Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 45

One thing that makes physical anthropology particularly complex is that humanity evolves not only as a result of biological factors but also because of cultural factors. For this reason, anthropologists call it biocultural evolution. Culture — which I discuss more thoroughly in Chapters 2 and 11 — is basically the set of ideas that condition how you see and act in the world. Although humans survive by using both their biology and cultural information, all other animals survive mainly through their biology and by relying on instinct rather than such cultural information.

For example, cultural, not instinctual, information would have instructed you (if you were an early human) that certain kinds of wood are better than others for making a digging stick. You wouldn’t have known about different kinds of wood instinctually, but because detailed information about the properties of different kinds of wood was passed on to your mind culturally — through some form of language — by your parent generation or your siblings or others in your group.