Biocultural anthropology

Biocultural anthropology can be defined in numerous ways. It is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. "Instead of looking for the biology underlying biological roots of human behavior, biocultural anthropology attempts to understand how culture affects our biological capacities and limitations. Biocultural anthropology attempts to understand challenges to human biology in an ever increasing and diversified cultural environment.”

Physical anthropologists throughout the first half of the 20th century viewed this relationship from a racial perspective; that is, from the assumption that typological human biological differences lead to cultural differences. After World War II the emphasis began to shift toward an effort to explore the role culture plays in shaping human biology. The shift towards understanding the role of culture to human biology led to the development of Dual inheritance theory in the 1960s. In relation to, and following the development of Dual-inheritance theory, biocultural evolution was introduced and first used in the 1970s.

Key Research:

“For the modern biological or medical Anthropologist the bio-cultural model has its connection with the adaptability model where the human environment interaction is the focus to understand human biological variation.” There is also the Single Stress model, the integrated Bio-Cultural model, and complex Bio-Cultural models. Contemporary biocultural anthropologists view culture as having several key roles in human biological variation:

While biocultural anthropologists are found in many academic anthropology departments, usually as a minority of the faculty, certain departments have placed considerable emphasis on the "biocultural synthesis." Historically, this has included Emory University, the University of Alabama, UMass Amherst (especially in biocultural bioarchaeology) [6] [7], and the University of Washington [8], each of which built Ph.D. programs around biocultural anthropology; Binghamton University, which has a M.S. program in biomedical anthropology; Oregon State University, University of Kentucky and others. Paul Baker, an anthropologist at Penn State whose work focused upon human adaptation to environmental variations, is credited with having popularized the concept of "biocultural" anthropology as a distinct subcategory of anthropology in general. Many anthropologists consider biocultural anthropology as the future of anthropology because it serves as a guiding force towards greater integration of the subdisciplines.

...
Wikipedia