Anthropology 101

Ethnography is:

the firsthand, personal study of local settings.

How are cultural rights different from human rights?

Cultural rights are vested in groups, not in individuals.

What are the four main subdisciplines of anthropology?

Biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology

Current evidence suggests that the last common ancestor of hominins and the African apes existed

6 to 8 m.y.a.

Ethnology is:

the comparative, generalizing aspect of cultural anthropology.

Evolution can be defined most simply as

Descent with modification.

How does survey research differ from ethnography?

Survey research generally focuses on a subset of a larger population.

In evolutionary terms, what does fitness refer to?

An organism's ability to survive and reproduce

Of the following nonhuman primates, which are most comparable to humans?

Terrestrial primates

The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics is

designed to ensure that all anthropologists are aware of their obligations to the field of anthropology, the host communities that allow them to conduct their research, and to society in general.

The emergence of agriculture in at least seven different regions of the world is an example of

Independent invention.

The pressurized cabin of an airplane flying at high altitude provides an example of a(n)

cultural adaptation

The process by which children learn culture is known as

enculturation.

The tendency of people living in the Peruvian Andes to develop a voluminous chest and lungs for life at very high altitudes provides an example of a(n)

genetic adaptation

What are the two major components of fieldwork in archaeological anthropology?

Systematic survey and excavation

What distinction does Kottak draw between culture and society?

People share society (organized life in groups) with other animals, but culture is distinctly human.

What do anthropological archaeologists study?

Material remains

What does natural selection act on?

The phenotypes of organisms

What does "evolution" actually refer to (i.e., how do we measure it)?

Changes in gene frequency (proportions of each genotype in population over time)

What is cultural relativism?

The argument that behavior in a particular culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture

What is paleoanthropology?

The study of hominid evolution and human life as revealed by the fossil record

What is the term for an expert on a particular aspect of local life?

Key cultural consultant

What is the term for cultural change that results when two or more cultures have continuous firsthand contact?

Acculturation

What is the term for processes that are causing nations and people to be increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent?

Globalization

What is the term for the process in which certain traits of one sex are selected because of advantages they confer in winning mates?

Sexual selection

What is the term for the processes by which organisms cope with environmental forces and stresses?

Adaptation

What role do independent assortment and recombination play in evolution?

They create genetic variability in a breeding population.

What term refers to an organism's evident traits, or physical appearance?

Phenotype

What term refers to the study of a community, region, society, or culture over time?

Longitudinal research

Which of the following are great apes?

All of the above.

(Chimpanzee, Orangutan, Gorilla)

Which of the following human traits does not have rudimentary building blocks in place in non-human primates, particularly great apes?

Writing

Which of the following is not a characteristic field technique used by ethnographers?

Telephone questionnaires

Which of the following is not an absolute dating technique?

Stratigraphy

Which of the following is not an adaptive trend in anthropoids?

Decreased sociality

Which of the following is not one of the ways in which individuals learn culture?

Genetic transmission

Which of the following is used as a basis for assigning organisms to the same taxon (zoological category)?

Homologies

Which of the following statements about cultural relativism is not true?

Cultural relativism argues that some cultures are relatively better than others

Why do anthropological archaeologists use relative dating?

To create a relative chronology for the materials uncovered during excavation

Why do human populations living in temperate, northern climates generally have light skin color?

It helps to prevent rickets.

Why is it important to understand that human racial categories are based upon perceptions of phenotypic features and not on genotypes?

Because race is socially constructed, not biologically determined

Which of the following is a cultural universal?

Some kind of family

What are cultural particulars?

Features unique to a given culture, not shared with any others

What is ethnocentrism?

Viewing another culture in terms of your own culture and values

Which of the following statements about culture is not true?

Human groups differ in their capacities for culture.

Which of the following is not a distinctive feature of four-field anthropology?

It has an exclusive focus on contemporary cultures.

A scientist who studies the fossil record of human evolution is a(n)

paleoanthropologist.

Which of the following features do humans not share with other primates?

Habitual, obligatory bipedalism

Which of the following is not part of Darwin's theory of evolution?

Catastrophism

Rather than attempting to classify humans into racial categories, biologists and anthropologists are

seeking to explain why specific biological variations occur.

What is special about Pierolapithecus catalaunicus?

It is a possible Miocene common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.

Ascribed status is

Status one is born with and inherits

Achieved status is

Status based on an individual's own personal characteristics that is earned by ones' actions

Which of the following is not a probable adaptive advantage of bipedalism?

