My name is Kathy Schick
and I am an anthropologist.
What is anthropology?
Sometimes it's been called
the holistic study of humankind,
which is a lot of work.
It's trying to look
at humans from all angles.
And I got interested in this
even long before I even knew
there was such a field.
As a teenager in junior high
school and then high school,
I became fascinated with
looking around the world
at human beings
all around the world
but living in different cultures
with different lifestyles,
different beliefs and customs.
And I wondered,
how did this happen?
How does this work?
I also became fascinated with
us as a species,
that we were a very unusual
species in the animal world.
We have this huge brain,
we walked on two feet,
we had complex tools and
technology, elaborate culture.
And I wondered how
did this really happen?
How, when, and why?
And then my very
first semester in college,
I found the field
was called anthropology.
This was what I had been
interested in for so long.
Now, doing anthropology
has taken me
to a lot of places
in the world over the years.
I actually met my husband
on an archeological dig.
And then while we
were in graduate school,
we went off to Africa
right after we got married,
more or less spent
our honeymoon in a tent.
In fact, the first
two years of our marriage,
we figured we spent about half
of it living in a tent
with all of our belongings
in a little tin trunk
at the foot of the bed.
So, we've traveled a lot,
lived in many places of the
world for months at a time
and had quite a wide range
of experiences with people
and also living
in unusual places
like the African plains with
our nearest neighbors being
antelope, crocodiles, and lions.
So, it's been a very
exciting time.
Now, when anthropologists
want to do their work,
their research,
they often have to travel.
Some people
might do it in the U.S.,
deal with particular groups here
but as often,
it entails going overseas
to other countries
and other continents
and living with
different cultures,
learning about
aspects of their culture,
learning about
the physical people there,
the adaptation, for instance,
in high altitudes
and how people adapt--
their bodies have adapted
to high altitude,
so studying the physical being.
Also, studying the
languages and also studying
the prehistory
through archeology.
And when we do this,
we often will
be studying the tools
and we'll go and excavate
these early tools
and try to understand
how they made
and use their tools
and how they
lived out their lives,
their daily lives and adapted.
Physical anthropologists
may also study
human fossil ancestors
such as these, so that you
will go out and excavate
and sometimes
study in laboratories.
And also, you'll find
not only our direct ancestors
but also that there are other
species out there who are
our cousins, long lost cousins.
We're used to being
the sole species
with only the chimpanzees
being our closest
living relatives
but we have much
closer cousin species
many years ago
who also walked upright
but had small brains
and a different adaptation.
So, this is another
fascinating aspect
of what anthropologists study.
Now, if you think about it,
it's only been about a 150 years
since Darwin wrote
"Origin of Species".
And Neanderthals were only
beginning to be found
short time before that.
So, in that
short amount of time,
a 150 years for a discipline,
we have made huge, huge
accomplishments
in anthropology,
especially in my field,
paleoanthropology, which tries
to look at human evolution.
And usually this entails
physical anthropologists,
archeologists, and a wide
range of other people.
Paleontologists who might
study carnivores or elephants,
geologists of different sorts
living in big field camps
and doing their
work sometimes for weeks
or months at a time,
sometimes in remote
places of Africa for instance,
so you... often doing
a lot of travel and interfacing
with a lot of other
scientists in this work.
Now, all of these
fossils that we found,
in a sense, you've heard of
probably missing links.
In a sense, all of these
fossils that we found
are found missing links.
But remember, for each
missing link that we find,
when we find the next one,
then, you want to find the one
that's in between those.
So, that is the challenge.
Every year,
more expeditions go out.
If you go into this field,
you might be on one
of those expeditions
to find new missing links
that will fill in
even more exciting stories
about human prehistory.
