Question

Explain the cultural history of the species belonging to the human family

Answer 1

The name Homo sapiens was applied in 1758 by the father of modern biological classification Carolus Linnaeus. It had also been known that human beings physically resemble the primates more closely than any other. Linnaeus, concerned exclusively with similarities in bodily structure, faced only the problem of distinguishing H. sapiens from apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons), which differ from humans in numerous bodily as well as cognitive features. Since Linnaeus’s time, a huge fossil record has come in existence This record contains numerous extinct species that are much more closely related to humans than to today’s apes and that were presumably more similar to H. sapiens behaviorally as well.

Evolution:

Before about 1980 it was widely thought that distinctively hominin fossils could be identified from 14 to 12 million years ago (mya). However, during the 1970s geneticists introduced the use of molecular clocks to calculate how long species had been separated from a common ancestor. The molecular clock concept is based on an assumed regularity in the accumulation of tiny changes in the genetic codes of humans and other organisms.

Moreover, many of the forms were divided into the subgroups, discerning exactly how any of them may have been connected to later species is problematic because of incomplete fossil evidence. Homo may have originated as early as about 2.8 mya, though the record during this time is tantalizingly fragmentary. A variety of incomplete or broken fossils from the earlier period have been placed in the category of earlier homo genus while slightly later fossils from Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge and elsewhere have been called H. habilis. Taken together, this hominin assemblage makes a rather odd assortment that is based more than anything else on a modest increase in the size of the brain compared with that of Australopithecus and its relatives. Even more important in the assignment of these fossils to Homo may be the occurrence in the same geologic deposits of very primitive stone tools. The notion of “man the toolmaker” was very powerful in the early 1960s when H. habilis was named.

Decades later, the species responsible for producing the first stone tools remains unknown, but it likely was relatively small-brained, with a body proportioned quite differently from that of H. sapiens. Found near Kenya’s Lake Turkana in a layer of rock dating to approximately 3.3 mya, during the middle of the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago), the first tools—primitive hammers, anvils, and cutting tools—predate the emergence of Homo by almost 400,000 years. Paleontologists speculate that, barring the finding of an as-yet-undiscovered species of Homo, the tools were likely constructed by members of Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus.

Cranial remains dating to slightly less than 2 mya have been discovered at Koobi Fora, Kenya. These are thought to belong to the same species as the remarkably complete 1.6-million-year-old skeleton named “Turkana Boy,” found at nearby Nariokotome. The nature of the association between the two finds is not yet completely evident, as even partial hominin skeletons are almost vanishingly rare as researchers delve deeper into the past to a time before the introduction of burial practices. Discovered in 1984, the slender-limbed, long-legged Nariokotome skeleton is the first solid evidence of an individual that resembled H. sapiens in overall bodily form. Here, at last, is a representative of a species that was definitely at home on the open savanna, emancipated from the forest and woodland environments to which its predecessors had been confined.