Genetics and its Relevance to Physical Anthropology

According to A.J Kelso physical anthropology attempts to explain human evolution.Genetics provides a basis for investigating similarities  and differences between parent and offspring generations.Evolution  may be defined as the accumulation of genetic changes over generations.

Physical anthropology attempts to describe and explain man's  biological variation.Genetics have made it possible  to employ a distinctive set of traits,inherited ones in describing and analysing man's variation and these may be analysed in ways that other traits cannot.

In classifying man's variation ,physical anthropology have relied heavily on racial classification that basically are pre-Darwinian or non evolutionary in outlook.Genetics in the development of its theory of population structure has laid the foundations  for classifying human variation into categories with clearer evolutionary unity and thus with clearer biological meaning than traditional racial classification simply.