I had taken a couple different anthropology classes before taking ANP 206. I thought this class would be very similar to my previous classes, but I was wrong. This class goes into more how we as humans had physically evolved, and the timeline of humans came to be. On the other hand, my other anthropology classes discussed more on how culture has affected us.

The big overall topic for this class seems to be about human evolution. As humans, there are different ways we are still evolving. One example would be our diet. Our ancestors mainly had proteins, no carbohydrates, and refined foods. As time went on, our ancestors were able to migrate, physically evolve, and develop more tools to expand their diet. There are many different factors that lead to our current diet. I feel that our brain size is very important to how our diet came to be. Humans have bigger brains compared to some of our ancestors. Humans were able to develop different tools to process different foods quickly. In modern times, you can see that we incorporate more processed foods, more fat, and not as much produce into our diets. So we are not eating like our ancestors did in their time. However, the paleo diet has been popular in our time. Many people believe that if our ancestors ate a certain way, we as humans can do the same. This is not true. Our bodies have evolved to eat a certain way due to the many changes we experience in evolution, and we need certain nutrients to keep us healthy. For example, many people believed that our ancestors did not consume grains. However, scientists were able to find some residue of grain on tools by some of our ancestors. Also, we the carbohydrates are needed for glucose to give our body energy.

Another example that contributes to the idea that humans are still evolving is natural selection. Natural selection is the process where organisms will adapt to their environment tend to survive and produce offspring. Natural selection is a key mechanism in evolution. I believe this is important, because in the lectures we notice that we do not have certain traits anymore. This is due to the fact that the environment plays a big part in natural selection. Natural selection acts on traits differently in different environments. We develop certain traits based on our environment to survive. Diseases can affect natural selection. Selection favors the more positive alleles, while wanting to eliminate the harmful alleles. For example, we talked about how natural selection has played apart in sickle cell anemia in past lectures. In areas of those to carry the HbS gene have been naturally selected, because the trait had some resistance towards malaria. The red blood cells in the body that contained some abnormal hemoglobin tended to sickle when they were affected by the parasite that had malaria.

In conclusion, evolution has a huge impact on what makes us humans today. As humans, we are biologically, behaviorally, environmentally, and culturally continuously still evolving.