by Arnie Schoenberg
version: August 14, 2021
Student User Guide
Do NOT try to print this entire document because so much of the information is in the hyperlinks that you need to click on to get to. The forthcoming Study Guide for the Introduction to Physical Anthropology will be formated for printing, but if you're reading this now, you probably won't need a print out. You can read this on your phone but it's bad for your neck and eyes to spend too much time hunched over squinting at a tiny screen. The money you would have spent on a new textbook can easily pay for something with a nice big screen.
Experiment with different browsers and try the Reader Mode, you should be able to adjust the font and size so this is not so hard on your eyes.
It's most efficient to read this with a fast internet connection to minimize the frustration of waiting for links to load. If you don't have a fast connection at home or school, many browsers have settings that will cache or save pages and let you read them off-line, so you may be able to click all the links here when you have a good connection and then read the pages later. Page caching has different names depending on your browser such as: "Make Available Offline", "add page to reading list", or "show saved copy". Other options might include just leave everything up on different windows and click on all the links when you have a fast connection, or try apps that store online documents like Pocket, or cloud services like Google and Dropbox.
For navigation, the table of contents has hyperlinks to the sections. An index is unnecessary because most internet browsers have a "search" or "find" function within this webpage, trying pressing CONTROL or COMMAND or the little square knot, and the letter F at the same time.
Figure i Take Control + F to find your place in the universe by Arnie Schoenberg, remix of 2014 NASA Hubble photo and 2015 Tracy Watanabe ctrlF (CC BY-NC 4.0)
This is a work in progress so for any problems you find, please send me an email or let me know in class. If a link is bad you can often find the correct one through a search engine, but please email me the broken link and I will fix it.
I've labeled required links and assignments in GREEN CAPITALS, and consider this part of your required course work; I expect you to do the assignment or click on the link and read it. When I say to skim a link, you want to go to the link with the question in mind "How is this relevant to physical anthropology?" and scroll thorough quickly looking for answers. If you haven't had much experience skimming before, here is a quick description of skimming scientific articles.
If I just include the link, then you can consider it recommended but not required. Many of the recommend links can be written up as Critical Reviews, which I've labeled with a teal asterisk *. You will find over 200 teal asterisks * that mark suggested links within the text, within graphic captions, as separate paragraphs. Please consult the instructions for critical reviews in your syllabus for more information. To find a list of suggested articles try CTR + F and then * and you can scroll through them.
Below each Figure is a caption that describes the graphic. You can pretty much ignore the second half of the captions. I've tried to mark the interesting links with a teal asterisk *.
The Imagination Questions are extra credit assignments that you can answer in a journal format, see your syllabus for details.
Please contact me with specific questions and feedback.
next section: 1 Introduction to anthropology
problems (mistakes, bad links, etc.)