Becoming Human: Intro to Biological Anthropology

This class is about what it means to be human, what defines us as a species, and how we got this way. Over the course of the semester we will explore our own humanness, our adaptations, our diversity, our evolution, and our place in the world. The main class topics include evolutionary theory; human biodiversity and its relationship to sex/gender and race; our primate cousins; and the evolution of humans from the first split with apes around 7 million years ago until modern humans had spread worldwide, around 30 thousand years ago.