While most people are still able to (albeit it probably a bit incorrectly) answer what an archaeologist does, anthropologists are a species less known to the general public and media. Derived from the Greek 'anthropos' (human), anthropology means, 'the social science that studies the origins and social relationships of human beings' according to the Princeton WordNet, and is most often used to refer to 'cultural anthropology'. But anthropology student Dai Cooper is doing her bit to make the discipline just that bit more famous... on YouTube. In just a few weeks, the 'Anthropology Song: A little bit Anthropologist' has become immensely popular, especially for a song about anthropology, even threatening to beat the usual YouTube hits 'cat being cute' and 'cat acting like a typical cat' in the charts.
Submitted by Sean Williams on Tue, 10/06/2009 - 09:36
Take a girl out for a meal and you may think yourself quite the traditionalist. But most men won't know quite how traditional they're being: the world's first hominids learnt to stand on two feet simply to carry food to woo women, according to one leading expert. Professor Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University made his claim following the much-publicised discovery of 'Ardi' last week, the oldest-known member of the human family tree. Ardi, or Ardipithecus ramidus in full, roamed the forests of Ethiopia some 4.4 million years ago - over a million years before the next oldest hominid, Lucy, who was unearthed in 1974.
Anthropologist, Archaeologist and Director General of the Georgian National Museum
5 August 1963
David Lordkipanidze is a leading anthropolgist and archaeologist, a Professor at Tbilisi State University and the Director General of the Georgian National Museum. He is best known for his discovery of 1.8 million year-old human bones at Dmanisi in Georgia in 2007 which are thought to be the oldest human remains ever discovered outside of Africa, and evidence of a Eurasian precursor to Homo erectus.
Lordkipanidze graduated from the Faculty of Geography at Tbilisi State University in 1985, then went on to attain his PhD at the same institution in 1992. He has since authored over 100 publications on a variety of subjects, from anthropology to paleoecology, hominid evolution and archaeology, and one a number of prestigious awards, including Georgia's Order of Honour in 2000, the Award of the Prince of Monaco in 2001, the French Order of "Palmes Academiques" in 2002 and the French Order of Honour in 2006.
He is a Corresponding Member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. His ground-breaking study of the human fossils at Dmanisi remains ongoing.
Ethnographer, writer, photographer, filmmaker and explorer-in-residence
14 December 1953
Wade Davis is a Canadian ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmaker, as well as Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society. He has been described as "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity."
Davis has degrees (all from Harvard University) in anthropology and biology, and a Ph.D. in ethnobotany. He has lived and worked in locations from the Amazon Basin to the Andes, Haiti, East Africa and the Arctic. He first became known for his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow (about the zombies of Haiti), and has since written multiple books, including Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), Rainforest (1998), The Lost Amazon (2004) and Book of Peoples of the World (2008). His latest work, Fire on the Mountain - a history of some of the first British expeditions to Everest - will come out in 2009.
Alexandre Piankoff was a world-renowned anthropologist and Egyptologist, who made significant progress in the field of translating religious texts. Born in 1897 in St Petersburg, Russia, Piankoff first got a taste for history when visiting the majestic State Hermitage Museum in his home city. Enthralled by the Egyptology section in particular, Piankoff studied Foreign Languages and Egyptian Philology at university, before his academic life was cut short by the First World War.
Thereafter Piankoff became a fervent academic, studying at Berlin, then the Sarbonne in 1924, then the University of Paris where he obtained a Phd. The Second World War saw Piankoff take the French side and he fought in Africa, where he ended up in Cairo. On the war's conclusion he traveled back to Egypt, where he made several discoveries with the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology.
His work in Thebes, however, would prove the most fruitful, with some fantastic discoveries made in the tombs of Ramesses V and VI, and he helped with work at Tutankhamun's glittering grave. It would be the translating of ancient Egyptian religious material for which Piankoff would be most revered, with books such as Mythological Papyri, The Wandering of the Soul and The Litany of Re. He is also highly revered in studies of the Book of the Dead. Alexandre Piankoff died in 1966.
Archaeology and photography were his father's hobbies, while his mother was fascinated by classical music and painting. His early years were, therefore, immersed in the arts and antiquities of foreign cultures.
Photographer and anthropologist Martin Gray spent 20 years photographing and writing about more than 1,000 sacred sites in some 80 countries around the world. He has since recorded his work in his exhaustive coffee table tome, Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power.
Here, he describes how he took his favourite heritage photograph, on his first trip to Cheju-do. The a small island in the Korean Strait is home to the sacred mountain Halla-san, believed by the ancient Chinese to form a bridge between Heaven and Earth.
In 1985, I was riding a bicycle through the mountains of Japan, from the north to the south, and visiting and photographing nearly 50 pilgrimage sites of Shintoism and Buddhism.
Photographer and anthropologist 
