This can include plants, animals, viruses and bacteria, single-celled organisms, and even cells. Read on to learn more about this field and everything it encompasses.Īs the name might suggest, life science studies life in all its forms, past and present. From bacteria to begonias to beluga whales, life sciences aim to learn everything about life on this planet. Life science is an enormous field of study that examines every living thing on earth. You may have seen textbooks about life sciences without ever knowing what that means. When you were in school, you may have had to take a course titled “Life Science 101” or similar. 13902-6000, or e-mail For more information, visit. Teachers in the Greater Binghamton area who wish to participate in the program are asked to write to Ask a Scientist, c/o Binghamton University, Office of Communications and Marketing, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, N.Y. Questions are answered by faculty at Binghamton University. Your smartphone, for example, might be one day become an ancient artifact that allows future archaeologists to learn how people of this time learned about the world and communicated with one another.Īsk a Scientist runs on Sundays. Some of the common artifacts we use today, in fact, will become the evidence that future archaeologists will use to learn about life in the early 21st century. All of these artifacts give us information about specific times and places in our history and shed light on the way we live, the resources we depend upon and the technology we have developed. In more recent history, human artifacts are made out of metal, and now, plastic. Over time, humans began to make ceramic artifacts by firing clay shaped into vessels used for cooking, storage and serving. Many of the earliest artifacts that archaeologists find are made from brittle stone that breaks into sharp flakes, a material that was used to fashion ancient knives and other kinds of tools.
Over the course of human history, artifacts made by humans have exploded in their number and variety. Archaeologists use a variety of techniques to obtain ages for artifacts. Once we find an artifact, we must learn its age so that we can learn the point in time when something was made or used. Determining how old an artifact is a major task for archaeologists. These early artifacts are stone tools, systematically broken rocks that appeared to have been used for opening up nuts or tubers. These other kinds of artifacts give us evidence of how we interacted with the environment and are an important source of archaeological information.Īncient artifacts are known as far back as the times of our earliest ancestors, at least 2.8 million years ago, and perhaps earlier. We also create artifacts when we step into a puddle of concrete, build a campfire or throw chicken bones into the trash. The forks and knives we use to eat, the clothes we wear and the houses we live in are all artifacts. In today, as in the past, we make and use artifacts as part of our daily lives. Archaeologists call the evidence of the past artifacts, a term that we define as anything that was the result of human activity. The evidence studied by archaeologists allows us to explain how the course of human history unfolded as it did to lead to the present day. This evidence tells us about past events and provides information on how the people before us lived their lives: what they ate, how they built their houses and how they organized their communities. Answer: Archaeologists are scientists who look for and study the evidence left behind by people who lived in the past.
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