The Essential Question: When does Humanness first appear

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The Essential Question When does Humanness
first appear?

• What are the unique features of a modern human?
• When did these unique traits develop, and under
  what circumstances?
• Did they appear suddenly, at once, or gradually
  over a long time?
• Were earlier creatures, who did not look like
  modern humans, also capable of these sorts of
  behaviors. Or, were these traits limited only to
  people who are modern human in appearance?

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What is a human?

• Clearly, modern humans are unique amongst living
  animals in having
• 1. Complex culture with a wide variety of
  societal norms in behavior.
• 2. Language and symbolism.
• 3. Biologically
• bipedal locomotion.
• large brains in comparison
  to body size.
• small, non-projecting
  canine teeth.
• The major question here is when did these
  distinctive features of modern humans appear in
  the course of our evolution?

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Bipedalism

• Bipedalism is the mode of locomotion of modern
  humans and our near extinct ancestors.
• There are numerous modifications in the skeleton
  and muscles that permit effective human stride.
• Bipedalism allows humans to free their front
  limbs from the requirements of locomotion, but it
  is not a perfect system, with humans developing
  serious problems in the back, pelvis and lower
  limbs (often termed the scars of human
  evolution).
• The earliest evidence for the appearance of a
  bipedal ancestor is about 4.4 million years ago,
  and there is good evidence that by 3.7 million
  years ago, an effective biped with a striding
  gait was living in the forests and savannas of
  East Africa.

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Chimps are Knuckle Walkers

• Although chimps can walk bipedally over short
  distances, their normal pattern of locomotion is
  knuckle walking.
• Here you see a mom, with her offspring, standing
  in a typical knuckle walking posture with the
  front limb resting on the middle knuckles

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Humans as bipeds the human stride
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Chimps as bipeds

• Chimps can walk bipedally. They do not do it
  very well and cannot do it over a long distance.
• Note the way the animal is holding its body, and
  the normal flexion of the knees, which also
  contributes to support of upper body weight.

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The Evolution of Bipedalism

• By about 3.7 million years ago, there are
  footprint trails at a place called Laetoli, in
  Tanzania, which show a biped with a gait pattern
  virtually identical to modern humans.
• By 3.2 million years, the skeleton of the most
  complete of these early human ancestors, called
  the australopithecines, shows many of the
  distinctive traits found on modern humans. This
  is the famous Lucy skeleton, who was only 3.5
  feet tall and weighed about 60 lbs.

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Variability in form and function in adults is the
result of the interaction of biocultural
complexes and reflects evolutionary scenarios

• Genetic mechanisms
• mutation
• drift
• selection
• flow
• Development
• Environmental variables

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The Interaction of genes and environment

• In the development of an individual, a complex
  interplay of the genetic materials and
  environmental (which of course includes culture)
  factors is responsible for the outcome a
  functioning (and reproducing) adult
• GENES/interaction with ENVIRONMENT ADULT Form
• (Genotype)
  (Phenotype)

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Adaptation The interplay of genotype and
phenotype

• Genotype is the underlying framework
• Environment molds and channels genotype into the
  final phenotype
• In humans, culture and the resultant complex
  behavior are a unique basis for the environment
  to influence and shape final phenotype.
• (This represents a complex interplay that few
  other animals have.)

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Growth and Maturation

• Growth increase in size
• Maturation acquisition of adult-like
  characteristics

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From one cell to you
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To who?
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Language and Human Evolution

• Most anthropologists would argue that it is
  speech, language that represents the major
  distinguishing feature of living humans. It
  provides the basis for complex human interaction,
  and as inner speech, is the basis for organized
  behavior.
• When, and under what conditions did language
  originate?
• Did it appear over the course of time, developing
  from a simpler predecessor, or did it explode
  over an instant of geological time?

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Language and Humanness

• All mammals communicate and among our closest
  living relatives, the Primates, there can be
  complex systems for sharing information about the
  environment as well as the emotional state of an
  individual animal.
• What seems clear from a wide variety of
  observations, tests and analyses is that these
  communication systems differ fundamentally from
  human language.
• One of the most important of these differences is
  the open nature of human language. That is, a
  human can utter an observation, idea or whatever,
  that has never been spoken before, and yet every
  speaker of that language will immediately
  understand what was said.

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What Language is

• Primate communication systems are fixed in that
  they are not composed of a flexible number of
  smaller entities that, used together in different
  sequences, allow a language speaker the unlimited
  freedom of expression.
• Of the more than 5,000 known human languages,
  there are none that cannot express the full range
  of ideas, motives, concepts and emotions that are
  part of that culture. In other words, there are
  no primitive languages that might be thought of
  as ancestral to, or the basis of, more advanced
  languages.
• All human languages can express, in one way or
  another, a sense of the present, the past and the
  future. All can express notions of self, of
  others, and of place here and now and elsewhere.

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Larsen
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hominspread
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The Origins of Tool Making

• Another trait that is often considered unique to
  humans, as we have seen, is the ability to make
  tools to an arbitrary pattern.
• It is clear from observations of our closest
  living relatives, the African ape, the
  chimpanzee, that in their natural habitat that
  they are capable of making simple tools, like
  termiting sticks. Thus, tool making itself is not
  a unique ability of the human line.
• It is reasonable to assume that the earliest
  members of the human line were at least as
  capable as living chimpanzees of making simple,
  non-durable tools. And of course, we will never
  find these objects in the fossil record.

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The First Stone Tools

• The first stone tools appear in the fossil record
  in East Africa about 2.5 myr. They are river
  pebbles with flakes chipped off to produce a
  cutting edge.
• These first tools mark the beginning of the
  Paleolithic (do not confuse with Pliocene or
  Pleistocene). Later on, tools will become far
  more complex, sophisticated and well made.
• There is debate about the precise level of
  neurological abilities necessary to produce stone
  tools made to a pattern.

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oldowanmaking
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oldowanpebble
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bloodymess
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smashbone
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scratchmaking
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Bone Tools
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1st fire
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Deliberate Burial of the Dead

• The earliest evidence for the deliberate burial
  of the dead is about 115,000 years ago. It has
  often been suggested that when our ancestors
  began this practice, that it represented the
  origins of symbolic behavior, or at least
  religious beliefs and concept of the self.
• These first burials were NOT performed by modern
  human-like creatures, but by more primitive
  forms, known as Neandertals.

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Scene II
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Cromagnon
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Lascaux Bison
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Techiform Font de Gaume
Font de Gaume tectiform
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venus
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Sculpture