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Introducing anthropology

Hey everyone! For my first post, I'll be talking a bit about biological (physical) anthropology and what it exactly has to do with us. Let's backtrack a bit before we go into that, though. What exactly is anthropology? It's the study of human behavior, culture, biology, and societies. It revolves much around past human species and evolution, and how and why we evolved. There are four main branches of anthropology: cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeology. I'll do a quick description of each category. Cultural anthropology is the study of cultural variation around the globe, biological anthropology studies the behavioral and biological aspect of humans, linguistic is concerned with human language and how it influences(ed) our social life. Last but not least, archaeology studies humankind from the past to the present. For reference, I'll mostly be focusing on biological anthropology in this blog.

So what exactly is biological anthropology? I summarized it above, but let's dive a little deeper. Essentially, biological anthropology is concerned with ancient humans, how they were related to non-human primates, and how they evolved into modern humans today. Sound complicated? Let's break it up. Humans had to have evolved from somewhere, right? They definitely did not just appear on Earth one day and be like, "Hey, let's make this world ours" Humans had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was apes. Chimps, gorillas, baboons, you know it. Humans diverged from primates about 5-6 million years ago and many factors went into play that helped them evolve into what we are today. A way to think about this is that we once had fur all over ourselves and lived in the wild. Hard to believe, I know. 

Ok! This post is becoming pretty long so I'll end it here. I'll continue talking about humans and evolution in the next post and as for now, have a great rest of your day:) 

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