Physical or Biological Anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies human beings as biological organisms. It deals with human evolution, biological variation, heredity, adaptation, growth and development, and the relationship between humans and other primates. It examines humans from both evolutionary and biological perspectives and seeks to understand how present-day human populations originated and changed over time. The subject also includes the study of fossil humans, living human populations, primates, and biological processes responsible for human variation. The roots of Physical Anthropology can be traced to the scientific developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, European scholars began to study human anatomy, classification and variation systematically. The work of Carl Linnaeus was particularly important. In his classification system, humans were placed within the animal kingdom and given the scientific name *Homo sapiens*. This helped establish the biological study of humans within the broader framework of natural science. During the eighteenth century, scholars such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach contributed significantly to the development of physical anthropology. Blumenbach studied human skulls and proposed a classification of human populations into different varieties. Although many early racial classifications are now considered scientifically inadequate, they encouraged systematic investigation of human physical diversity. The nineteenth century marked a major turning point.