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The adaptation of an animal or plant through breeding in captivity to a life intimately associated with and advantageous to humans. Domesticated plants and animals differ genetically and morphologically from their wild counterparts, often in ways…

A biological organism whose genetic material has been manipulated artificially through genetic or genomic editing techniques. In contrast to the long history of artificial selection (domestication), in which humans selectively breed organisms to…

The use of live nonhuman animals for scientific research and experimentation. Animal testing has been a cornerstone of biomedical research, having contributed greatly to the understanding of human biology, to the unraveling of the complex underlying…

The application of chemical techniques to the study of archeological materials in order to elucidate aspects of the human past. The materials used in archeological chemistry might be anthropogenic (for example, pottery or metal) or natural (from…

The study of skeletal remains from archeological sites by biological (or physical) anthropologists. Bioarcheology differs in several ways from traditional skeletal research (see illustration). Previous work focused on individual case studies (for…

An active and intentional act or practice of putting to death, in a relatively painless way, of persons suffering severely from medical conditions that are incurable, untreatable, or irreversible. Euthanasia is an act by a person, usually a…

The test of a hypothesis under controlled conditions. The experiment is one of the distinctive tools of the scientist. It enables the scientist to put questions to nature and receive answers. These answers lead to new problems whose solutions…

A tentative supposition with regard to an unknown state of affairs, the truth of which is thereupon subject to investigation by any available method, either by logical deduction of consequences which may be checked against what is known, or by…

The body of knowledge that concerns the fundamental nature, function, development, and use of formal models in science and technology. In its most general sense, a model is a proxy. A model is one entity used to represent some other entity for some…

The Nobel Prizes for 2021 included the following awards for scientific disciplines. Chemistry The chemistry prize was awarded jointly to Benjamin List of the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, and David W.C.…

The oldest archeological cultures of the New World, the ancestors of modern Native Americans. The Paleoindian colonizing populations of the Americas were Homo sapiens sapiens who arrived during the late Pleistocene (Ice Age) from Asia, though…

The study of disease in the ancient past. Paleopathology is the investigation of ancient diseases and their origins. The term applies to any evidence of disease in any form of life, including both plants and animals. However, the research emphasis…

The set of ideas that prescribe the manufacture and use of implements before written history. Technology is the principal means through which the human species has succeeded in occupying most of the world. The prehistoric record documents that for…

A proposition arrived at by the methods of logical deduction from a set of basic postulates or axioms accepted as primitive and therefore not subject to deductive proof. So long as a theorem is part of a purely formal system, it is not meaningful to…

The scientific study of past material culture. The initial objective of archeology (often spelled archaeology) is to construct cultural chronologies that order past material culture into meaningful temporal segments. The intermediate objective is to…

The earliest representatives of people anatomically similar to living humans that evolved from more archaic humans approximately 150,000–300,000 years ago. The general process by which early modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged from late archaic…

The empirical method is not sharply defined. It is generally characterized by the collection of a large amount of data before much speculation as to their significance, or without much idea of what to expect, and is to be contrasted with more…

A method of dating geological and archeological specimens by counting the radiation-damage tracks produced by spontaneous fission of uranium impurities in minerals and glasses. During fission two fragments of the uranium nucleus fly apart with high…

Fossil members of the group of primates constituting the apes. Apes and humans are closely related primates in the superfamily Hominoidea. The living hominoids are subdivided into the families Hylobatidae and Hominidae. The hylobatids, or lesser…

Extinct members of the order of mammals to which humans belong. All current classifications divide the living primates (order Primates) into two major groups (suborders) [Fig. 1]: the Strepsirhini (Strepsirrhini) or "lower" primates (lemurs,…

A species of fossil human from the Pleistocene representing a specialized side branch in human evolution in Africa and Eurasia. Homo erectus (Fig. 1) was a common, widespread, and long-surviving ancestor of modern humans (H. sapiens). Fossil remains…

The diversity of biological and genetic differences observed in the human population. Anthropologists study human biology to better understand the extent of human biological variability, to explain the mechanisms that create and pattern this…

The study of primate phylogeny and human evolution through the genetic information in the DNA of genomes and in the proteins that genes encode. The first studies in molecular anthropology used immunological and biochemical methods to obtain…

A group of late archaic humans (Homo neanderthalensis) from Europe, southwest Asia, and central Asia that immediately preceded the first modern humans in those regions. The closest evolutionary relatives of modern humans are the Neandertals (also…

The period of prehistoric culture whose basic defining attributes are the emergence of agriculture, animal domestication, and sedentary farmsteads or villages. This definition has evolved over the last century from the original characterization of…

