Through the 19th century Developmental phase

Through the 19th century

In 1647, the Bartholins, founders of the University of Copenhagen, defined l'anthropologie as follows: Anthropology, that is to say the science that treats of man, is divided ordinarily and with reason into Anatomy, which considers the body and the parts, and Psychology, which speaks of the soul.

Anthropology and many other current fields are the intellectual results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. Theorists in such diverse fields as anatomy, linguistics, and Ethnology, making feature-by-feature comparisons of their subject matters, were beginning to suspect that similarities between animals, languages, and folkways were the result of processes or laws unknown to them then.^[10] For them, the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect. Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild.

 

Biological Anthropology

Biological (or physical) anthropologists carry out systematic studies of the non-cultural aspects of humans and near-humans.  Non-cultural refers to all of those biological characteristics that are genetically inherited in contrast to learned.  Near-human is a category that includes monkeys, apes, and the other primates as well as our fossil ancestors.  The primary interest of most biological anthropologists today is human evolution--they want to learn how our ancestors changed through time to become what we are today.  Biological anthropologists also are interested in understanding the mechanisms of evolution and genetic inheritance as well as human variation and adaptations to different environmental stresses, such as those found at high altitudes and in environments that have temperature extremes. 

Biological anthropologists are usually involved in one of three different areas of research: human biology, primatology, or paleoanthropology.  Human biology is concerned with learning about human diversity, genetic inheritance patterns, non-cultural adaptations to environmental stresses, and other biological characteristics of our species, Homo sapiens.Primatologists carry out non-human primate studies.  This is usually done in a natural setting among wild apes, monkeys, and related animals.  They are principally interested in learning about the capabilities and behavior patterns of primates--our closest living relatives.  It is likely that the great apes in particular can give us important clues to understanding the lives of our earliest human ancestors over 2 million years ago.  Paleoanthropologists recover the fossil record of early humans and their primate ancestors in order to understand the path of our evolution.  In doing this, they often work with geologists, paleozoologists, and scientists with other specialties who help them reconstruct ancient environments.

Cultural Anthropology

Cultural (or socio-cultural) anthropologists are interested in learning about the cultural aspects of human societies all over the world.  They usually focus their research on such things as the social and political organizations, marriage patterns and kinship systems, subsistence and economic patterns, and religious beliefs of different societies.  Most cultural anthropologists study contemporary societies rather than ancient ones.  Through the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, the peoples who primarily interested cultural anthropologists were those who lived in small-scale, isolated societies with cultures that were very different from those of Europeans and European Americans.  African, American Indian, and Pacific Island societies were often the subject of their research.  Today, they are equally likely to study subcultures of modern, large-scale societies such as Southeast Asian Hmong families now living in St. Paul, Minnesota, Mexican neighborhoods in Southern California, or conservative Old Order Amish communities in rural Pennsylvania.

Archaeology

Archaeologists are interested in recovering the prehistory and early history of societies and their cultures.  They systematically uncover the evidence by excavating, dating, and analyzing the material remains left by people in the past.  Archaeologists are essentially detectives who search through many thousands of pieces of fragmentary pots and other artifacts as well as environmental data in order to reconstruct ancient life ways.  In a sense, this makes archaeology the cultural anthropology of the past.  Archaeology is also related to biological anthropology in its use of the same methods in excavating and analyzing human skeletal remains found in archaeological sites.
Archaeologists are in a unique position to understand the development of human societies and cultures from those of our distant hunter gatherer ancestors through the ancient civilizations on up to the present.  There have been humans for at least 2.5 million years.  Only the last 5,500 of these years have been even partly recorded by scribes and historians.  As a consequence, well over 99% of the human story lies in the prehistoric past and has been out of reach of historians.  Only archaeology can recover it.