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The Beginnings of Human Culture

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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. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: The Beginnings of Human Culture


1
Chapter 3
  • The Beginnings of Human Culture

2
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?

3
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.

4
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.

5
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.

6
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

7
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.

8
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.

9
Dentition
10
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.

11
Binocular Stereoscopic Vision
12
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.

13
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.

14
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

15
Primate Skeleton
  • Bison skeleton (left) and Gorilla skeleton (right)

16
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

17
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

18
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

19
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.

20
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

21
Human Ancestors
  • Ancestors of humans
  • Most likely apelike animals
  • Living in Africa
  • Forced by climactic changes to leave trees

22
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.

23
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

24
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25
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

26
Homo habilis
  • Culture
  • Using wits to compete with large animals
  • Food sharing and preparation
  • Butchering sites where carcasses are brought

27
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.

28
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.

29
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.

30
Paleoanthropological Sites
31
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

32
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

33
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.

34
Anatomically Modern Peoples and the Upper
Paleolithic
  • Art
  • Decoration
  • Sculpture
  • Pendants
  • Cave painting
  • Ritual
  • Trance
  • Burial

35
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.

36
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.

37
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.

38
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.

39
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
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