New publication: "Imagination et construction mentale. La fabrique du discours scientifique" #PhysicalAnthropology https://doi.org/10.46608/schola1.9782356135032

New publication: "Mandible and teeth characterization of the Gravettian child from Gargas, France" #PhysicalAnthropology https://doi.org/10.4000/bmsap.9810

#goughscave1 #cheddarman #physicalanthropology #race #caucasoid #skincolor

As we discussed earlier, this increasing coherence and self consistency, together with increasingly incontestable empirical evidence, forced #anthropology to split into two separate fields.

What happened next, was that each of these two fields began developing their own specialisations. #PhysicalAnthropology began specialising in osteology, odontology, taphonomics, genetics, etc, while #SocialAnthropology began specialising in kinship, religion, language and economics.

In both cases, these specialisations drew the two respective fields of anthropology into closer and closer harmony with other related fields, which is exactly how science works. Terms like 'inter-disciplinary' and 'trans-disciplinary' research have recently become buzzwords in the humanities, but they are so deeply foundational to the sciences that they are generally taken for granted. Science works effectively precisely because its various branches are all closely vertically integrated.

So this was more-or-less the trajectory of both #PhysicalAnthropology and #SocialAnthropology from the inception of their parent discipline of anthropology in the 1870s onwards. As we noted earlier, World War II finalised the formal distinction between the two fields once and for all. Physical anthropology became increasingly integrated with biology, while social anthropology remained firmly within that domain of research that we know as 'the social sciences'.

Then, after WW2, the global #decolonization movement started TBC

Earlier on in this thread we talked about the definition of scientific fields according to the logical relations linking them together. We talked about this logic as based around three interrelated terms and definitions: 1) An object of study; 2) Parameters of study, and; 3) A causal model.

As Thomas Kuhn pointed out back in the 1960s, a scientific field is forced to reorganise itself whenever its existing object of study, parameters and causal model are no longer able to describe and explain new information it has encountered. When this happens, the field usually has to split off and develop new specialisations. #Anthropology did this in the early 20th century when it split into #PhysicalAnthropology and #SocialAnthropology. Pretty much every other scientific field has been doing this continuously since the industrial revolution started, as parameters of study become more and more extensive, and causal models become more and more specific.

The humanities don't work in the way that sciences do though. They have a different mode of 'discovering new knowledge'. Without segueing too much, it is important to understand that part of the way humanities discover new knowledge, is by attaching themselves to new information discovered by the sciences, and by engaging in philosophical discussion about those new discoveries. This is a very important function that helps to regulate the way science is applied, particularly in terms of its social impacts.

As the data on this purported object of study trickled in over the next 50 years, it bacame clear to those who were collecting this data that *social variation* between communities of people and *physical variation* between communities of people were actually two different objects of study, with two different causal models - one biological and the other other cultural. The discipline of #anthropology consequently developed two subsidiary or 'child' fields: #PhysicalAnthropology and #SocialAnthropology, each with its own causal model - biological and cultural respectively.

Because the adjacent scientific discipline of biology advanced so much more rapidly than the science of culture (thanks to the utility of biology in medicine and the agricultural and sector), the science of #PhysicalAnthropology matured rapidly.

By contrast, the science of culture remained stymied by politics and ideology.#SocialAnthropology)did nevertheless manage to develop some relatively formal and empirical models for predicting cultural causes of community-level social interaction.

This is where we get onto the issue of *specialisation* in scientific fields.

Similarly, #PhysicalAnthropology has recently become more popularly known as #BiologicalAnthropology, both of which are alternate terms for the same child field of the parent discipline of #anthropology. 'Physical anthropology' takes its name from 1a) the field's object of study, i.e. *physical* variation within and between communities. Meanwhile, 'biological anthropology' takes its name from 3a) the field's causal model of *biological* processes, e.g. genetics, osteology, odontology, etc.

The upshot (if we can call it that) is that we have been left with a very clear distinction between two different child fields within the parent discipline of #anthropology:

One of these fields, #PhysicalAnthropology, is now defined by 1) an object of study comprising physical variation within and between communities of people; 2) parameters of study comprising the known history and known geographic extent of both individuals and communities, and; 3) a causal model comprising *intra-species biological processes* e.g. genetics, osteology, odontology, etc.

In the 70 years leading up to World War 2, there developed a gradual but increasingly clear divergence between #anthropology that focused on human physicality, and anthropology that focused on human sociality.

Much of the research in #PhysicalAnthropology consolidated its focus on fossils and prehistoric human remains, giving rise to the specialised branch known as #Paleoanthropology. This is a branch of anthropology that uses a causal model of biological evolution to focus on *inter-species variation* between different evolutionary branches of our genus, all of which are now extinct apart from our own species, Sapiens.

Simultaneously, much of the research in #SocialAnthropology consolidated its focus on distinct variations in communally-shared ideas, and the links between those ideas and observable patterns of social interaction in regionally district communities.

However, until World War 2 there persisted a stubborn strain of research that continued to assert a link between human biology and sociality. This research tended to orbit around the pseudoscientific #philosophy of eugenics, and so-called 'social Darwinism'. Anthropologists who supported this pseudoscience claimed that certain forms of social organisation, which they alleged to be 'dysfunctional', were the result of biological evolutionary failures.

Anthropologists who endorsed eugenics were prominent all over the world, not only in Nazi Germany, but also in the USA, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere.