The book I read to research this post was Anthropology For Dummies by Cameron M Smith which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is an introduction to the subject of anthropology and tries to demystify what is often considered a difficult subject. As with a lot of for dummies books it does a good job in that respect. In the old days anthropology was a bit of a quack subject carried out by a few eccentrics and often they were what we call social darwinists and didn't respect the new culture and couldn't wait to assimilate it into western ideas or thought the studied culture was going to die out anyway so they would just do a study of it before it did. What more serious anthropologists have discovered is we can learn alot about other ways of life and it can potentially help benefit our society and nowadays this subject is taken very seriously and of course they are a lot let eager to assimilate every culture into the western way of life. We can also learn a lot about ourselves and why our society is the way it is from studying this subject. We know we are descended from primates and that there are over 200+ types of people which is probably simplifying it a bit. One of the big questions in this subject is why people are so diverse. We know the first people probably came out of eastern Africa & of course gradually spread. In many cases at certain points there were landbridges like the Bering Straits which have long since gone. In Australia surprisingly there have been humans for at least 40,000 years which is surprising because this was more remote from anywhere else. In contrast Western Europe has only had people for 20,000 years. One of the big revolutions in humankind was growing crops and domesticating animals. Rice has been grown for 10,500 years, horses have been used for 5,000 years and even guinea pigs were being bread for food 3,000 years ago in Peru, perhaps surprisingly.I enjoyed reading this book and it is a decent length.