Paleoanthropology

Paleoanthropology combines the fields of physical anthropology and paleontology, which deals with the study of the ancient humans as found in the fossil hominid evidence such as footprints and petrifacted bones.  The Paleoanthropology study actually started during 19^th century. Human evolutionary studies are also called as Paleoanthropology, which concerns about the biological changes through time to understand how when, and why we became the type of organisms we are nowadays.  In the biological meanings, we human beings are primates, i.e. one of the several types of mam­mals, the main reason is that humans share the general ancestry with various other primates, particularly apes. Paleoanthropologists generally see the ancient period or early man period (i.e. about sixty millions years or more), or even the earliest mammals i.e. 225 million years ago, to reconstruct the multifaceted path of the human evolution.

Paleoanthropology, unlike other evolution­ary studies, takes a bio-cultural concept concerning on the relation of the culture and biology.  In the Paleoanthropology fossilized skeletons of early man enable the paleoanthropologists to rebuild the course of the human evolutionary history. They compare the size and shape of these fossils to one another and to the bones of the living species. And with the help of every new fossil discovery, the paleoanthropologists add more information to the human evo­lutionary history about our early ancestors.  The compare size and shape of the fossils to one another and to the bones of living species. With each new fossils discover, the paleoanthropologists have another piece to add to the human evolution history.  Bio genetic and chemical studies which add significantly to the genetic evidence, fossil evidence establishes the close connection between ape species such as chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos and the human beings. The genetics analyses show that the unique human line started five to eight million years.  The Physical anthropology thus deals with the more time spans than the archaeology or other studies of anthropology.

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