Human Biology and History (review)

Human Biology in Britain

Human Variation and Biocultural Adaptation in Papua New GuineaHuman Biology in Papua New Guinea: The Small Cosmos.Robert D. Attenborough , Michael P. Alpers

The study of human biology includes exploration of all the genetic and environmental influences on human variation and life history, including impacts of sociocultural and physical environments. Religious practice and spirituality may be one of these influences. There are more than 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children, accounting for 84% of the world's 6.9 billion people. Furthermore, 70% of Americans consider themselves spiritual in some way, including 22% who do not consider themselves religious, and the numbers for Europe are lower but proportionally similar. Such a high rate of religious affiliation and spiritual belief suggests that religion and spirituality could be sociocultural influences on human variation, but human biologists have scarcely attended to their impacts, as indicated by the limited numbers of relevant articles in the two flagship human biology journals. In this article, we discuss why human biologists may have overlooked this important force for human variability and highlight foundational work from human biology and other disciplines that can give our colleagues directions forward. We review the impacts of religion and spirituality at population and individual levels and call for human biologists to attend to the many aspects of religion and spirituality that can impact human biology and are much more than simply influences of denominational affiliation.

Water connects the environment, culture, and biology, yet only recently has it emerged as a major focus for research in human biology. To facilitate such research, we describe methods to measure biological, environmental, and perceptual indicators of human water needs. This toolkit provides an overview of methods for assessing different dimensions of human water need, both well‐established and newly‐developed. These include: (a) markers of hydration (eg, urine specific gravity, doubly labeled water) important for measuring the impacts of water need on human biological functioning; (b) methods for measuring water quality (eg, digital colorimeter, membrane filtration) essential for understanding the health risks associated with exposure to microbiological, organic, metal, inorganic nonmental, and other contaminants; and (c) assessments of household water insecurity status that track aspects of unmet water needs (eg, inadequate water service, unaffordability, and experiences of water insecurity) that are directly relevant to human health and biology. Together, these methods can advance new research about the role of water in human biology and health, including the ways that insufficient, unsafe, or insecure water produces negative biological and health outcomes.

Paul T. Baker (1927–2007) was a leader in transforming biological anthropology and human biology from descriptive endeavors to a comparative biology of humans on the basis of evolutionary principles. He was a Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University from 1958 to 1996, where his major scientific interest was how human biological and physiological variation is structured by responses to environmental and sociocultural stressors. Exploring responses to climatic and social stressors at the population level, early in his career Baker integrated ecological and evolutionary theory and later defined the subdiscipline of human population biology as a transdisciplinary science with the goal of understanding how human variation is patterned in modern populations. On the basis of his multiple contributions to elucidating genetic, environmental, and sociocultural inputs to human variability in health, physical function, and longevity and his leadership in multiple transdisciplinary research projects, including the International Biological Programme, in 1980 Baker was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, insight into fundamental principles of human biology and disease has been obtained primarily by experiments in animal models. While this has allowed researchers to understand many human biological processes in great detail, some developmental and disease mechanisms have proven difficult to study due to inherent species differences. The advent of organoid technology more than 10 years ago has established laboratory-grown organ tissues as an additional model system to recapitulate human-specific aspects of biology. The use of human 3D organoids, as well as other advances in single-cell technologies, has revealed unprecedented insights into human biology and disease mechanisms, especially those that distinguish humans from other species. This review highlights novel advances in organoid biology with a focus on how organoid technology has generated a better understanding of human-specific processes in development and disease.

Human biology seeks to understand human variation and the biological, environmental, social, and historical influences on that variation. Views of the nature of both variation and environment have changed during the past 100 years. Typological approaches to nature and human diversity shifted to an evolutionary perspective during the first half of the 20th century. In the second half, widespread human biological variation was documented and interpreted in terms of adaptation to the environment. Environmental physiology and reproductive ecology continue to document environmental influences on human biological functioning, but with (1) an expanded concept of environment that acknowledges more fully the interactions among its physical, biotic, and social aspects and (2) an expanded theoretical basis, drawing on evolutionary ecology and life history theory, acknowledging tradeoffs and changing constraints and opportunities over the lifetime. Human biology gains from greater interaction with other fields, such as political ecology, but also contributes to them. [Keywords: biological anthropology, human ecology, adaptation, environmental physiology, reproductive ecology]

Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political Economic Perspectives in Human Biology called for an integration of political economy with ecological and adaptability perspectives in biocultural anthropology. A major goal of this volume was to explore the utility of including political-economic and sociocultural processes in analyses of human biological variation, nutrition, and health. A second goal was to enhance collaboration among subfields and work against the "chasm" that separated complementary perspectives in cultural and biological anthropology. Twenty years hence, new ways to link social inequalities and human biology have emerged in part through contributions of developmental origins of health and disease, epigenetics, microbiomes, and other new methods for tracing pathways of embodiment. Equally important, notions of "local/situated biologies" and "reactive genomes," provide frameworks for understanding biology and health at the nexus of ecologies, societies, and histories. We review and highlight these contributions toward expanding critical approaches to human biology. Developments over the past two decades have reinforced the central role of social environments and structural inequalities in shaping human biology and health. Yet, within biocultural approaches, a significant engagement with historical, political-economic, and sociocultural conditions remains relatively rare. We review potential barriers to such analyses, focusing on theoretical and methodological challenges as well as the subfield structure of anthropology. Achieving politically and socially contextualized and relevant critical biocultural approaches remains a challenge, but there is reason for optimism amid new theoretical and methodological developments and innovations brought by new generations of scholars.

Introducing a special issue on "Translating Human Biology," we pose two basic questions: Is human biology addressing the most critical challenges facing our species? How can the processes of translating our science be improved and innovated? We analyze articles published in American Journal of Human Biology from 2004-2013, and find there is very little human biological consideration of issues related to most of the core human challenges such as water, energy, environmental degradation, or conflict. There is some focus on disease, and considerable focus on food/nutrition. We then introduce this special volume with reference to the following articles that provide exemplars for the process of how translation and concern for broader context and impacts can be integrated into research. Human biology has significant unmet potential to engage more fully in translation for the public good, through consideration of the topics we focus on, the processes of doing our science, and the way we present our domain expertise.

Over the past several decades, biomarkers have become indispensable tools in human biology, allowing researchers to investigate biocultural and evolutionary questions and to generate basic data on health and well-being. Human biologists are central players in biomarker methods development, pioneering the creation of "field friendly," minimally invasively collected biomarker approaches, as well as leading the innovative use of biomarkers, most notably to map the complex pathways from social and environmental conditions to altered physiology to health effects. This special issue, Part 2 of a collection focused on minimally invasively collected biomarkers, is comprised of nine papers that jointly contribute to driving the science of biomarker methods development and application. This compilation of papers engages with topics such as biological normalcy, ecoimmunology, and the ethics of working with vulnerable and underserved populations. It also focuses attention on research areas at present not emphasized in human biology such as bone turnover markers as a window onto osteoporosis and osteoarthritis and the use of cancer-related biomarkers in population screening and epidemiology. Taken together, these papers help draw the roadmap for future biomarker work, emphasizing: (1) the need for systematic and transparent approaches to assay validation, with open access publication; (2) simultaneous measurement of multiple biomarkers and expanded use of instrument platforms that increase the range of physiological, genomics, and omics markers available to researchers; and, (3) increased attention to ethics and researcher responsibilities, encouraging a mindset that recognizes our obligation to provide benefits to individuals and communities and to help redress past abuses.

The human biological aspects of the fatal neurological disease kuru have been expounded in some detail in the past (Gajdusek 1977; Alpers 1979, 1987, 1988). I am reluctant to go over the same ground since these previous discussions are still valid. However, it would be highly improper to discuss the human biology of Papua New Guinea without including some account of kuru since the puzzle of this disease was solved by adopting an interdisciplinary human biological approach (see Alpers and Attenborough, Chapter 1). Such a striking illustration of the value of human biology should not fail to be given its due emphasis in the context of the Small Cosmos.

