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Anthropology Interview Questions and Answers will Guide you about that Anthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time. Anthropology has its intellectual origins in both the natural sciences, and the humanities. Its basic questions concern, What defines Homo sapiens? Learn more about the Anthropology and get preparation of Anthropology Jobs Interview by our Anthropology Interview Questions and Answers Guide.

50 Anthropology Questions and Answers:

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Latest  Anthropology Job Interview Questions and Answers
Latest Anthropology Job Interview Questions and Answers

5 :: How would you compare and contrast the specific distinctions between psychology, anthropology, and sociology? Any suggestions would be appreciate.

Psychology is the study of Man's behavior Sociology is the study of his societies and social interactions etc... Thus, both Sociology and Psychology are sub sets of the study of Man. The study of anthropology also covers economics, medicine, archaeology, human evolution etc... Any area of human endeavor could be listed under Anthropology.

6 :: What was the life expectancy of Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, and early Homo sapiens? Is 18 to 20 years about right, with the oldest age around 40?

Your figures are about right for maximum life expectancies. Individuals in their 40s are extremely rare. Some scholars place the age of the "old man" of La Chapelle aux Saints in its mid-30s. Be aware, though that once individuals are skeletally mature (ca. 18 years) estimates of age are based on wear and tear on the skeleton, and this can vary widely among individuals based on subsistence adaptation, parasite load and other factors.

7 :: How do societies without access to text decide what are good and bad sources of information?

I am assuming that you mean by " with out access to text" as preliterate societies. One such society would be the “Kung San! - Bushmen of the Kalihari”. In this society, there are storytellers who know the history of the people (or given group). These peoples also care for their elderly after their ability to hunt ends. There are often people with injuries, blindness and other disabilities received over a long life in the bush. These elderly people often have an important role for the children not yet old enough to hunt and they impart a lot of the tribal knowledge to these youngsters as they grow up.

8 :: When did humans first use fire? Was the primary use of fire to cook food or something else?

There is possible evidence from about 1.4 Million years ago in Sterkfontein Cave in South Africa. Other than this, evidence for controlled use of fire that is distinct from naturally occurring phenomena (i.e., burnt tree stumps) does not become a regular part of the record until after around 300,000-200,000 year ago (Terra Amata and Pech de L'Azé Cave, both in France). You will see references to fire use in the 300,000-700,000 BP range from Zhokoudian Cave in China, but recent studies suggest this evidence is not really the result of fire.

Presumably, there was a long period during which human ancestors ate most of their food raw (much as do living chimpanzees and bonobos), however, evidence for regular controlled use of fire is pretty common by the time modern Homo sapiens fossils start showing up in the fossil record (ca. 150,000 BP).

9 :: How much mass extinction has been completed?

Most paleontologists recognize five major ones, End-Ordovician, Late Devonian, Late Permian, Late Triassic, and Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT- the "dinosaur killer"). Extinction rates and habitat destruction appear to be increasing over the last 10,000 years leading some scholars to propose the present day as a "sixth extinction".

10 :: Do you know of any cultures today or in recorded history that did not have some type of deity that they worshiped?

Belief in supernatural entities of one sort or another is a human cultural universal today, and a feature of every historic society of which we have reasonable written records. Styles of "worship" vary, though, so detecting this kind of behavior in the archaeological record can be difficult. Many hunter-gatherer societies embed their religious activities in daily life (i.e., no shrines, temples), so formal religious practices can be difficult to identify unequivocally in the prehistoric record.

11 :: What is the significant of the phaistos disk? Has anyone translated it?

This is a little outside my main area of expertise, but here is what I know. The disk features writing that is unique. Some of the symbols replicate ones from other Minoan (Bronze Age Cretan) script, but many of them are unique to this artifact. There are many published claims of "translations" of the disk, but no consensus among experts. (You can use Google to locate many of these, but much of what I found is "fringe scholarship", i.e., non-peer review.)

No other examples of this kind of inscribed disk are known and the original archaeological provenance of the original disk is unclear. The disk was found in 1903. That we have found no other examples of this kind of writing or medium in the countless excavations carried out on Crete suggests to me that this disk is a forgery. Somebody probably made it based on the limited published information about the Minoan civilization in the early 1900s and passed it off as having been found in a Minoan site.

12 :: Is there any evidence that Neanderthal man held any sort of religious beliefs?

The evidence on Neanderthal religion is equivocal. Much of what was once considered evidence for this is now believed to be natural phenomena misinterpreted or over-interpreted by archaeologists.

Head Cult: some isolated finds of Neanderthal skulls (e.g., Monte Circeo) were once thought to indicate a religious belief. Now we think these reflect the separation of skulls from the rest of the skeleton by geological processes or animal scavengers.

Cave Bear Cult: Now thought to reflect geological mixing of cave bear bones and human artifacts.

