Introducing Anthropology: An Integrated Approach, Essay Example

The search for food is believed to be one of the primary driving forces of human evolution, as shrinking forests and expanding savannahs forces early hominids out of the jungles and onto open plains. For most of human history, subsistence patterns have been based on foraging, gathering, and hunting, with foraging for plant-based foods serving as the primary source of nutritional value. For early humans (and earlier hominids) the majority of meat in the diet was obtained not through hunting, but through scavenging. Despite the relatively small role that hunting has played in the overall subsistence patterns of humans over the course of human evolution, the role of hunters has often been emphasized and celebrated (Park, 2014). Because hunting is a far more dangerous and exciting undertaking than foraging, this may explain why anthropologists have tended to focus on, or even overstate, its relative importance in various societies (Park, 2014). Some groups, such as those in areas where plant life was less abundant, had meat as a larger part of their main diet; overall, however, foraging has played the largest role in human subsistence patterns.

A discussion about the evolution of modern human language must begin by looking at its antecedents. Humans are not the only primates who use a form of language; chimpanzees, for example, use a system of calls and facial expressions to warn of approaching predators, or to reflect emotional states such as fear or aggression (Park, 2014). The advent of more complex human language came long before the development of written language, and much of the evidence for when it emerged is linked to the fossil record of human evolution.  The development of specific structures in the brain and the evolution of the structures in the skull and throat needed to produce vocalizations each offer some insight into how and when speech and language developed in humans. Cultural evidence, such as the development of early tools and the ability to control fire, may also indicate a period of human evolution when language would become a necessary component of, or complement to, such development.  The combined effect of the available evidence would seem to indicate that language evolved in tandem with human biological evolution, with less complex forms of language eventually growing into more complex forms as human culture began to develop (Park, 2014).

Religions function as an expression of the worldview of different cultural groups (Park, 2014). Natural phenomena are ascribed supernatural explanations relative to our ability to understand them. The number of supernatural beings codified in specific religious systems tends to depend on the ways that groups interact with their environments (Park, 2014). More naturalistic groups tend to display polytheistic systems, while groups that have gained more mastery of their environment –such as those that have developed agriculture and science- tend to be more monotheistic. This is not universally true, and even societies that are nominally monotheistic, such as Christians, still revere saints and other supernatural or religious figures.

Sociobiology, at its core, is concerned with the intersection of nature and nurture (Wilson, 1975). It examines the influence that evolution and biology have on social behavior, and attempts to make determinations about the role that genetics has on behavior. Sociobiology, also known as evolutionary psychology, provides a framework for using an integrated approach to exploring the development of human culture. It focuses on how culture and biology influence behavior, and explores the evolutionary and biological bases of cultural development and expression.

Reference

Park, M.A. (2014).  Introducing anthropology: An integrated approach, with PowerWeb, 6th Edition.  New York:  McGraw-Hill.

Wilson, Edward O. (1975). Sociobiology. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.