The Nobel Prizes for 2020 included the following awards for scientific disciplines. Chemistry The chemistry prize was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, Berlin, Germany; and Jennifer A.…

A highly ambiguous term that designates four different concepts: (1) objective pattern (or natural regularity), (2) formula purporting to represent an objective pattern, (3) law-based rule (or uniform procedure), and (4) principle concerning any of…

The study of matter, energy, and forces. Physical science is generally considered to include astronomy, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, meteorology, and physics. These fields overlap more or less, as illustrated by astrophysics, chemical physics,…

An attempt to explain a certain class of physical phenomena by deducing them as necessary consequences of other phenomena regarded as more primitive or fundamental and less in need of explanation. When formulating a physical theory, any fundamental…

In a formal deductive system, a proposition accepted without proof, from which other propositions are deduced by the conventional methods of formal logic. There is a certain arbitrariness as to which propositions are to be treated as postulates,…

A scientific discipline that applies principles of evolutionary biology to the study of animal and human social behavior. Sociobiology is a synthesis of ethology (the study of animal behavior), ecology, and evolutionary theory in which social…

Determination of the relative or absolute age of materials or objects by measurement of the degree of racemization of the amino acids present. With the exception of glycine, the amino acids found in proteins can exist in two isomeric forms called d-…

The observation, measurement, and explanation of human variability in time and space. Anthropology is a science concerned with the interrelations of the biological, cultural, geographical, and historical aspects of humankind, including modern human…

The systematic quantitative representation of the human body. Anthropometric techniques are used to measure the absolute and relative variability in size and shape of the human body. Instrumentation Depending on the objective, anthropometric…

The establishment of the temporal sequence of prehistoric events. An event can be defined as a duration of time during which certain features came together to form a set, for example, when certain materials were formed into an object (manufacturing…

Any member of an adaptively diverse group of extinct hominin species that inhabited Africa between approximately 4.2 million years ago (MYA) and 1.2 MYA. The term australopith is used in preference to the term australopithecine, which is sometimes…

A discipline concerned with the application of ethics to biological problems, especially in the field of medicine. Bioethics is a broad term that encompasses the environmental, ethical, legal, and social implications of agriculture, life sciences,…

Relative and quantitative techniques used to arrange events in time and to determine the numerical age of events in history, geology, paleontology, archeology, paleoanthropology, and astronomy. Relative techniques allow the order of events to be…

The science that dates annual tree rings to their exact year of formation for study of modern, historical, and prehistorical events and environmental conditions. Trees are intimately bound to the environment, with their growth influenced by natural…

The scientific study of people, with their living and extinct primate relatives, using the evidence of teeth. Dental anthropologists include not only those trained in anthropology but also practicing dentists, anatomists, radiologists, forensic…

The application of physical anthropology theory and techniques to medicolegal questions. Forensic anthropology may also pertain to subdisciplines of anthropology, such as cultural anthropology, biological/physical anthropology, archaeology, and…

Ancient fossilized members of human beings and those species directly ancestral to modern humans. Fossil humans comprise all prehistoric skeletal remains of humans that are archeologically earlier than the Neolithic (necessarily an imprecise limit,…

The accumulated body of scientific and technical writing published to serve the informational needs of, primarily, scientists, engineers, and research workers, and, to the extent that it can be understood, the general public. This vast literature is…

The deoxyribonucleic acid of Homo neanderthalensis. Neandertals (also spelled Neanderthals) are the closest evolutionary relatives of modern humans. Based on fossil and archeological records, Neandertals are large-brained people with a distinct…

The Nobel Prizes for 2019 included the following awards for scientific disciplines. Chemistry The chemistry prize was awarded to John B. Goodenough of the University of Texas at Austin, United States; M. Stanley Whittingham of Binghamton University,…

The prehistoric period when people made stone tools exclusively by chipping or flaking. John Lubbock proposed and defined the term Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, in 1865 and also defined a subsequent stage, Neolithic or New Stone Age, during which…

The subfield of philosophy that treats fundamental questions pertaining to science. The philosophy of science explores the fundamental principles, purposes, methodologies, implications, and reliability of the human enterprise known as science. It…

The subfield of anthropology that deals with human and nonhuman primate evolution, the biological bases of human behavior, and human biological variability and its significance. Physical anthropology is a branch of anthropology that investigates the…

The study of nature and natural phenomena in which facts are observed and classified, and, often, quantitative laws are formulated and verified; involves the application of logical reasoning and data analysis to natural phenomena. Originally, the…

The Nobel Prizes for 2018 included the following awards for scientific disciplines. Chemistry The prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists. Half of the prize went to Frances H. Arnold from the California Institute of Technology in…