Anyone living today could form the impression that humanity is essentially fractured and fragmented; that we’re split up along ethnic, geographic, cultural, national, and ideological lines. This is the societal reality. But in Anthropology For Beginners, Micah J. Fleck asks us to take a big step backward and look at the full picture, as if we were aliens who stumbled upon planet Earth and glimpsed its inhabitants. We would see a myriad of languages, practices, religious rites, food palettes, clothing styles, leisure activities - all of which belong to the same curious species: Homo sapiens. Where did it come from? How did it develop so many different ways of being? And most importantly, what do its members have in common?

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Anthropology is the field that sets out to answer these questions. Micah J. Fleck provides a history not only of humankind, but also a history of anthropology itself - giving anyone with an interest in the subject a solid background of its key figures and developments.