Special Sub-Topic: Famous Anthropologists and Evolutionists Click Here To Play: Famous Anthropologists and Evolutionists

Who came up with the four fields of anthropology?

Franz Boas. The four fields of anthropology are Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Archaeology Anthropology, and Linguistics.

He was a cultural anthropologist who practiced enculturation in 1914 on the Trobriand Islands.

Bronislaw Malinowski. Enculturation is when you pretend to be a member of a culture that you are studying. One danger of enculturation is in becoming what one pretends to be. Malinowski proved this by keeping two notebooks. One was about the Trobian Islanders and the other was about himself. After a while the two notebooks started to look alike.

Who came up with the method of classification of life that we still use today?

Carolous Linnaeus. He devised this method of classification in 1758, and he classified all living organisms together based on structure.

Who came up with the idea of stratigraphy, deeper layers being the older layers?

Charles Lyell. Charles Lyell also came up with The Principle of Uniformitarianism, which states that earth has been formed by a fixed set of natural forces operating throughout time, and that the forces changing the earth today were the same that changed it in the past.

Who came up with the idea of "natural selection"?

Charles Darwin. Darwin is probably the best known evolutionist ever. He is very well known for his idea of natural selection, which states that the organism with the most characteristics that contribute to surviving, lives longer and leaves a greater number of offspring.

He wrote an essay on population stating that food supply increases at an arithmetic rate, and population increases at a geometric rate.

Thomas Malthus. Malthus said that population will always exceed the growth of food. He then stated that "perfectibility" of human society will always be out of reach.

Who demonstrated the structure of DNA?

James Watson and Francis Crick. DNA is the molecule of heredity. The discovery of DNA was a big breakthrough for the argument of evolution.

Who came up with population genetics, which is the scientific study of gene changes in animal populations?

Theobosius Dobzhansky. Dobzhansky also came up with the Four Forces of Evolution, which are Mutation, Genetic Drift, Gene Flow, and Natural Selection.

He found a hominid skull at the Taung site in South Africa. The skull was an Australopithecus Africanus, which is thought to be on the direct line of human descent.

Raymond Dart. The way Raymond Dart knew it was a hominid skull was because the Foramen Magnum, the large opening in the skull where the spine connects to the brain, was at the bottom of the skull. This proves that this was a bi-pedal animal, which are hominids.

This man found a skull at the Krom Draai site in South Africa. It was heavier than the skull found at Taung. This species was called Australopithecus Robustus.

Robert Broom. Robert Broom also found an Australopithecus Robustus skull at Swart Krans. Then he went to Sterk Fon Teian and found an Australopithecus Africanus.

Who went to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and after 20 years, finally found a hominid skull? The species for this was Australopithecus Boisei.

Mary Leakey. Mary and her husband were searching the Olduvai Gorge for 20 years without finding anything. One day, when Mary's husband, LSB Leakey, was sick, she went out on her own. She then found the Australopithecus Boisei skull.

Who found another hominid skull, along with tools, at the Olduvai Gorge? The species for this skull is Homo Habilis.

LSB Leakey. When Mary returned after finding the Boisei skull, LSB went with her, and he discovered another skull with tools around it. Because it used tools when it was alive, it got a new genus, Homo. So any hominid that didn't use tools got the genius Australopithecus, and hominids that used tools got the genus Homo.

This person found another Homo Habilis skull along with a femur bone, the longest bone in the body, at East Lake Turkana in Kenya.

Richard Leakey. Richard Leakey is the son of LSB and Mary Leakey. When they got too old, he took over the family business, and went out to find hominid bones.

Who found a hominid skeleton in Hadar, Ethiopia? It was an Australopithecus Afarensis and was 40% complete.

Donald Johanson. The skull that Johanson found was the best known specimen of Australopithecus Afarensis. It was labeled AL 288-1 and got the name "Lucy". Australopithecus Afarensis probably lived 3.5 to 3.9 million years ago.

This person found a hominid skull in Central Chad during the 1990's. It was a Sahelanthropus Tchadensis and the oldest found so far.

Michelle Brumete. It is one of the oldest that we have found so far, but it looks more human like than the other finds. Since it is such a new fossil, little is known about the Sahelanthropus Tchadensis.