The closest mammalian relatives of the human species are the apes (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and gibbon), monkeys (the catarrhine cercopithecoids in the Old World, and platyrrhines in the Americas), and prosimians. Together these form the Order of Primates. Biological anthropology is the study of the biology of human and other primate species from an evolutionary and comparative perspective. It is concerned with the nature of the *evolutionary process and with modes of †adaptation to the environment.
In continental Europe, the field of anthropology has been identified broadly with biological science, as distinct from *ethnography, since the founding of the Société d’Anthropologie in Paris in 1859 by Paul Broca (Barnicot in Harrison 1964) and of the journal Archiv fur Anthropologie in Göttingen in 1861 by von Baer (Schwidetzky 1992). In the anglophone world, the term ‘anthropology’ is sometimes used exclusively to denote social or cultural anthropology, although by etymology it embraces both fields.
Biological anthropology comprises five general sub-disciplines: human evolution, primatology, human genetics, the study of human physical growth, and human ecology. The first two subdisciplines have sometimes been termed †‘physical anthropology’ in contrast to the second three as ‘human biology’; ‘biological anthropology’ embraces both. The field has been grounded in the natural sciences and medicine rather than social studies, which on their own have been thought not to provide the requisite biological competence (Harrison 1964). Despite numerous assertions of the need to integrate these various sub-disciplines with *archaeology, social anthropology and associated social science fields, in practice few have succeeded in this aim since *Franz Boas.
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