Field Note Collaborations for Week Three ( respond to two peers)

Weekly Study Field Notes

Field notes are a very important part of anthropological research. Anthropologists use their field notes to make records about what they are seeing and thinking while conducting research. For your collaboration you are being asked to make your own field notes, based on the assigned course materials. Each week, as you read the assigned material or watch an assigned video, you will create a new set of field notes in which you are expected to write down such things as important concepts, things that you might have questions about, or even things that you find surprising or interesting. Just like the notes that an anthropologist makes in the field, your notes must be clear and easy to read because you will be sharing them with your peers in the collaboration

Complete the following sections in the spaces below:

First and Last Name:

Justin McKinney

Date:

October 19, 2017

Title of Assigned Readings (including chapter numbers) or Videos:

Chapter 7: Expanding Geographic Horizons: New Worlds

Chapter 8: After the Ice: The Food-Producing Revolution

Chapter 9: Roots of Complexity: The Origins of Civilization

Jablonski, N. (2009). Nina Jablonski- Breaking the Illusion of skin color.

Reflections:

The skin color in which we see in each human being has always been identified according to color. Yet Nina Jablonskis’ video proves that due to UV radiation and migration that the pigmentation in our skin began to make the human species skin a lighter color. We continue to this day identify others by their skin color instead of by their rightful identity which should be considered just human.

Many of people deny the chance of understanding evolution. Many people in our world do not have an idea of where to start when it comes to explaining the origin of human race. The video on Breaking the illusion of skin color, really changed my entire perspective of human history and world history.

Christopher Columbus refused to believe that he stumbled upon an area that was already populated by other peoples. His inability to adapt to those who already lived on that land, which created an issue even today that still exists within the American Natives whose ancestors populated the so called “New World”.

If this New World was already settled by tens of millions of natives, then why did we as children in school learn that Christopher Columbus first discovered our land in which we live on now?

Why is Christopher Columbus Day considered a holiday if the land was improperly taken from the natives?

Even plants and food are being recovered just as our ancestor’s bones and their world they lived in. Squash seeds, ring fragments, and stem have been recovered and dated to the period between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. (Smith, 1997). This is just extraordinary because not only are bones preserved and able to be discovered. Some other forms of agricultural are also able to be discovered after thousands of years.

Emerging questions/analyses:

Due to these findings of skin color, we should not identify anybody by their skin color anymore. This was created as an identification based on what we can call human ignorance.

Why hasn’t this information about skin color been made public on a higher push? I posted this on my Anthropology and History Facebook page and got so many responses of those who had no idea that this was how skin color was created.

“The New World consisted of two continents that make up almost 28.5 percent of the world’s land surface, with a native population estimated to have been in the tens of millions and speaking more than 1,500 different languages and dialects.” (Feder)

Alaska is said to be the oldest firmly dated occupation of the New World.

Important concepts:

Nina Jablonski- Differing skin colors are simply our bodies’ adaption to varied climates and level of UV exposure.

Sedentism: A pattern of settlement in which a community of people tends to remain in one place over the course of a year or years.

Artificial Selection: The directed breeding of plants and animals possessing characteristics deemed beneficial to human beings.

Tehuacan Valley Project- Produced important archaeological date concerning the domestication of plants in the New World.

Archaeologist Deborah Pearsall divided the South American Neolithic into three physiographic areas: low-altitude, mid-altitude, and high altitude. Different plants growing wild in each of these divisions became the basis for distinct agricultural revolutions. (Feder)

Agriculture would have been the worst mistake according to Scientist Jared Diamond

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