ARCH 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Carl Linnaeus, European Bison, American Bison

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Archaeology
• Course: ARCH 131
• Professor: Dennis Sandgathe

Document Summary

The early tool used in science was classification. Carl linnaeus (1707-1778) was one of the people to try and classify plants and invented the modern binomial classification system. Hominin = human tribe in the classification system. Genus is capitalized, species and subspecies are italicized and are in lower case letters. Change is constant in life on earth. The idea of fixity of species is gradually dying in the 1700s and 1800s among scientists and the general public. A lot of things are changing in this time. Their thinking was forced to change due to stuff like fossils. However, the fixity of species couldn"t explain extinct species. People used to be involved in farming at that time and although they couldn"t see new species in their lifetime, they could see new breeds. As people traveled more, they saw variation within species; a lot more variability than they realized e. g. european bison and north american bison.