anthropology is what we call for the study of human populations and their characteristics.
anthropology is what we call for the study of human populations and their characteristics.
what do we call the study of human populations and their characteristics?
anthropology
after separating from the soviet union, belarus went through a period of state development that lasted from about 1990 to 1994. during this time, the focus was on nation-building. this required both an institutional and ideological change from the time when belarus was under soviet rule. a policy of “belarusisation” was implemented in order to bring back culture and language that was understood to be native to belarus. in 1971, anthropological research focused on the characteristics of populations within belarus, looking at perceived internal “others”. in the 1980s, anthropologists were looking at the genetic structure of human populations based on demographics and environment, along with a study of belarus's child population. belarusian anthropologists also looked outside of belarus through the research institute and museum of anthropology from moscow state university in order to study the chukchi, eskimos, kazakhs, and khakas peoples.
history of anthropology by country
jeffrey long and rick kittles give a long critique of the application of "f" to human populations in their 2003 paper "human genetic diversity and the nonexistence of biological races". they find that the figure of 85% is misleading because it implies that all human populations contain on average 85% of all genetic diversity. they argue the underlying statistical model incorrectly assumes equal and independent histories of variation for each large human population. a more realistic approach is to understand that some human groups are parental to other groups and that these groups represent paraphyletic groups to their descent groups. for example, under the recent african origin theory the human population in africa is paraphyletic to all other human groups because it represents the ancestral group from which all non-african populations derive, but more than that, non-african groups only derive from a small non-representative sample of this african population. this means that all non-african groups are more closely related to each other and to some african groups (probably east africans) than they are to others, and further that the migration out of africa represented a genetic bottleneck, with much of the diversity that existed in africa not being carried out of africa by the emigrating groups. under this scenario, human populations do not have equal amounts of local variability, but rather diminished amounts of diversity the further from africa any population lives. long and kittles find that rather than 85% of human genetic diversity existing in all human populations, about 100% of human diversity exists in a single african population, whereas only about 70% of human genetic diversity exists in a population derived from new guinea. long and kittles argued that this still produces a global human population that is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammalian populations.
human genetic variation