Anthropology Professor David Pilbeam, Head Tutor Anthropology brings global, comparative, and holistic views to the study of the human condition, exploring an enormous range of similarities and differences across time and space. It includes the study of how Homo sapiens evolved as well as the study of how language, culture, and society have shaped and continue to shape human experience. As a comparative discipline that takes both scientific and humanistic approaches to human evolution, human biology, society, culture, economics, politics, the arts, psychology, history, and language, anthropology is uniquely holistic in its understanding and outlook, that is, it is interested in the whole of the human condition. Its commitment to exploring the long sweep of time over which humans have evolved makes it a broad, global science.
Archaeology is the means of studying past human ways of life.
Biological Anthropology examines human biology, growth and development, and long-term physical evolution as revealed by the fossil record. It also studies the behavior of non-human primates, and modern humans and human behavioral evolution. Social Anthropology provides comparative and critical perspectives on human thought, practice, and diversity by looking at societies around the globe. It shows that assumptions about human experience and action based on knowledge of a single society are limited and inadequate, and views Euro-American social and cultural orders with the same critical eye it brings to the study of other societies. Because of the diversity of the field, Anthropology is not the same endeavor for all its concentrators.