Page "Anthropology" Paragraph 30

Many scholars consider modern anthropology as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted to study human behavior systematically, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the fifteenth century as a result of the first European colonization wave.

The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part.