Not looking for a specific date here. (I’m thinking of some simian creature, drinking his day’s first cup of mud–literally–and grunting to his spouse, “Ahhh, now I feel human.”) I’m wondering what all the conditions for humanity are. Use of language (and at what point do noises become “language”?)? Tools? Awareness of mortality? Ability to process abstraction? Walking fully erect? All of these? Some combination?
It would be cool if someone had figured out when all the necessaries came together for the first time*, too, of course, but I’m really asking what ARE the necessaries? (I’d do a search for this, because I’m sure this one’s come up before, but all the key terms-- “humanity,” “language” etc. --seem awfully broad to me.)
You might find Great Debates or IMHO more suited to your question. General Questions is the forum for quesitons that have a factual answer. Given the amount of pondering that’s devoted to the question “What makes us human?” I don’t think there’s a GQ-type answer. You can email one of the moderators to ask them to move it, if you feel that’s appropriate.
Since we have no written records from the earliest people, writing having developed only in the last 4,000 years or so, it is rather difficult to determine the answers to most of your questions. Pythagras correctly indicates that we can identify the speciation point (roughly 100,000 years ago), but we cannot know when culture arose among Homo sapiens–or that it did not originate with one of the predecessor species (although we assume it did not). What paleontologists can and do look for are tools and art. Both can be found as far back as 30,000 years ago, but we do not have clear and conclusive proof that they originated, then; we only know that we have not currently found anything older.
(Along with arrowheads and axes and stone hammers, we have found examples of carved figurines and cave paintings, so we know that art, in some fashion, goes back a long way. Interestingly, we have found ritual burial sites from the Neandertals that are about the same age as many of the H. sapiens artifacts of Europe.)
An interesting site that explores much of this material (although it requires Macromedia Flash 5, 64 MB Ram, and (they say) a high speed connection (I have gotten around on it pretty well with a 56Kb dialup)), is http://www.becominghuman.org/
Yeah it all depends where you want to draw the line really. Tools? Other primates use tools, as did our predecessors I believe. That could have gradually advanced over time. Language? Hmm thats really hard one to answer. Just consider that the first homo sapiens were just as homo sapien as you or I. We shouldnt think of them as different from us in the sense we see an ape and think its stupid. The first humans arguably adapted to their changing environment just as we do. I would be interested in learning about the social structures (if any) of the first humans. More specificially, Id be interested to learn about their social psychology or sociology. That might be impossible to answer, and its probably not for this thread.
When I was teaching, one thing that became clear to me was that we attempt to catagorize things to make them more understandable. Much of what we attempt to catagorize, though, when looked at closely, is actually a continuum.
Asking when our ancestors became human is like asking where yellow becomes green (on the visible spectrum).
We can unequivicably state that we are human now, and we can state that an ancestor x millions of years ago was not human, but I think it is well-nigh impossible to pinpoint when the change happened.
As I recall, the simplistic explanation of species is that two creatures belong to the same species if they would be capable of producing fertile offspring together (if they are of opposite sexes). Bah. It seems pretty clear that the relationship isn’t transitive. By which I mean, if A is the ancestor of B and B is the ancesor of C, and A and B would have been capable of successfully breeding (if they were alive at the same time), and so would B and C, it doesn’t follow that the same is true of A and C. For it to be otherwise, one generation would at some point have to be a different species from the previous one.
So the whole notion that every creature, alive or dead, belongs to exactly one species seems a little suspicious to me. You could create an arbitrary dividing point where a bunch of children are different species from their parents, but it would probably be just that, arbitrary.
It would also presumably be difficult to classify all creatures alive at a given time, not just all creatures that ever lived, into distinct species, because species diverge over time, and this process is continuous too. Like a lot of seemingly simple distincitons, the notion of species goes away if you look at it closely enough.
Personally, I think that a lot of the notions we use to describe the world don’t have a precise, objective meaning. That’s not to say that they’re invalid, just that certain questions about them have no objective answer.
“Free will doesn’t actually exist in reality, but only in the sense that flowers don’t actually exist in reality.”
“it is well-nigh impossible to pinpoint when the change happened.”
Well, that’s kinda why I said I wasn’t really looking for a date as much as for a method.
At one point deep in our past, somewhere beyond the protazoan state, we had no human qualities and now we have all of them. I suppose I’m asking what are those traits generally considered to be?
The part of about whiich one was the last piece of the puzzle is interesting, as well as when that happened, and where, etc., but I put this inquiry here because I think there might be some high level discussion (among anthropologists, say?) about the traits which humans possess.
Are you looking for the first point at which Homo sapiens appeared or for the first point at which the genus Homo appeared? There may be a million year (or more) difference between the two. Remember that Homo means man, and is the designator for humans as opposed to our ancestors and relatives.
Some things you mention - waking erect for sure, tools maybe - occurred pre-Homo sapiens.
I think language is a good indicator of “human”… (time to push this to the Great Debates section)… How is it that in no experiment witnessed thus far a human has been able to develop a language (with grammar and structure) without learning it from another human? I personally see some divine intervention here…
Mods can move this where appropriate, I guess, but I’m still wanting to know what experts (anthropologists?) think the essential elements of humanity are. Where’s the line (not what’s the date) beyond which we stopped being “highly advanced simian creatures” and started being “human”? Do anthropologists just accept “no one really knows,” “it’s awful hard to say” etc as good answers?
