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Apr 19, 2024
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ANTH 102 - Introduction to Physical Anthropology (3 units) CO4L
Biological and evolutionary origins of humans, with consideration of population genetics, living primates, fossil records and human variation. Includes eight laboratory experiences.
Prerequisite(s): MATH 120 or Corequisite. Corequisite(s): MATH 126 or higher.
Units of Lecture: 3
Offered: Every Fall, Spring, and Summer
Student Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this course:
1. Students will be able to explain the differences between evolutionary biology, based on scientific principles, and intelligent design or creation science, based on faith and belief systems.
2. Students will be able to explain how natural selections, genetic drift, and mutation have produced the biological differences among human populations (e.g., in skin color, eye color and form, blood group gene frequencies, body size, fingerprints, dental morphology, metabolic disorders, etc.).
3. Students will be able to analyze the primary types of environmental stressors that have affected human evolution, including climate (e.g., extreme temperatures), disease (e.g., malaria), nutrition (e.g., over reliance on one staple), and demography (e.g., issues of crowding and sanitation following emergence of food production and beginning of sedentary life style). Moreover, students will evaluate how human populations adapt through behavioral (cultural), physiological, and genetic means, and how these interact (biocultural approach).
4. Students will be able to explain how humans fall within the larger biological world (as primates, mammals, vertebrates, bilaterians), and describe what they owe to the rest of the animal kingdom that contributes to their current evolutionary form and what constitutes uniquely human traits both behaviorally and biologically.
5. Students will be able to explain how, above all other biological changes in hominid evolution, the one that set humans off in a new direction was the development of bipedal locomotion (ca. 5-6 mya) and that some of the hallmarks of humanity, including speech, art, and music, developed within the past 50,000 years.
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