The Beginnings of Human Culture

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Chapter 3

• The Beginnings of Human Culture

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Chapter Outline

• To what group of animals do humans belong?
• When and how did humans evolve?
• Is the biological concept of race useful for
  studying physical variation in humans?

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Anthropology Four Field Discipline

• Anthropology includes
• Research on human cultures and languages
  worldwide and through time.
• Paleoanthropologists analyze ancient fossil
  humans and their ancestors.
• Primatologists study the behaviors of our closest
  animal relatives and other primates.
• Others investigate the genetic basis for
  variations among human populations.

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Human Cultural Adaptation

• Cultural adaptations allow people to survive in
  their environment
• Manufacture and utilize tools.
• Organize social units to make foraging more
  successful.
• Preserve and share traditions and knowledge.

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Human Cultural Adaptation

• Computer technology enables us to organize and
  manipulate information.
• Space technology may enable us to propagate our
  species in extraterrestrial environments.
• Biomedical technology may enable us to control
  genetic inheritance and the future of our
  biological evolution.

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Humans and Other Primates

• The human species is one kind of primate, a
  subgroup of mammals that includes lemurs,
  lorises, tarsiers, monkeys, and apes.
• Humans are most closely related to apes
• chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and
  gibbons

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Anatomical Adaptation

• Preadaptation
• Characteristics adaptive to one way of life that
  also are suitable for a different way of life.
• Ancestral primates
• Preadapted to arboreal life favored by natural
  selection.
• Over time
• Arboreal life involves changes in various
  anatomical features.

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Primate Dentition

• Diet available to arboreal primates requires
  unspecialized teeth.
• Over time, there is a trend toward economy, with
  fewer smaller teeth doing more work
• Number of incisors decrease.
• Number of cusps on molars increases.

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Dentition
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Sense Organs

• Decrease dependency upon sense of smell.
• Increase dependency upon sight
• Stereoscopic color vision
• Corresponding increase in brain size in the
  visual area
• More acute sense of touch.

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Binocular Stereoscopic Vision
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The Primate Brain

• An increase in brain size, particularly in the
  areas supporting conscious thought occurred in
  the course of primate evolution.
• In monkeys, apes, and humans the cerebral
  hemispheres cover the cerebellum, the part of the
  brain that coordinates muscles and maintains
  balance.
• Rather than relying on reflexes controlled by the
  cerebellum, primates constantly react to a
  variety of features in the environment.

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The Primate Brain

• Messages from hands and feet, eyes and ears, and
  balance, movement, heat, touch, and pain sensors
  are simultaneously relayed to the cerebral
  cortex.
• The cortex had to develop in order to receive,
  analyze, and coordinate these impressions and
  transmit a response back to the motor nerves.
• The enlarged, responsive, cerebral cortex
  provides the biological basis for flexible
  behavior patterns found in all primates,
  including humans.

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The Primate Skeleton

• Opening of the skull for the spinal cord shifts
  forward toward the skulls base accommodating
  upright posture.
• Snout or muzzle portion of the skull reduced
• Arms at side rather than the front part of the
  body
• Retention of the primate prehensile hand with
  opposable thumb

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Primate Skeleton

• Bison skeleton (left) and Gorilla skeleton (right)

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Adaptation Through Behavior

• Arboreal life involved changes in behavior as
  well as in anatomical features.
• Learned social behavior plays an important role
• Social behavior rarely observable in fossil
  record
• Examination of contemporary primate behavior may
  lead to clues to early primate behavior and the
  emergence of human cultural behavior

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Chimpanzee Behavior

• Communities with open subgroups
• Males generally move
• Male dominance with mother important in
  determining rank
• Maintain strong mother-child bond
• Grooming is a common pastime
• Promiscuous sex when female is fertile
• Settle disputes by aggressive behavior
• Dependence upon cultural behavior
• Make and use tools
• Males hunt in groups and share kill

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Bonobo Behavior

• Communities with open subgroups
• Females generally move
• Female dominance
• Strong mother-child bonds
• Grooming is a common pastime
• Promiscuous sex in all varieties
• Settle disputes through sex
• Dependence upon cultural behavior
• Make trail markers
• Females hunt in groups and share kill

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Reconciliation and Its Cultural Modification in
Primates

• There is evidence for reconciliation in more than
  25 different primate species.
• Reconciliation is common mechanism found whenever
  relationships need to be maintained despite
  occasional conflict.
• Chimpanzees are the only animals to use mediators
  in conflict resolution.
• Reconciliation is a learned social skill subject
  to what primatologists now increasingly call
  culture.

