Biological Anthropology

Biological anthropology is the study of human structure, variation, and evolution. It has been radically transformed in recent years because of the virtual explosion of knowledge that has occurred in the natural sciences. In the past, much of what used to be called “physical anthropology” was largely descriptive and involved detailed accounts of human fossil discoveries, measurement of the human and primate skeleton, dissection of primate cadavers and description of their anatomy, and some field studies of behavior. Today, Biological Anthropology is really a specialized form of biology whose target is understanding human evolution. To that end, a vast new variety of approaches are available, from comparing the genomes of different primates and mammals to determine their degrees of relatedness, to study of the collagen orientation in ancient human fossils.