When I was researching sub-fields of biological anthropology, I knew that I was interested in ancestry and biological evolution of humans. I found paleoanthropology to be an interesting marriage of biology and culture. The organization that I found online is simply called the Paleoanthropology Society and aims to educate and create discussion between anthropologists from many different disciplines.

While paleoanthropologists work with biological remains such as bones and teeth, they also pay attention to the biological behavior of the modern human’s ancestors. The Paleoanthropology Society uses researchers from both cultural and biological fields to, “shed light on hominid behavioral and biological evolution.” This means that finding bones is just as important as finding cultural items, such as farming tools, to be able to interpret the ways that human evolution is shaped by biology and culture.

I found that paleoanthropology has a lot in common with biocultural anthropology in that is uses a lot of the same resources and is interested in the way humans have influenced their environment and vice versa. What is different about paleoanthropology is that their primary goal is to understand how humans have developed in the context of early human hominids. Therefore the scope of their research and conclusions can often stretch thousands of years.

Another important aspect of paleoanthropology is its use of family trees in primates and humans. They seeks to understand the similarities and differences between the larger family of humans and the primates we evolved from. This can include work done in exploring the evolution of chimpanzees and gorillas, but it also includes the larger subset of the hominoid family tree. Paleoanthropologists are interested in melding together culture and biology to understand how humans came to develop in the way that we did. This contributes to anthropology as a whole by establishing a developmental timeline (though always in flux), and by providing comparative analysis of humans across different regions of the Earth. Paleoanthropologists preserve both biological and cultural artifacts that can then be used in other areas of study.

By studying and comparing different groups of humans and their development throughout the world, paleoanthropologists contribute a lot of the biological groundwork for other areas of anthropological study. For example, linguistic anthropologists can take studies of certain tribes and grouped people and use the biological and cultural research to apply to that group’s development of a particular language. The way those humans developed biologically could also have an effect upon how their language and writing system then developed and changed over time.

I think that paleoanthropology is one of the most expansive sub-fields of anthropology in that it blends both cultural and biological elements together. Its interest in the development of humans ties in environmental and evolutionary research is fascinating to me because it provides such a timeline of human process and culture that you can see trends and variations across different populations. I like the biological aspect because it is relatively straightforward research into the tangible past and helps us flesh out the complexities of evolution and how we have influenced our bodies and minds today.