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Human Ancestors

• Bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas
• Closest living relatives to humans
• Humans, bonobos and chimpanzees 98.5 genetically
  identical
• Separation from a common stock
• Genetics suggest divergence at least 5.5 million
  years ago
• Fossil evidence shows separation at least 4.4 mya

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Human Ancestors

• Ancestors of humans
• Most likely apelike animals
• Living in Africa
• Forced by climactic changes to leave trees

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Monkeys, Apes, and Humans

• Molecular evidence indicates the split between
  the human and African ape lines took place
  between 8 and 5 million years ago.

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The First Hominines Australopithecus

• Earliest well-known hominine, who lived between 1
  and 4.2, if not 5.6 m.y.a. and which includes
  several species.
• Found in eastern Africa and westward into Chad
• Fully bipedal
• Brain appears apelike
• Teeth more like modern humans than apes
• Males about twice the size of females
• Likely depended upon animal flesh in diet

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Homo habilis

• Earliest species of the genus Homo
• Increased consumption of meat
• Living primarily on the savannah
• Scavenging from carcasses
• Dentition not suited for meat eating, so they
  probably needed tools to butcher carcasses.
• Increased brain complexity and size

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Homo habilis

• Culture
• Using wits to compete with large animals
• Food sharing and preparation
• Butchering sites where carcasses are brought

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Homo habilis

• Invention of tools about 2.5 million years ago
• Oldowan tools
• Striking flakes from core
• Paleolithic
• The Old Stone Age, characterized by chipped stone
  tools.

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Homo erectus

• Species directly ancestral to modern humans
• Had a body size and proportions similar to modern
  humans, though with heavier musculature.
• Average brain size fell within the higher range
  of H. habilis and the lower range of modern human
  brain size.
• Dentition was fully human, though relatively
  large by modern standards.

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Homo erectus

• Culture
• Fire and cooking circa 700,000 years ago
• Toolkit diversity
• New tool making techniques
• Selectivity of raw material
• Evidence of organized hunting as the means for
  procuring meat, animal hides, horn, bone, and
  sinew.

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Paleoanthropological Sites
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Homo sapiens

• First appear about 300,000 years ago
• Archaic Homo sapiens
• Neanderthal
• Europe and Asia
• Large brained
• Massive face
• Other groups found in Java, Zambia, China
• Modern Homo sapiens
• Less massive face
• Less bony architecture

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Anatomically Modern Peoples and the Upper
Paleolithic

• Upper Paleolithic peoples
• First people of modern appearance, who lived in
  the last part of the Old Stone Age.
• Culture emerges as a more potent force than
  biology
• Tools surpass the physical equipment of predators
• Atlatl
• Burin
• Bow and arrow

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Tool Making Upper Paleolithic

• A technique used to manufacture blades The stone
  was broken to create a striking platform, then
  vertical blades were flaked off to form
  sharp-edged tools.

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Anatomically Modern Peoples and the Upper
Paleolithic

• Art
• Decoration
• Sculpture
• Pendants
• Cave painting
• Ritual
• Trance
• Burial

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Race and Human Evolution

• Anthropologists agree no subspecies exist within
  currently surviving Homo sapiens.
• As far as contemporary humanity is concerned,
  race is not a valid biological category.
• Anthropologists work to expose the concept of
  race as scientifically inapplicable to humans.

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Ota Benga

• Captured in a raid in the Congo, Ota came into
  the possession of a missionary-explorer looking
  for savages to exhibit in the U.S.
• In 1904, Ota and a group of fellow pygmies were
  exhibited at a Worlds Fair in Saint Louis,
  Missouri.
• About 23 years old at the time, Ota was 4 feet 11
  inches in height and weighed 103 pounds.

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Ota Benga

• The missionary returned to the Congo and with
  Otas help collected artifacts for the American
  Museum of Natural History in New York City.
• He returned to the U.S. with Ota in the summer of
  1906, went bankrupt and Ota was left stranded in
  the city.
• Ota was placed in the care of the museum and then
  taken to the Bronx Zoo where he was put on
  exhibit in the monkey house, with an orangutan as
  company.

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Ota Benga

• After protests, zoo officials released Ota from
  his cage during the day and let him roam free in
  the park.
• Ota was then turned over to an orphanage for
  African American children.
• In 1916, upon hearing that he would never return
  to his homeland, he took a revolver and shot
  himself through the heart.

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Race as a Cultural Construct

• Although biological variation exists in the human
  species, biological races or distinct subspecies
  do not.
• Variation such as differences in skin color is
  the result of genetically adaptive processes to
  different natural environments.
• The majority of human variation exists within
  populations rather than among populations due to
• independent inheritance of individual traits
• genetic openness of human populations