Anthropology Project Suggestions?

Question

Any suggestions for a Biological Anthropology poster project? Please list any that you think are good ideas and interesting to research. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Try this, it was an answer for a question posted earlier but should give you the groundwork for a good project on the earliest human settlements and our transition from hunter-gatherers to truly modern humans.

Well I think starting at the beginning is a good idea

For an excellent summary of human pre-history based on the genetics, archeological and paleontological record, check here.

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journe...

Note specifically that nearly 75000 years ago our species was reduced to no more than 10 thousand humans. An excellent discussion of this "genetic bottleneck" exists in the book "The 7 Daughters of Eve".

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journe...

There are incredibly well founded sets of evidence to suggest that human habitation and culture and some variety of common cultural artifacts had spread throughout most of the world by about 40-20 thousand years ago but mostly these were nomadic and or subsistence tribes in nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Paleo...

The most ancient evidence for non-hunter-gatherer or semi-nomadic civilizations exists - we think in the earliest forms of semi-permanent habitation where shelter-caves and other semi-settled areas were developed - mostly around religious or ceremonial activities (as mentioned above), these PREDATE , formal agriculture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory

The oldest "culture" as such was that of the Natufians which was a prehistoric culture - if not a formal nation/people, relatively little is known other than their basic cultural and archeological record based on vases and other culturally identifying materials.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian

This civilization may have had influence and contacts as far afield as Middle-Asia around modern day Pakistan and India

As we can see from the settlement of Merhgarh - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehrgarh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asian...

Natufian culture and predates the more modern Babylonian and Sumerian cultures by many hundreds of years and could be considered the "parent" civilization of the entire southeastern Eurasian region with respect to the spread of agricultural methods.

The most ancient of civilization's remnants may very well be the religious temples and "settlements" which predate formal agriculture. Nearby cities may very well be among the very oldest, Göbekli Tepe and Nevali Çori, near the modern city of Sanliurfa/Urfa, in Turkey, comprise some of the more ancient cities, which may have been started as temporary sets of dwellings that were not always permanently inhabited until agriculture became capable of supporting a fully sedentary population and trade and cultural exchanges may have actually existed with other settlements in the west in pre-agricultural, prehistoric settlements such as Dolní Vestonice, in Hungary, which is known to have been settled for many thousands of years beforehand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doln%C3%AD_...

Urfa is often referred to as the traditional home-city of Abraham - whom of course was the founder of the Hebrew religion.

Nearby is the neolithic city / settlement of Cayönü, which appears to have both the natural predecessor of the Pig, (wild boar) as well as the common genetic ancestor / predecessor to over 60 different types of grains currently in use today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cay%C3%B6n%...

Certainly there are a set of very ancient cities, ranging in age from approximately 9500 years ago such as Göbekli Tepe, Cayönü, Mehrgarh, Eridu, and Jericho, but these were preceded by even older structures, which were ceremonial or religious in nature. but by no means is the distribution limited to just the middle east / Levant region, there are many such proto-settlements in the historical record of various regions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cay%C3%B6n%...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Cave

The Mesopotamian civilization has been host to various civilizations, the Sumerians, Babylonians,Akkadians and others,

worldwide, however in the paleontological records, there is what is called the late Holocene civilizations, which all have co-incident records of significant climatic change which - in the case of the Sumerians and Akkadians may have led directly to the fall of their empires.

Due to drought may have caused them to start regular agriculture and then (naturally) experience the first crop failures due to an inability to irrigate and grow crops without engineering support, but many of the other areas of successful human settlement these civilizations record similar semi-prehistoric events such as a serious droughts and flooding events which caused these civilizations to collapse or seriously affect them.

Droughts - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22nd_centur...

Floods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassi... - The draining of Lake Agassiz , was probably one of the most significant events, because it would have created three things likely to have adversely affected ANY civilizations existing near shallow lands or bordering on seas or inland waterways.

1. Rapid, massive changes is ocean flows affecting the tidal bores and causing catastrophic flooding certainly initially.

2. This would have implications climactically, causing a variety of climactic changes, around 12000-9500 years ago.

This is well supported both climatologically as well as through anecdotal remains of animals - in odd places.

http://www.uvm.edu/whale/QHowOldSpecimen...

Long term changes in climate - There is an interesting climatic cycle called the "Bond Event" which appears to occur on an approximately 4200 year time scale, which may even have a precedent event at approximately 8300-8200 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1500-year_c...

So in short,

Tigris/Euphrates River Vally- Mesopotamia - this civilization set (extends from prehistoric times , at least 12000-10000 years ago and obviously much earlier than that, but basically settlements have existed there in some for since about 10000 years ago , the last of the great ancient cultures was probably conquered by Alexander the Great (ca. 450-400 BC)

The Nile Valley - is actually a remnant civilization on account of the fact that the entire Sahara was originally both warm and wet, and relatively capable of supporting grasslands and cultures, classical Egyptian kingdoms were formed around 5500 years ago and lasted until their fall at the hands of the Romans,  (ca. 3500 BC - 30 BC)

The Indus River Valley - These cultures remained rather self contained evolving from the Mehrgarh Culture from 9500 years ago up to and including the development of the Indus Valley civilizations around 3200 years ago, the Harappan and finally the Vedic periods of various monarchies and cultures which eventually met with classical antiquity and were in some semi-permanent contact with other ancient cultures (from Alexander through the Roman and Persian empires. about 400 BC)

Huang He River Valley- China - There were many smaller - Pre-Han civilizations, but there is a fascinating part of human early civilization, in that there appears to have been no attempt to form a centralized government, as such the Peiligang culture, stands as an interesting example of an egalitarian culture. The Peiligang culture was in some degree of contact with their contemporary cultures in Pengtoushan which is actually slightly older in so far as evidence of settlement and organization from but were subsequently overtaken by daughter civilizations (ca 7500 - 3500 or earlier).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiligang_c...

There is an excellent wiki on this event set

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Neo...

Phoenician civilization more or less seems to have arisen MUCH LATER and as such makes them the "Canaanites" of ancient Hebraic texts, but are also basically derived from the same semetic parent Natufian culture from pre-historical times, in this regard their development, it's not likely the case that the Phonecians ever considered themselves a distinct culture as such, but they were the first set of city states / culture to use an alphabetically based language representation, rather than earlier cuneiform or iconographic systems. The closest modern / ancient equivalent to their language would be Hebrew - the Phonecian civilization existed more or less from (ca. 2700 BC-100 BC).