This book introduces the ‘dramatis personae’ of three important and well-travelled anatomists: a Scotsman (Arthur Keith), an Englishman (Frederic Wood Jones) and an Australian (Grafton Elliot Smith). Their remarkable biographies are skilfully interwoven within a not-inconsiderable wider history of anatomy and anthropology and what became the scientific quest to understand humanity and its place in the environment in the late 19th and early 20th century. This book introduces the ‘dramatis personae’ of three important and well-travelled anatomists: a Scotsman (Arthur Keith), an Englishman (Frederic Wood Jones) and an Australian (Grafton Elliot Smith). Their remarkable biographies are skilfully interwoven within a not-inconsiderable wider history of anatomy and anthropology and what became the scientific quest to understand humanity and its place in the environment in the late 19th and early 20th century. Wood's work carefully narrates the struggle among anatomists, anthropologists and zoologists for academic supremacy. As the idea of ‘Human Biology’ emerges, the differences in how anatomy was taught across the world, particularly in ‘Atlantic and Antipodean’ medical schools, make for fascinating reading. Another engaging thread is the description of the ways that anatomical knowledge was gathered and disseminated and what becomes particularly apparent is the growing influence of the individual anatomist. This importance is emphasised by their efforts to gain control of scientific societies to direct debate in a post-Darwinian world or the growing trend for them to give international lectures, appear on radio programmes and, in some cases, write their own newspaper columns. Jones also tells of a time that museums were becoming the centre of the global exchange networks that collected and swapped both animal and then human specimens. This process quickly became tangled into a story of European Imperialism and Colonialism with Australian human biological remains in particular being in great demand. Although anatomists like Grafton Elliot Smith used anatomical studies to challenge and discredit racist theories based on human anatomy, their urge for collecting and studying human remains from all parts of the British Empire (even when the coded language of their correspondence suggests they knew their collecting activities were not appropriate) was placed above their intellectual and political beliefs. As we live in a time when many museums across the UK are developing ‘decolonising’ narratives around their collections and interrogating the provenance of their historic specimens, this section of the book is particularly timely. Within this current climate, Jones may have dwelt longer on some of the legacies that these historic collecting activities have left us, but that is perhaps outwith his original remit. Overall, Jones argues convincingly that these three anatomists deserve much greater recognition and he tells a compelling tale of their world of academic rivalries and clashing interpretations of anatomy that will be of interest to both the historian of science and the general reader.

Increasing human exposure to environmental contaminants is a growing concern and has become an important factor within human biological variation and health outcomes. Yet, traditional exposure assessment methods are often limited in their ability to capture the complexity and variation of chemical exposure, or are invasive, costly, and challenging to apply in field-based research. Here, we introduce silicone wristbands as an innovative and noninvasive tool for measuring personal passive chemical exposure and highlight opportunities for their use in human biological research. The wristbands sequester organic chemicals across multiple media (e.g., air, water, dust) and capture both inhalation and dermal absorption. We describe how they work, how to deploy them in the field, how to extract and analyze the chemical composition, and their methodological advantages for human biological research. A case study assessing exposure to flame retardants and the relationship to body size among girls in Costa Rica demonstrates the application for human biological research in a tropical and remote setting. We argue that wristbands provide a noninvasive method for assessing individual exposomes and understanding how environments are embodied and become a meaningful axis of human biological variation. Additionally, they motivate interdisciplinary, ethical, and community-engaged research in diverse and hard-to-reach populations, aligning with future directions of the field of human biology.

This introductory chapter examines previous archaeological thinking regarding the origins, scales, forms of evidence, and nature of social complexity in the human past. As a relative newcomer to this topical area, bioarchaeological approaches are shown to bring unique theoretical and empirical perspectives on these issues. Unique strengths of the bioarchaeological approach include compelling ways of looking at power, hierarchy, and heterarchy, the embodiment of social realities into human behavior and biology, and avenues to bridge long-standing divides between mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology. The authors also discuss a number of challenges in the bioarchaeology of social complexity, including how best to grapple with typological thinking and interpretation of social structures from human skeletal remains. The chapter closes with a preview summary of the following chapters in the volume.

A Data-Driven Lens to Understand Human Biology: An Interview with Daphne Koller