The anthropology studies comparatively about the humans with four main field such as biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology and archaeological anthropology. Among these, I decided to focus on the paleoanthropology as the biological subfield. I explored the website called AAPA(American Association of Physical Anthropologists) that is the world’s leading professional organization of the field. According to the AAPA, Physical anthropology is a biological science that deals with the adaptations, variability, and evolution of human beings and their living and fossil relatives. This is because it studies biology in the context of human culture and behavior pattern, and it is social science. The organization is expected to have 89th annual meeting in 2020 in LA, California. It also introduces new publications, news, and even jobs with career explanation to introduce as much.
Under News tab, there are most recently uploaded resource as courses for future anthropologists like “Using GEIGER, PHYTOOLS, and other computational tools and 3D Geometric Morphometrics to study and analyze in terms of using technology for more precise tests and accurate results. Several different kinds of computational process is required to maximize efficiency for visualizing and analyzing the data when using Geometric Morphometrics. To explore data, they use regressions. Visualizing change that is associated with size. Removing change associated from size from your data (MorphoJ). Common allometric trajectories. Comparing vector directions. Extracting linear dimensions from 3D data and using them as covariates.
The organization also publishes journal of the AAPA on physical anthropology to share information on abstracts and proceedings from the annual meeting and other official documents.
AAPA : http://physanth.org/news/
Paleoanthropology seems like a very interesting field since they get to look at human bones and remains. Paleoanthropology shows us how the human body had changed over many years and how our body has changed to help us adapt to our world. I also found it really cool that the etymology of the word is greek and are derived from greek palaios. There are three greek works that make up the term paleoanthropology. Palaios means old or ancient, Anthropos means man or human and lastly logia which is a suffix means the study of. I thought this was really cool while I was researching more about paleoanthropology. I also wonder if they study the bones of animals and how they change or adapt over time as well. It would be very interesting to compare human bones for the last three hundred years and compare them to an animals bones for the past three hundred years. Lastly I wonder how paleoanthropology has changed in the past years with all the new technology constantly being added to society. I bet it makes their jobs a lot easier when they need to go back to a far date and compare bones to a more recent date.
I have also wanted to look at paleoanthropology due to its topic of discussing fossil remains, etc. I think its important to understand the concept of paleoanthropology with the idea that species arise through bipedal ancestors. The human body has evolved drastically over millions of years and fossil research is a great way to analyze the changes. Paleoanthropology is a very simple concept tht tells us how adaptation, migration, and culture play an influence in evolution of our bodies.
APAA, I believe, is hugely popular with anthropological studies and a professional organization I was interested in researching more about as well. The ways in which they do these tests, I find, is phenomenal. 3D data is a concept that allows us to further look at our past ancestors and see how everything has changed.
Paleoanthropology comes across as a difficult topic but interesting to understand as a subfield within biological anthropology. The website you shared seems like a great platform to really throw everything together that you mentioned such as publication and news, that relates to paleoanthropology and can be easier to find to a public audience that could possibly want to learn more about this particular part of anthropology. It can also be an access to look for job availabilities in the field, and it is just another example how anthropology is trying to reach out to the public and show its importance towards learning more about the history of human life.
While you listed several different ways as to how anthropologists examine their data- what way seemed to be the most common? And is that due to the price or the accuracy of the technique. I find it also interesting how technology can advance fairly quickly, and it seems this field has put in the time to allow that for better examination/analyzation.