Wellfleet Press

Humans are the last remaining hominin species and the only member of the genus Homo to have colonized the entire planet.

Anthropology is the study of the most complex and contradictory species on the planet—us. Humans are not easy to understand and are even more difficult to explain. On paper, we are a relatively large, naked form of ape with a big brain and an odd way of walking on two legs.

No other species comes close to being as odd as us.

This is what anthropology tries to explain, and it is, perhaps, one of the most difficult questions in science.

Anthropology is broadly split into two subdisciplines: social anthropology and biological anthropology.

Social anthropology explores societies and cultures in all their diversity and is a largely self-sufficient subject that draws on its own methods.

But despite this misapprehension, anthropology is “done” by a wide range of people, both at home and abroad, who may not use the label but are still “doing” anthropology.

Historically, the fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus was perhaps the first anthropologist and his, albeit sometimes fictional, accounts of foreign cultures and behaviors has a distinctly anthropological theme.

The roots of the subject as an academic discipline belong to the nineteenth century, when ethnographers began to study people in the expanding European empires—often as means of reinforcing ideas of European supremacy.

Each generation of humans has developed increasingly sophisticated technology to assist in every aspect of life—with cutting-edge ideas quickly being surpassed by those of future generations.