Anthropology

History of Anthropology

Given human nature, it is clear that our ancestors began speculating about their origins long before the written word was invented. The early creation myths of ancient civilizations such as Egypt and Mesopotamia that have come down to us in writing, date to the 2nd millennium BCE When true “anthropological” thinking came about is a matter of speculation. The term anthropology is a 19th-century combination of two Greek words: άνθρωπος, antbropos, “human being, man,” and λóγος, logos, “knowledge”), and the earliest writing we have on the scientific speculation of human origins is Greek as well. The 6th-century BCE philosopher Anaximander (c. 610-c. 546 BCE) lived in Miletus in Ionia (modern western Turkey, i.e., Anatolia) and became a part of a school of philosophy called Milesian (named after Miletus). Although his works survive in only one fragment, citations by later classical authors provide us with what little we know about him. Among his influential ideas, which ranged from astronomy to cartography, he developed the earliest known “scientific” hypothesis of human evolution. Anaximander believed that the earth was once composed entirely of water and that the first life forms came from there, and in this he was basically correct. Furthermore, according to Anaximander, when parts of the earth dried up, some of the fishlike animals came up on shore, bearing human beings within themselves like fetuses, which then emerged from their aquatic parents when fully acclimatized. However, Anaximander's ideas that humans developed somehow from other organisms were eclipsed by those of Plato (c. 428/427-c. 348/347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), two later philosophers whose ideas would dominate Western thinking for centuries to come. Plato was a believer in essentialism, a point of view that maintained that any given entity was created as perfect and possessed a series of characteristics, all of which any entity of that kind must have. Plato believed in eternal, ideal forms, which are reflected in material objects although far superior to them; these ideal types (Platonic ideals) had neither the need nor the ability to change. Aristotle believed that all creatures were arranged in a scala naturae, or “great chain of being”: a system of 11 grades of perfection beginning with plants and ending with human beings. Higher creatures gave birth to warm and wet live offspring, and the lower ones bore theirs cold and dry, in eggs. These ideas were prevalent for centuries, essentially hindering any thought of human evolution or change through time. The 5th-century Greek (also from western Anatolia) Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BCE), often referred to as father of the study of history, could also be considered the father of another aspect of anthropology: ethnography, the writing down of firsthand observations of foreign cultures. In his travels throughout the ancient world, Herodotus was using many methods in common with those of modern anthropologists, such as locating the [Page 24]best-informed people to provide information about history and customs.

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