What is anthropology?

Sometimes it's been called the holistic study of humankind,

which is a lot of work.

It's trying to look at humans from all angles.

And I got interested in this

even long before I even knew there was such a field.

As a teenager in junior high school and then high school,

I became fascinated with looking around the world

at human beings all around the world

but living in different cultures with different lifestyles,

different beliefs and customs.

And I wondered, how did this happen?

How does this work?

I also became fascinated with us as a species,

that we were a very unusual species in the animal world.

We have this huge brain, we walked on two feet,

we had complex tools and technology, elaborate culture.

And I wondered how did this really happen?

How, when, and why?

And then my very first semester in college,

I found the field was called anthropology.

This was what I had been interested in for so long.

Now, doing anthropology has taken me

to a lot of places in the world over the years.

I actually met my husband on an archeological dig.

And then while we were in graduate school,

we went off to Africa right after we got married,

more or less spent our honeymoon in a tent.

In fact, the first two years of our marriage,

we figured we spent about half of it living in a tent

with all of our belongings in a little tin trunk

at the foot of the bed.

So, we've traveled a lot,

lived in many places of the world for months at a time

and had quite a wide range of experiences with people

and also living in unusual places

like the African plains with our nearest neighbors being

antelope, crocodiles, and lions.

So, it's been a very exciting time.

Now, when anthropologists want to do their work,

their research, they often have to travel.

Some people might do it in the U.S.,

deal with particular groups here

but as often, it entails going overseas

to other countries and other continents

and living with different cultures,

learning about aspects of their culture,

learning about the physical people there,

the adaptation, for instance,

in high altitudes and how people adapt--

their bodies have adapted to high altitude,

so studying the physical being.

Also, studying the languages and also studying

the prehistory through archeology.

And when we do this,

we often will be studying the tools

and we'll go and excavate

these early tools and try to understand

how they made and use their tools

and how they lived out their lives,

their daily lives and adapted.

Physical anthropologists

may also study human fossil ancestors

such as these, so that you will go out and excavate

and sometimes study in laboratories.

And also, you'll find not only our direct ancestors

but also that there are other species out there who are

our cousins, long lost cousins.

We're used to being the sole species

with only the chimpanzees

being our closest living relatives

but we have much closer cousin species

many years ago who also walked upright

but had small brains and a different adaptation.

So, this is another fascinating aspect

of what anthropologists study.

Now, if you think about it, it's only been about a 150 years

since Darwin wrote "Origin of Species".

And Neanderthals were only

beginning to be found short time before that.

So, in that short amount of time,

a 150 years for a discipline,

we have made huge, huge accomplishments

in anthropology, especially in my field,

paleoanthropology, which tries to look at human evolution.

And usually this entails physical anthropologists,

archeologists, and a wide range of other people.

Paleontologists who might study carnivores or elephants,

geologists of different sorts living in big field camps

and doing their work sometimes for weeks

or months at a time,

sometimes in remote places of Africa for instance,

so you... often doing a lot of travel and interfacing

with a lot of other scientists in this work.

Now, all of these fossils that we found,

in a sense, you've heard of probably missing links.

In a sense, all of these fossils that we found

are found missing links.

But remember, for each missing link that we find,

when we find the next one,

then, you want to find the one that's in between those.

So, that is the challenge.

Every year, more expeditions go out.

If you go into this field,

you might be on one of those expeditions

to find new missing links

that will fill in even more exciting stories

about human prehistory.