Reflection Paper

A New Outlook on Anthropology

Though the term Anthropology was one that I seemed to walk by and brush shoulders
with in my life, it really all began with (yes, as random as can be) a set of tarot cards that caught
my eye entitled Karma Cards. Instead of the standard deck that you may have heard of, this
one was more based on astrological ideas, the question seeker must draw three cards; a planet, a
sign, and a house. All of which were represented and youd place them in order to form
sentences, there is an action side which is a set of three different sentences broken up into three
groups. The spiritual group spoke of what is best to nurture your soul, the mental raised
awareness to what would be best for nurturing intellect, while the physical advised what would
be most beneficial in the nurturing of your bodily needs. The term Anthropology kept coming
up in the cards, at first I couldnt match a definition to the word in my head, and looked it up on
several occasions to make sure I fully grasped the concepts I was reading about. Later as I signed
up for classes, once again I was encountered by this term and I could not look away.
Of all the things that this course has gone over, something that has always caught my
attention as I have always had a love for bones, and evidence of these activities really resided in
bone manipulationscannibalism. Any time the subject came up from the Anasazi and the
findings in the Chaco Canyon, to the Neandertals in Eastern Asia and Shanidar 1, this topic has
always been one thats had my mind going. Curiosity rises as there has been no way to really
find out why these actions began to occur. We know that the Donner party suffered conditions in
nature that were extremely harsh and whether or not that is any sort of excuse, at least its a
reason, and we know why they did what they did, but what about the Anasazis? Did they eat
themselves due to their own set of naturally harsh circumstances? Or did they do it to those as a
punishment? A ritual? Was it seen as an offering?
Did the Neandertals have ways of deciding who would be eaten and who gained
immunity from the jaws of their brothers? Bones found in booth sights tell similar stories of tools
purposefully cutting into them, like they would that of an animals. Youd think that part of being
a human would be some moral sense of knowing that its wrong to eat one another, or is that
just a fairly recent notion in our evolution? Instead of burying your dead and waiting for them to

decompose before they can serve as nutrients by means of fertilizing the soil Was it more
socially acceptable to cook up your dead and gain those nutrients first hand?
Other things that tend to gain my interest as far as history is concerned have to do with
witches and irrationalities of why folks called a witch a witch throughout time. In this
department of things came the knowledge of genetics and a people so acclimated to high
elevations that their lungs would be very well over the size of the average human lung with big
barrel chests to support and protect them. Natural selection is at work at its finest, giving greater
lung capacity and blood circulatory abilities in higher elevations while someone from a normal
lower land population would suffer things such as altitude sickness. When the Spanish invaded
the high mountain people of Peru, they suddenly faced a shock of having no abilities to achieve
any sort of Darwinian fitness, their blood incapable of receiving the oxygen needed to support a
healthy fetus. So instead they turned to thoughts of witchery! There must be curses placed on
them, clearly. At times when people didnt have the understandings that we do now, it makes you
wonder what other explanations besides devilry or divinity they would turn to when encountered
by a force unknown.
If I were to try to help another understand anthrolopiligical (yes, that just became a word
if it is not yet) ideas, Id have to say as much as it was a hard concept to grasp, you really would
want to start out with the basics of DNA. I think I would try to touch on concepts of DNA and
genetics before I introduced Darwin and his pea plant watching counterpart in another land. I
mean, it served as a great prelude into what was to come, and maybe we started off that way to
ease the class into things a big before slamming down the hard stuff which is much appreciated,
but for some reason Id like to lay out the blue prints a bit so as the students can start putting
together in their own minds what that could mean for evolution and letting them kind of form
their own ideas before telling them about the ones that have taken lead and charge of the theory.
This could be an especially good approach when it comes to religious students who may
believe there was a world, life, then Adam and Eve. Though Im sure they must have grown
accustomed to other notions being a student of academia, as natural selection would suggest or
else they wouldnt be attending. In that case maybe not having the means to proliferate, limiting
their Darwinian fitness, which just might lead to their extinction. But once skeletons have started
to uncover true roots and started showing signs of the foramen magnum gradually shifting into

more bipedalistic forms of locomotion, the opposing ideas of where we came from really dont
have any business competing anymore. Climate change signs as well as those indicating that
weve moved on from being tree swingers to land dwellers in clues of leg lengths becoming
greatly longer than arm, only greater enhance the Darwinian Theory of Evolution.