The fossil record of humanity, the significance of race, the relationship of human beings to other animals, and the evolutionary future of our species are among the topics of concern. They investigate spoken languages, articulated speech being one of the most striking characteristics of human language and many groups in the world maintaining their culture through oral tradition rather than relying on written languages. Within the field of linguistic anthropology, ethnolinguists study the influence of culture on linguistic systems and language use. Others concentrate on the social aspects of human interactions. All linguistic anthropologists adopt linguistic concepts and methods to understand language structure and to compare languages in time and space.
Archaeology is the part of anthropology which examines the lives and cultures of former societies.
Archaeologists face a major challenge, for they are unable to interact directly with the people about whom they are seeking information. The data archaeologists collect are but a small portion of a total culture. The artifacts found relate mainly to the material culture of a society, which encompasses only a fraction of the total make-up of a culture. From this evidence, which has survived the tests of time, archaeologists must reconstruct as much of the culture as is possible. Their aids to reconstruction of the social and cultural life of a society are found in the other subdisciplines of anthropology, and in certain of the natural sciences.