Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 23

One big problem with being human is that it leads to questions. One of the biggest of all questions is just what we humans are. How do we fit in with the rest of the universe? Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that three fundamental questions were “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” Just like Rene Descartes’ momentous phrase “I think, therefore I am,” each of Kant’s little nuggets can lead to a lifetime of introspection. If anthropology is a mirror for humankind, the individual human mind is itself a hall of mirrors. It’s a wonder we can make any sense of anything!

To get anywhere, you need to start with some definitions. These terms come up throughout this book, so it’s important to get a handle on them sooner rather than later.

In anthropology, humanity refers to the human species, a group of life forms with the following characteristics:

 Bipedalism (walking on two legs)

 Relatively small teeth for primates of our size

 Relatively large brains for primates of our size

 Using modern language to communicate ideas

 Using complex sets of ideas — called culture (discussed later) — to survive

Standing on two legs and having particularly small teeth and large brains are all anatomical characteristics, and they’re studied by anthropologists focusing on human biological evolution. Surviving by using a wide array of cultural information (including instructions for making a fur cloak in the Arctic or a pottery canteen in the desert Southwest) are behavioral characteristics. Each requires different kinds of anthropology to understand.

Humanity is a general term that doesn’t specify whether you’re talking about males, females, adults, or children; it simply means our species — Homo sapiens sapiens — at large. The term humanity can be applied to modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) as well as some of our most recent ancestors, placed more generally in Homo sapiens, without the subspecies (the second sapiens) suffix. Exactly when Homo sapiens evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens is a complex question based on when humans became anatomically modern and when they became behaviorally modern. I introduce these questions a little later in this chapter and investigate them in detail in Chapter 7.