This question came up, btw, as I was talking on friday morning about the meaning of myth, how it arose to explain phenomena for which we yet had no (scientific or other) rational explanation, and I got to wondering about primitive peoples and when they started to think, and whether a pre-literate people can develop myths, and how early, and how far back the mythmaking impulse goes, and on and on. If a really smart monkey thought about “why” something or other happens, would that make him partially human? How about if he were able, somehow, to communicate that dawning idea with another of his species? These are all btw kinds of questions, but they all added up to my realizing that I have no idea how people whose field this is think about this subject, or whether everyone just dismisses this entire train of thought as useless speculation.
I don’t know about what anthropologists think, but as far as taxonomy goes, there is no official definition (or diagnostic) for Homo sapiens. (Diagnostic characters in particular, I think, are what you are looking for here: characters which, when present, ensure that we are looking at a member of group X.) Linnaeus, in his classification project, said of humans simply, “Nosce te ipsum,” which translated roughly is “know thyself”. And that’s as far as we’ve come.
There is also no “type specimen” for humans (a specimen which acts as official name bearer and as the standard by which all other specimens are measured to determine if another specimen should belong to that group).
Because of the above, we are pretty much stuck with, “I know one when I see one.”
Odds and ends from the becominghuman.org site to which I linked earlier:
Apes (particularly chimps) use tools (and some modifiy sticks in particular ways that some describe as tool “making”).
Different groups of apes are capable of social problem solving, deceit, warfare, and the use of sex for conflict resolution instead of procreation. (Some chimpanzees hunt socially, with specific members of the group driving the game and others completing the kill after which the meat is shared with the rest of the group.)
Some apes appear to have discovered medicinal uses for plants.
Stone tools show up in the fossil record as long ago as 250 million years back (long before H. sapiens: Homo habilis was so named because of the wide variety of tools associated with it, but there are also a couple of older Australopithecus species that appear to have been tool users, and probably tool makers).
Hunting (as opposed to scavenging) among hominids can be dated to at least 400,000 years ago when homo erectus can be shown to have used fire-hardened spears.
Scorched bones at meal sites have been found as far back as 1.5 million years ago, although the fires used may have been fortuitous. However, there is evidence of hearth use by H. erectus dating back 465,000 years.
Language is a problem. Since writing goes back only 6,000 years (as opposed to my earlier mistyped 4,000), and recordings go back fewer than 150 years, it is not possible to determine the first speech. However, both H. sapiens and Neandertals have a hyoid bones that indicate the same control of the tongue (Jane Auel notwithstanding). Earlier hominids have similar, but not as developed, features. We simply do not know whether the change in throat and mouth shapes facilitated communication to allow humans to supplant the earlier species or whether language developed as an accident after the supplanting had occurred.
Paleontologists suspect that Neandertals wore clothing, because their tools included scrapers that would have been used to prepare hides for use as clothing and perforators to create non-ripping holes (although these might have been used for tents or carry bags). Human clothing is confirmed by 26,000 years ago by buttons and beads discovered among dwelling sites.
Jewelry in the form of pendants is present among both Neandertal and human remains.
Ritual burial sites have been found for both Neandertals and humans in the 60,000 - 50,000 year old range (with one Neandertal site going back to 70,000 years ago).
Cave paintings have been found as old as 20,000 years and at least one fired clay figurine has been dated between 16,000 and 22,000 years old.
So what makes a human? We’re on pretty shaky ground if we try to use some older concepts such as tool use or tool making. Social interaction has been observed in apes.
What does that leave? Harnessing of fire? Explicit communication? Language, specifically? Art? Dress? Treatment of the dead?
I would also be interested in seeing the thoughts of any Dopers who have majored in anthropology. (I also suspect that if more than one shows up, we might find ourselves in GD .)
I don’t think anybody would dismiss that as useless speculation, but even if people were agreeing on a definition of what a “human” is, there’s not much datas available to answer the question of “when”.
For instance some posters refer to language. But nobody know for sure when language appeared, whether or not the homo sapiens were the first one to use a language (or at least an elaborate form of language). It’s a very debated topic, AFAIK. Some base their educated guesses on physiology (these ones were likely able to speak, these ones probably weren’t), others on the study of linguistics and DNA (pointing to an hypothetical original human group of very limited size), etc…So even if for instance the definition of “human” included the ability to speak, nobody could tell with certainty when speech appeared.
Also, you’re refering to myths. How would we know when our ancestors began to have myths? One could suppose that burials are indicative of some belief, perhaps in an afterlife, so perhaps myths appeared roughly at the same time than the first burials, But once again it’s only a guess. How could we know?
And finally, it seems to me that even if we knew much more about our ancestors and their “relatives”, the definition of humans would probably still be very arbitrary. If the Homo neanderthalensis who were contemporary of the Homo sapiens and had apparently an elaborate “culture” were still roaming amongst us, would they be considered “humans”? They apparently couldn’t breed with us, so perhaps they weren’t “humans”? But they used elaborate crafts and created some art, so perhaps they were “humans”, after all? Had they a language as elaborate as us or not? Had they a “psychology” similar to our? Were they equally, less or even more “intelligent” than us? Nobody knows…
.)
250 thousand? 2.5 Million?