Burial: Many Neanderthal bodies appear to have been buried, but this could as much is for hygienic reasons as for religious ones. Claims of "grave goods" usually involved animal bones and artifacts very similar to those in the surrounding sediments, which makes is possible that they were accidentally juxtaposed with the Neanderthal skeletons during burial.

13 :: What is the most credible explanation of how dinosaur evidence (evolution) and biblical belief (creationism) can co-exist?

Biblical belief and science are fundamentally different ways of thinking about reality. Biblical belief's standard of proof for its explanations is faith. The more you believe in something, the more satisfying the explanation. Science is standard of proof is evidence, usually organized in terms of hypotheses that are possible to prove wrong. Gravity, for example, is not affected by how strongly you believe in it.

When religion and science stick to their appropriate subjects (supernatural phenomena and empirical reality), there is no conflict. The trouble starts when religious standards of proof are applied to explanations of natural phenomena and when science tries to answer questions about supernatural beliefs. Because the Biblical account of Genesis, like the mythologies of most of the world's cultures, contains an account of the origins of the world (a natural phenomenon) this tends to be a flashpoint for controversy with scientific investigations of the origin of the world and humanity.

14 :: Do you think, in spite of no evidence, that it is conceivable that hominids had crossed into what is now North America...?

Cold seems to have been a limiting factor in this hominin's ability to colonize new habitats.

The northernmost frontier of Homo erectus is known geographic range in Asia is northern China (presumably during a relatively warm period). This is still pretty far from the southernmost extent of the Bering Sea land bridge (that would have been exposed in COLD periods).

There is neither fossil nor archaeological evidence for such a migration. If Homo erectus populations made it to the New World, they would, one assumes, have littered the place (and especially caves) with stone tools in much the same way they did all over Africa, Europe and Asia.

15 :: What are Ice ages? When was the last Ice age?

Ice ages are periods when there are extensive glaciers stretching away from the North and South Pole towards the equator? Because there are more continents closer to the North Pole, the glaciers tend to be more extensive in the north. There are also glaciers that form on mountains in tropical latitudes.

For about the last 900,000 years, Ice Ages have occurred about every 110,000 years. They are separated by warm periods, called interglacial, which are of shorter duration. The last Ice age lasted between about 70,000-13,000 years ago.

Ice Ages probably moved people around (away from the pole, towards the equator, and to lower elevations) but our species actually underwent a dramatic expansion of our geographic range during the last Ice Age. At 70,000 BP humans lived only in Africa, the Near East and possibly some parts of Southern Asia. By 13,000 years ago, we were present all over Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

16 :: What is one brief reason anthropologists care so much about social complexity?

Social complexity is the "web" a society has developed to answer the needs of that society. Each society has its own web much as each spider species has a very distinct web of its own. No two are alike yet we satisfy our needs some more efficiently then others. Therefore, when we look at these social webs, we gain an insight into both the history and the development of the society.

17 :: Did the Eskimos have fire before the Europeans arrived? Did they cook food? Use for heat?

They did indeed have fire long before Europeans arrived. Earliest traces of fire in the Arctic New World date to at least 10,000 years ago and much older in the parts of Siberia from which Eskimos (who prefer to be called Inuit, actually) migrated.

They did cook food, as indicated by numerous burned bones from Arctic archaeological sites. Presumably they also used it for heat, light, anti-predator defense, as well as to smoke meat and help dry/tan leather.

The arctic is very poor in vegetal resources, so the traditional Inuit diet was heavily meat-dependent. They did collect some plants, however, and often they would eat the partly digested stomach contents of herbivores that they killed.

The Inuit had many health problems when Europeans encountered them, the most virulent of which was probably tuberculosis. In general, though, their skeletons suggest people who were in excellent health, partly from a sound diet (few sugars, lots of fat from fish sources) and from regular exercise in the course of their daily foraging activities.

18 :: What is race, how do anthropologists define it. How the different races did arose

Race is a way of classifying people, usually in terms of superficial physical characteristics, skin color, hair texture, cranial features, etc.

Anthropologists do not really use race as a way of classifying people anymore for a couple of reasons: first, genetic studies show that there is more variation within most "racial" groups than between them. Second, most racial groupings are at least partly social/cultural, rather than strictly biological. Thirdly, racial classifications oversimplify a complex, multivariate, pattern of human biological variability. Lastly, racial classifications provide no predictive basis for inferring human behavior.

The concept of "race" probably arose as a function of naval technology. When people had to travel overland, or anchor their ships after short journeys, differences between the people one encountered were predictably relatively minor. Once ships could stay out longer (weeks, months) then each landfall resulted in encounters with people who looked and acted remarkably different from the last people encountered. The first mentions one finds of "race" as a way of classifying people coincide closely with improvements in naval technology after 1400-1600 AD.

19 :: Over the entire world, in which countries were people of the Negro race found to be native or indigenous?

