ABSTRACT
Cultural anthropology examines the variation in human culture throughout the world in present times. Cultural anthropologists have recognized the incredible complexity of human behavior and the values that underlie this behavior. A major issue for human biologists in the twenty-first century is whether human diversity in fact conforms to a classification of people into “races,” and if so, how that categorization can be made. The horrors of Nazism received support from pseudoscientific theories of human variation that justified the attempted annihilation of certain ethnic groups in Europe. Basic to an understanding of human biological diversity is an appreciation for the concept of biological evolution, a topic touched on here and extended in succeeding chapters. Cynthia Beall is currently working to integrate genomics and human biology to discover how indigenous people living at high altitudes evolve and adapt to the stress of very low oxygen availability. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
