Where did we come from? What were our ancestors like? Why do we differ from other animals? How do scientists trace and construct our evolutionary history? The History of Our Tribe: Hominini provides answers to these questions and more. The book explores the field of paleoanthropology past and present. Beginning over 65 million years ago, Welker traces the evolution of our species, the environments and selective forces that shaped our ancestors, their physical and cultural adaptations, and the people and places involved with their discovery and study. It is designed as a textbook for a course on Human Evolution but can also serve as an introductory text for relevant sections of courses in Biological or General Anthropology or general interest. It is both a comprehensive technical reference for relevant terms, theories, methods, and species and an overview of the people, places, and discoveries that have imbued paleoanthropology with such fascination, romance, and mystery.

Through the comparative study of different cultures, anthropology explores fundamental questions about what it means to be human. It seeks to understand how culture both shapes societies, from the smallest island in the South Pacific to the largest Asian metropolis, and affects the way institutions work, from scientific laboratories to Christian mega-churches. This course will provide a framework for analyzing diverse facets of human experience such as gender, ethnicity, language, politics, economics, and art.

Textbook for ANTH 101: Introduction to Physical Anthropology at College of the Canyons
Examines the evolution of the human species and non-human primates primarily from the biological perspective. Topics include human heredity and population genetics, primate behavior and conservation, the human fossil record, and modern human variation.

Anthropologists attempt to answer the question of what it means to be human. In a sense, we all –do” anthropology because it is rooted in a universal human characteristic, curiosity. We are curious about ourselves and other people_ including the living and the dead. This course provides an introduction to the anthropological approach to the study of humans. It is a survey course that introduces anthropology as a four-field discipline, encompassing biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. Aspiring to a holistic understanding of what it means to be human, anthropology is at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences.The course begins with a basis in evolutionary theory and human variation. With this foundation, we will explore primate behavior and the fossil record to develop a better understanding of human evolution. We will discuss the archaeological record of early civilizations, the origins and use of language, and the concept of culture in the development of human societies, both extinct and extant. This class will also highlight the epistemological development of the field of anthropology and how religion, culture, and the scientific process pertains to the discipline of anthropology.