Human Nature

People are pretty much the same all over the world

Anthropology offers a broader perspective. Most people
think that anthropologists study fossils and non
industrial cultures, and they do.
The author study on Betseleo Brazil wherein he sailed
with the fishermen in simple sailboats on atlantic
waters. Madagascar he also worked in rice fields and
took part in ceremonies in which he entered the
tombs to rewrap the corpses of decaying ancestors.


However, anthropology is much more than study
of nonindustrial peoples.
It is a comparative study that examines all
societies, ancient and modern, simple and
complex.
To become an anthropologist, normally does
ethnographic field work. This entails spending a
year or more in another culture, living with the
natives and learning their customs.

No matter how much the anthropologist learns
about that culture, he/she remains an alien
impact. Having learned to respect other customs
and beliefs, anthropologist can never forget that
there is a wider world. There are normal ways of
thinking and acting other than our own.
ADAPTATION, VARIATION, AND
CHANGE
Adaptation
Humans are the most adaptable animals in the
world.
People survive malaria in the tropics
Men have walked on the moon. The symbol of the
starship enterprise in Washingtons Smithsonian
Institution symbolizes the desire to seek out new life
and civilizations, to boldly go where no one has
gone before.
2 basic human attributes
Flexibility
Adaptability

Human diversity is the subject matter of
anthropology.
Holistic Science studies the whole of the human
condition: past, present and future: biology,
society, language and culture.
Cultures
are traditions and customs, transmitted through
learning, that govern the beliefs and behavior of the
people exposed to them. children learn these
traditions by growing up in a particular society.
Cultural Traditions include customs and opinions,
developed over the generations, about proper and
improper behavior. It answers the question, such as,
How do we do things? How do we interpret the world?
Culture
Is not itself biological , but it rests on hominid
biology.
Hominids are members of zoological family that
includes fossil and living humans. For more than
a million years, hominids have had at least some
of biological capacities on which culture depends.
These abilities are to learn, to think symbolically,
to use language, and to employ tools, and other
cultural features in organizing their lives and
adapting to their environments.
Bound neither by time nor by space, anthropology
ponders and confronts major questions of human
existence.
By examining ancient bones and tools, they solve
the mysteries of hominid origins.
HUMAN ADAPTATION
THE PROCESS BY WHICH ORGANISMS COPE
WITH ENVIRONMENTALSTRESSES. It involves
an interplay between culture, heredity and
biological plasticity. (the ability to change)