This volume offers a comprehensive introduction to Paleoanthropology. Introduction to Paleoanthropology is one of the very few Wikibooks to gain the coveted Featured Books rating by the administrators of Wikibooks, a project of Wikipedia, attesting to its highly developed and comprehensive nature. This book can be used as an excellent High School or College level textbook, reference work, and/or a volume for general reading and learning. As a subset of physical anthropology, this field relies on the following: . Research Design: Understanding Human Evolution Evolution of hominoids from other primates starting around 8 million to 6 million years ago . Importance of physical anthropology Evidence of hominoid activity between 8 and 2.5 million years ago usually only consists of bone remains available for study. Because of this very incomplete picture of the time period from the fossil record, various aspects of physical anthropology (osteometry, evolutionary framework) are essential to explain evolution during these first millions of years. Evolution during this time is considered as the result of natural forces only. . Importance of related disciplines Paleoanthropologists need to be well-versed in other scientific disciplines and methods, including ecology, biology, genetics and primatology. Through several million years of evolution, humans eventually became a unique species. This process is similar to the evolution of other animals that are adapted to specific environments or ecological niches . Animals adapted to niches usually play a specialized part in their ecosystem and rely on a specialized diet. Wikibooks is a collaborative book authoring website, where users from all over the world work together to write textbooks and other types of instructional books on many topics. It is a Wikimedia project, operated by the same group of people who run Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikibooks went online on 10 July 2003. Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks. Wikipedia attracts 683 million visitors annually reading over 10 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000- article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of May 31, 2008 it had over 2,396,000 articles consisting of over 1,034,000,000 words. This volume is published by Seven Treasures Publications, an independent book publisher unaffiliated with the Wikipedia Foundation, under the terms of the GNU license.
