| adaptation | change in response to environmental challenges
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| anthropology | the study of all aspects of the human experience
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| archaeology | the study of the patterns of behavior and the material record of humans who lived in the past
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| biological anthropology | the study of the biological and biocultural facets of humans and their relatives
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| catastrophism | the belief that great catastrophes regularly wipe out much of life on earth
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| comparative approach | the practice of comparing features across entities/cultures/organisms to elucidate similarities and differences
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| critical thinking | taking control of information presented to you and examining it
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| cultural anthropology | the study of human culture in all of its complexity
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| culture | patterns of behavior human societies exhibit in their families, relationships, religions, laws, moral codes, songs, art, business, and everyday interactions
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| ecology | interrelationships between living organisms and their environments
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| ethnography | the focused study of a culture or aspects of a culture
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| ethnology | the comparative study of many cultures fact a verifiable, observable truth
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| fit | having the set of heritable traits that are best suited to existing and reproducing in a given environment
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| fossil | material evidence of past life on this planet
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| heritable | capable of being passed to offspring biologically (through reproduction)
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| holistic approach | the practice of drawing on all subdisciplines of anthropology, as well as other disciplines, to attempt to answer questions about humans
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| hypothesis | a testable explanation for the observed facts
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| linguistic anthropology | the study of language, its structure, function, and evolution
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| natural selection | process by which the better fit variants in a population become overrepresented over time
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| niche | habitat or ecological role filled by an organism; the way in which an organism "makes a living"
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| paleoanthropology | the study of fossil humans and human relatives paradigm predominant ways of thinking about ideas
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| parsimony | economy in explanation; the least complex path
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| Primates | mammalian order to which humans belong
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| primatologist | researcher who studies primates reproductive success a measure of the number of surviving offspring an organism has
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| strata | layers of the earth
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| stratigraphy | the study of the layering of the earth's sediments
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| taxonomy | naming and classification of organisms based on morphological similarities and differences
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| theory | a set of supported hypotheses
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| uniformitarianism | the doctrine that geological processes operating in the present have also operated in the same way in the past and will do so in the future
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