The answer depends on how you define "Negro Race" and "native/indigenous".

If you follow the traditional definition, -people with dark skin, tightly curled hair, etc. and the definition of "indigenous" meaning likely to have originated in a particular place tens of thousands of years ago, your answer would be "all of the countries in Africa south of the Sahara as well as Sudan, Eritrea." It would also include some South Asian island-dwelling populations, like the Andamanese, for which there is some genetic evidence suggesting an ancient origin in Africa, but an origin about tens of thousands of years.

If your threshold for "indigeneity" were much shorter, say hundreds of years, you would have to include countries in the Americas, Arabia, and South Asia, as well as Europe, to which sub-Saharan African populations were forcibly transported over the last thousand years or so.

20 :: As the modern day, Greeks are the direct descendents of ancient Greek culture, such as Homers time; likewise, are the modern Egyptians the direct genetic/blood descendents of ancients Pharaohs, 2000 BC?

Both hypotheses are supported by the genetic and skeletal evidence, -bearing in mind that both regions have undergone some variable degree of immigration and genetic lineage extinction over the last 2000 or so years. People have sometimes questioned the link between ancient peoples and modern populations living in the same region because of perceived differences between what they look like "in the flesh" and artistic self-representation in the archaeological record. In considering such evidence, one has to be aware that all such ancient portraits are subjective impressions. For example, both the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Egyptians had very formal, stylized ways of rendering the human body. (Classical Greek sculptures, for example, exaggerated the forehead in a way that is anatomically impossible.)

21 :: When the Homo floresiensis remains were discovered on Flores in an un-fossilized state it was supposed DNA might be recoverable. Do you happen to know whether DNA was ever extracted from the remains - or if it is still intended to try to do so?

Wet tropical environments tend not to be very good ones for preserving DNA over long periods. There are also many political problems over access to and control over these fossils.

22 :: Is it true that all humans have the same size bones?

There is tremendous variation in size and shape of human bones (some more so than others). For example, if you exercise a lot, many microscopic cracks will form in your bones and bone cells will grow into the cracks to repair them. As a result, someone who exercises a lot will have much thicker bone than someone who does not exercise. Diet, diseases, parasites, evolutionary responses to temperature, and many other factors also influence the dimensions of human bones.

It is true that the sizes of bones in a population will cluster around certain average values. This is because some aspects of bone growth are under strong genetic control. However, any such values are statistical approximations, not fixed limits of bone dimensions.

FWIW: What the doctor has meant to say is that one cannot blame obesity on a person being "big boned". Bones simply do not make up that much of one's weight to tip the scale, as it were, between normal weight and obesity.

23 :: Is it possible to describe in general terms (archetype) the race that once populated Britain and already present when the Celts arrived

This is a difficult issue to sort out. One problem, of course, is that we have neither artistic evidence nor soft-tissue evidence for either pre-Celtic (Iron Age) or Celtic populations themselves. The second problem is that such characteristics as skin color, hair form, skull shape, stature, etc. can change rapidly among small populations. This was famously demonstrated in studies of immigrants to the USA in the early 20th Century. Therefore, it is difficult to tell if any changes we see in the archaeological record (mostly changes in skeletal morphology) are the result of indigenous evolution or if there is significant gene flow from immigrant populations.

A subsidiary issue is that Bronze Age cultures seem to have practiced a fair amount of cremation, so bone preservation is weak for that period.

24 :: What experts should I ask about a question like this? Can a white male determine if he has any black blood in him through DNA testing?

Black and white blood is the same. Genetically there may be some markers such as some kinds of sickel cell anemia, which was endemic to some parts of Africa, but even some North Africans can have Sickel Cell. However, there are no markers, which are "purely" black, white, or Asian.

On the other hand, there may be some HLA factors or tissue typing which may indicate race but with the admixture of so many cultures in the last 300 years, even these may be difficult to track.

25 :: How can we justify scientifically that the Homo erectus, Homo heidelberensis, Neanderthal, and modern humans are separate species?

The main argument for treating these hominins as separate species is that each differs from the others in terms of skeletal morphology.

Some of these morphologies are thought to arise from genetically programmed differences in growth. Thus, morphological differences are treated as proxies for genetic differences.

Most of these fossil taxa also have non-overlapping distributions in time and space. This further suggests they were reproductively isolated from each other.

This combination of morphogenetic difference and inferred reproductive isolation are basic criteria for identifying a species.

Now, you are correct to be skeptical. We do not know the specific genetic underpinnings of many aspects of skeletal growth. Nor are we ever likely to know the precise geographic and chronological range of all hominin species.

Treating these hominin morphological taxa as biological species is in essence, accepting a hypothesis that cannot be proven conclusively wrong.
Anthropology Interview Questions and Answers
50 Anthropology Interview Questions and Answers