologists consider to be the major trends in human biological and cultural evolution. Here we will examine the important prehistoric developments that shaped the character of our contemporary way of life. In this part of the course we will investigate the origins of some fundamental human institutions and patterns of human cultural adaptation. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on the nature of the information that researchers use to study the remote past and on how researchers investigate those factors that appear to have stimulated change -- biological and behavioral -- through time. The underlying assumption of the course is that by understanding the processes and factors that shaped human life in the past, we can better understand our contemporary world and perhaps glean insight about the future course of human existence on this planet.
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