First Day of Class/ Fall 2013

Yesterday was my first Anthropology class. Our Professor is Connie Elsberg and although we spent a great time analyzing the syllabus, we had a chance to take a look at possible careers opportunities for students of anthropology as well as a brief look at different types of skulls that helped us understand the evolution of the men kind.

While looking at the possible careers for the students of anthropology, we learned about three separate groups: Cultural Anthropology, Physical Anthropology, and Archaeology.  On each field there are many subfields, for example for the cultural anthropology one of the sub-field is medical anthropology that focuses on what time of medicine each culture uses, sometimes based on natural elements, sometimes not.

The second half of the class was focused on taking a look at different skulls and trying to identify them. The whole class, as a team, worked of finding out, and we were very successful!! First skull was Lucy’s skull that was dated 2 million years ago.  We took a look at the Australopithecus’ skull, Home Erectus, Neanderthal and the modern skull.  

I still don’t have the text book of this class:  Understanding Humans, by Lewis, Jurmain and Kilgore, so I cannot comment on that, but hopefully it will arrive on time for next week’s blog post and I will add some information on the text too.

I am very excited about this class, understanding our origins help us understand our current behavior among others and our costumes.

For further information I am adding a link to a website that you can see the differences of the body’s skeleton throughout the evolution of the species and an image of the restoration model of Lucy (Australopithecus) in exhibit in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, Japan.

The human lineage