Jeremy McCombs, age 16, Longview, Wash., for his question:
WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY?
Anthropology is the scientific study of man. The word comes from two Greek words: anthropus, meaning man, and logia, meaning science.
Anthropology is also partly a biological science. It studies man's place in nature, how he developed and how the different races are related to each other.
Both living people and human fossil bones are studied by the anthropologists. Research is conducted on living people to see how different races react to stresses.
In addition to being a biological science, anthropology is also considered to be a social, or behavioral, science. Human culture, or man's ways of working, eating, courting and worshipping, is studied by the anthropologist.
Sociology checks to see how people live together in groups while psychology studies how they think, feel and learn. History traces the course of past events. Anthropology deals with all three of these areas as it tries to fit them together by studying man's whole way of life. Peoples of all the countries of the world are studied.
Because of anthropology, we are able to understand other people's accomplishments, problems and ambitions.
There are four branches of anthropology: physical anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology and linguistics.
The first anthropologists concentrated on classifying the races of man and tracing the origin of customs. By the early 1900s, anthropologists had begun to go into the field for systematic descriptions of as many cultures as possible.
Training for anthropology today includes both college courses and field work. Most professional anthropologists have Ph.D. degrees.
Compared with most other sciences, anthropology is a small field. It has been estimated that there are less than 5,000 professional anthropologists in the United States today. Most of them are either employed by museums or teach and do research in colleges and universities.
Today a number of universities sponsor large scale research programs in anthropology. It is still regarded as a rather new field and much is yet to be accomplished.
The science of anthropology started in about the middle of the 1800s when a British naturalist named Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution. Then a bit later a French archaeologist named Jacque Boucher de Perthes convinced his fellow scientists that stone tools found in Europe dated back thousands of years. Such studies and others like them led other scholars to found ethnological societies.
The American Ethnological Society, which was founded in 1842, is still in existence. In 1879, the Bureau of American Ethnology was founded as a division of the Smithsonian Institution to collect museum material and classify American Indian languages.
The first Ph.D. in anthropology in the U.S. was given in 1892 by Clark University of Worcester, Mass.