Branches
The nomenclature of the field is not exact: the relevant subdivision of the American Anthropological Association is the Biological Anthropology Section while the principal professional organization is the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The term "biological anthropology" emerged with the rise of genetics and incorporates genetic markers as well as primate ethology.
- Paleoanthropology, the study of fossil evidence for human evolution, studying hominid fossil evidence and dating to determine matters such as the time and manner in which the mandible evolved, the effect of nature and environment on bipedality or the use of opposable thumb, with hominid classification and the individual naming of the proposed species and their place in primatology, the study of primates. Paleopathology studies the traces of disease and injury in ancient human skeletons.
- Human behavioral ecology, the study of behavioral adaptations (foraging, reproduction, ontogeny) from the evolutionary and ecologic perspectives, (see behavioral ecology). Human adaptation, the study of human adaptive responses (physiologic, developmental, genetic) to environmental stresses and variation.
- Human biology, an interdisciplinary field of biology, biological anthropology, nutrition and medicine, concentrates upon international, population-level perspectives on health, evolution, adaptation and population genetics.
- Human osteology, the study of human bones.
- Paleopathology, the study of disease in antiquity. This study focuses not only on pathogenic conditions observable in bones or mummified soft tissue, but also on nutritional disorders, variation in stature or the morphology of bones over time, evidence of physical trauma, or evidence of occupationally derived biomechanic stress.
- Forensic anthropology, the application of osteology, paleopathology, archaeology, and other anthropological techniques for the identification of modern human remains or the reconstruction of events surrounding a person's death.
Read more about this topic: Biological Anthropology
Famous quotes containing the word branches:
“We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one’s bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one’s head under the cover, giving one’s self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)