Anthropology.net

So I was merely doing my morning feed reading, and Afarensis’ post on some creationists playing paleoanthropology catches my eye. Reading just the headline, I thought to myself, “Boy… I wonder what these nutjobs, the very ones who think that dinosaurs and humans shared the Earth some um-thousand years ago, have to say about Neandertals and humans?”

What Casey Luskin, the creationist, who posted on neandertals and humans, is spinning is that Neandertals were human humans. He has taken this Washington Post article, and derived the following:

“Neanderthals may have been virtually indistinguishable from modern humans in terms of both their appearance and intelligence. A lead author on the study declared that “we would understand both to be human. There’s good reason to think that they did as well.”"

This is a big misunderstanding here. It seems like Casey Luskin either doesn’t understand taxonomy, or he’s manipulating the terms to his advantage… and I’ll explain why.

Both Neandertals and humans belong to the genus, Homo. That makes us both humans, just as Homo erectus is also classified as a human. Human in latin is Homo. So Homo erectus, is Upright Human and Homo habilis, is Handy Human… pretty simple? The genus Homo is identified by big brains compared to other primates. The only living genus of Homo, or living classification of humans, left to date is us, Homo sapiens. Sometimes it is confusing. What I am trying to clarify is that what human stands for now, in our public day to day talk, is us. What human means in science is every organism that is classified as Homo. Does that make Neandertals the exact same as us? No.

I don’t know of any paleoanthropologists that truly advocate neandertals and Homo sapiens humans were exactly the same. They are pretty different. This image of a Neandertal skull to the left and a Homo sapiens one to the right should convince you:

There is current focus on research that is is addressing whether Homo sapiens and Neandertals interbred and that’s supplemented by both anatomical/fossil comparisons and also genetic data. What they are doing is testing a hypothesis and debating what’s going on. That’s different from equating Homo sapiens and neandertals as the same, because species concepts aren’t set in stone.

From Razib first, then John Hawks comes news that Harvard is ‘killing’ the biological anthropology major,

“Overnight, BioAnthro quietly started to fade into that sacred elephant-burial ground where concentrations go to die. All the biological anthropology classes from the tutorials on up have been renumbered to [Human Evolutionary Biology] classes. Students who attempted to get a study card signed for biological anthropology were encouraged by the department to strongly consider HEB. As a result, biological anthropology has gone from a small but lively concentration to one in which at the beginning of this semester only three sophomores still exist.”

I’ve seen this trend happen a lot, but I should clarify something that is not clearly conveyed in the Harvard Crimson op-ed. Most universities do not have a major labelled “Biological Anthropology” or even “Physical Anthropology” nor “Cultural Anthropology” for that matter. Most of our degrees just say “Anthropology.” That is because those specialties are subdisciplines within anthropology… just as microbiology, genetics, or physiology are subdisciplines within biology.

I’ve done some sleuthing and I’ve found out Harvard never offered a specific biological anthropology major. Instead they offered a biological anthropology track. The difference is that the ultimate diploma/degree says just Anthropology, but the coursework is more biological than cultural or archaeological. Does that really make a difference? Its up to you to judge, but to say biological anthropology majors are being phased out is a bit of exaggeration.

In Harvards situation, Human Evolutionary Biology seemed to have more in common with the biological anthropology than biological anthropology had with the rest of anthropology. That is the department’s decisions to be honest. And this is not a unique situtation. This has happened to many institutions, most notably UC Berkeley’s split of everything physical anthropology into the Integrative Biology department and also ASU’s disintegration of the Anthropology department.

That being said, John Hawks gingerly agrees to the complaints;

“that the new [HEB] major has no four-field [anthropology] component…

If I wanted to be a human zoologist, I wouldn’t have gone into anthropology. “

Now, while I have learned some outstanding lessons from my four-field anthropology education, such as cultural relativism (that is really useful in the field), I do approve with of the break into human evolutionary biology. Hawks recommends the following based upon the,

“increasing ethical and sociological components of genetic technology, I think that we should encourage all our students to include sociocultural anthropology in their studies of “human evolution” or “human genetics”.

But I disagree. There’s only so many classes a student could logistically take during their undegraduate education. I’ve come across more students than not have the ethical and social background to deal with physical anthropology. They know how to deal with Native Americans in a excavation and repatriation. But they don’t even know what a haplotype is, or they identify a bone a fibia and the companion a tibula. This shows me that there’s a mistaken focus on what we’re studying, the biology of humans.

The ethical and social aspects can be learned in graduate school or in extracurricular activities and experiences, for all I care. But if they don’t have the basics in sciences, there is something wrong.