The study of human beings worldwide in relation to distribution, origin, classification, and the relationships between variations in environmental and social influences as well physical characteristics and dietary intake relative to culture. The concept of culture is central to the work of anthropologists and the variations it creates (e.g., in beliefs and many other psychological functions such as social learning, child-rearing practices, development and growth). As a scientific enterprise, it has become a vast area of study in which the major sub-fields are: anthropological linguistics (the study of variations in language across space and time), biological or physical anthropology (the study of primate behavior, human evolution and population genetics), cultural or social anthropology (the study of social behavior and beliefs relative to, for example, kinship systems), forensic anthropology (the study of human skeletal variation), medical anthropology (the study of culture-based variations in diseases), and psychological anthropology (the study of cultural variations in a wide range of psychological functions). In the US, archaeology is treated as a sub-field of anthropology, but as a distinct discipline in the UK. In the past, there was a sharp division between the work of anthropologists and psychologists, despite the success of the Torres Straits expedition in bringing together their respective methods and techniques in the study of the relationships between behavior and culture at the end of the 19th century. The division arose as a consequence of the distinction between cultural relativism (held by anthropologists) and the psychic unity of mankind (held by psychologists), a distinction that has waned over the years and led to greater cooperation between anthropologists and psychologists, especially with regard to the study of child development.
See Child development, Cross-cultural psychology, Culture, Cultural evolution, Cultural selection, Discipline, Emic-etic distinction, Ethnography, Linguistic anthropology, Palaeontology, Participant observation, Psychic unity of mankind, Psychology, Relativism (or cultural relativism), Sociology, Torres Straits expedition