Archaeology Week 1: Modern Society Human Evolution

Week One Assignments

I don’t need any citations please answer both questions in one page

1-     Study Questions week one

• Breaking free from the hold that the biblical framework had on ideas held by pre-19th century Western society required the application of critical thinking on questions about where humans came from and about the world we inhabit. Explain in your own words how the scientific method works to maintain a critical thinking approach to understanding the world.
• Briefly explain the types of evidence that Darwin used (in Chapter 1 of The Descent of Man) to argue for a close evolutionary relationship between humans and other “higher” mammals.

2-Musings 1 (Week 1)

1. Try to imagine what modern society might be like if, for the last 150 years, we had no understanding of evolution and didn’t know anything about human origins and human prehistory.
2. With this in mind, what contributions do you think anthropology in general and biological anthropology in specific have made to modern society?
3. Do you think we could have a meaningful understanding of who we are as a species without an understanding of our origins?
4. Do you think knowing where we humans fit in the evolutionary tree of all of life on Earth, past and present, influences how you view your relationship with the rest of life on the planet?
5. The goals of sociology and cultural anthropology are to inform us about the behaviour of living people and the nature of culture, as we can view it going on today. How do investigations into human prehistory contribute to understanding the human condition? What is the unique contribution of this area of research to our understanding of what it is to be human? Think about what are the major differences between research into human origins and the study of modern or recent cultures.