Anthropology is the comparative study of the human species.
Because our species exhibits great diversity, anthropologists study the whole spectrum of human existence across time and space to address fundamental questions about what we are, and why. Those are the questions that lie at the heart of anthropology. Anthropology takes a broad approach to these core concerns. While the holistic approach looks at the big picture, anthropologists have found it most useful to focus on this picture from a handful of specialized perspectives. These perspectives give us the subfields of anthropology, described below.