It increased hominins' ability to brachiate through trees and thus escape from predators.

What is the name given to the cultural period in which the first signs of domestication are present?

Neolithic

How does domestication affect the reproduction of plants?

Domesticated plants lack natural seed dispersal mechanisms.

Compared to the Middle East, when did food production emerge in the New World?

At approximately the same time

Compared to their wild counterparts, domesticated animals tend to be

smaller

Cuneiform is the name for early writing in what region of the world?

Mesopotamia

How are ranked societies different from states?

States have social classes.

What does the current debate about Neanderthals' relation to anatomically modern humans (AMHs) focus on?

Whether Neanderthals were ancestral to AMHs in Europe

The footprints at Laetoli are associated with which bipedal human ancestor?

A. afarensis

In contrast to earlier models, current explanations of the origin and decline of states

consider the effects of social and political variables in addition to environmental factors.

Knowledge of the properties of metals, including how to extract, process, and use them to make tools, is known as

metallurgy

Linguistic displacement is

the ability to talk about things that are not present.

Linguists believe that

the world's linguistic diversity has been cut in half over the past 500 years.

Regular shifting between "high" and "low" variants of a language is known as

Diglossia

The first animals to be domesticated in the Middle East (between 10,000 and 7500 B.P.) were

goats and sheep

The study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and expressions is called:

Kinesics

How are ranked societies different from states?

States have social classes.

The study of the forms in which sounds combine to form words and their meaningful parts is known as

Morphology

What allows a state to expand its territory much larger than a chiefdom?

Bureaucracy

What do proponents of the hydraulic theory for the origin of the state argue?

States were the by-products of the organizational requirements of large irrigation systems.

What do sociolinguists study?

Speech in its social context

What does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argue?

The languages people speak influence the way they think.

What genetic difference has been found between humans and chimpanzees that is likely responsible for the human capability for speech?

A mutation in the FOXP2 gene

What happened at about the same time as the beginning of the Zapotec state in the Valley of Oaxaca?

Raiding increased to warfare for territory

What is a vertical economy?

A system that exploits closely spaced environmental zones that contrast with one another in altitude, rainfall, overall climate, and vegetation

What is the name of the wild ancestor of maize?

Teosinte

What is the term for the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is today Iraq and southwestern Iran?

Mesopotamia

What was the first hominin to arrive in the New World?

H. sapiens sapiens

Who were the Natufians?

Broad-spectrum foragers who lived in year-round villages in the Middle East

Why was animal domestication less important in the New World than it was in the Old World?

The large-game animals that were hunted during earlier periods either had gone extinct or were not domesticable.

Linguistic productivity is

Refers to using the rules of language to produce new expressions

Which statement about nonhuman primate calls is not true?

Calls demonstrate linguistic productivity.

Which of the following statements best describes the use of language by apes?

Apes can learn American Sign Language and have shown the capacity for cultural transmission, productivity, and displacement, although there is still a gap between human and other ape language capabilities.

Which of the following is an archaeological marker of ascribed status?

Wealthy burials of young children

What term refers to the minimal sound contrasts that distinguish meaning in a language?

Phonemes

What term refers to a society that lacks status distinctions except those based on age, gender, and individual qualities, talents, and achievements?

Egalitarian

How were Oldowan tools manufactured?

By chipping flakes off a core

Which of the following statements best summarizes the relationship between the birth canal and brain size during the course of hominin evolution?

Natural selection has struck a balance between the structural demands of upright posture in bipedalism, which limits the expansion of the pelvic opening, and the tendency toward increased brain size.

What was the major hominin group that lived from about 4 million to 1 million years ago?

Australopithecus

Which of the following statements concerning the Australopithecines is not true?

They started out as knuckle-walkers (A. anamensis) and ended up bipedal (A. boisei).

Which of the following is not a trend in early hominin evolution?

Decreasing cranial capacity

The spread of H. erectus from tropical into subtropical and temperate environments was facilitated by all of the following except

Upper Paleolithic toolmaking traditions.

Which of the following is a trend in hominin evolution since the genus Homo began?

Molar size has decreased.

Evidence from the South American site of Monte Verde suggests that the Americas may have first been settled

around 18,000 years ago.

What hominin species is associated with the broad-spectrum revolution?

H. sapiens sapiens

Which of the following is not a characteristic of states?

They lack hereditary inequality.

What term refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences?

Syntax

What term refers to languages that have descended from the same ancestral language?

Daughter languages