Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
...something like the actual forms and structure of man’s first language. This lies forever beyond the reach of science, in that spoken language in some form is almost certainly coeval with Homo sapiens. The earliest records of written language, the only linguistic fossils man can hope to have, go back no more than about 4,000 or 5,000 years. Attempts to derive human speech from...
in language: Physiological and physical basis of speech )The human being has almost certainly been in some sense a speaking animal from early in the emergence of Homo sapiens as a recognizably distinct species. The earliest known systems of writing go back perhaps some 5,000 years. This means that for many hundreds of thousands of years human languages were transmitted from generation to generation and were developed entirely as spoken means...
the species to which all modern human beings belong. Homo sapiens is one of several species grouped into the genus Homo, but it is the only one that is not extinct. See also human evolution.
first standardized tradition of toolmaking of Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens. Named for the type site, Saint-Acheul, in Somme département, in northern France, Acheulean tools were made of stone with good fracture characteristics, including chalcedony, jasper, and flint; in regions lacking these, quartzite might be used. During the Acheulean period, which lasted...
...the savanna regions and probably in the forest as well, though the forest may have been much thinner in the great dry phases of Africa’s climatic history. In the second phase Homo sapiens, modern man and woman, appeared in the region and absorbed or eclipsed the thinly scattered original inhabitants over a 100,000-year stretch. The third phase covered less than...
...excavations carried out since the late 1960s within a complex of South African coastal caves. Usually referred to as Klasies River Mouth, the site has yielded some of the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens.
...of Australopithecus africanus, a species of gracile (slender) hominin dating from 2.5 to 3 million years ago or more. The nearby Cave of Hearths yielded the right side of an early Homo sapiens child’s jaw, dating from about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
During this time early humans also developed those social, cognitive, and linguistic traits that distinguish Homo sapiens. Some of the earliest fossils associated with Homo sapiens, dated from about 120,000 to 80,000 years ago, have been found in South Africa at the Klasies River Mouth Cave in Eastern Cape, while at Border Cave on the...
Significant Homo sapiens cranial and dental fragments have been found together with Middle Paleolithic artifacts. Such assemblages have been unearthed at Dingcun, Shanxi; Changyang, Hubei; Dali, Shaanxi; Xujiayao, Shanxi; and Maba, Guangdong. Morphological characteristics such as the shovel-shaped incisor, broad nose, and mandibular torus link these remains to...
...The earliest flakes and chopper tools date from about 40,000 bc. The most important discovery at Niah was the remains of a skeleton of an adolescent male, about 38,000 bc, the earliest Homo sapiens remains found in the Far East to that time; these bones are of particular interest because this individual lived at the same time as Solo man of Java, the Rhodesioids of Africa, and...
...1934 Tabūn also yielded a series of fossil remains from the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. The fossils suggest that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and early modern humans (H. sapiens) alternately occupied the region.
...site in New South Wales, southeastern Australia, known for ancient human remains discovered there in 1968 and 1974. The Mungo remains consist of two relatively complete fossil skeletons of Homo sapiens; hearths and artifacts were also found at the site. At Mungo is the earliest evidence of human presence in Australia, a destination that could have been reached only by an...
...buried skeleton of a four-year-old child, dating to 25,000 years ago, was found. The unusual remains, which combine features of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and modern humans (H. sapiens), have led paleoanthropologists to speculate about a possible relationship between the two species.
...ago. The late age and the characteristics of some of the fossils and associated artifacts found at Vindija suggest that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and early modern humans (H. sapiens) elsewhere in Europe coexisted for a time.
discipline within philosophy that seeks to unify the several empirical investigations of human nature in an effort to understand individuals as both creatures of their environment and creators of their own values.
...is something more like well-being or flourishing than any feeling of contentment. Aristotle argues, in fact, that happiness is activity of the rational soul in accordance with virtue. Human beings must have a function, because particular types of humans (e.g., sculptors) do, as do the parts and organs of individual human beings. This function must be unique to humans; thus, it...
in law, philosophy of: Greek thought )...transcendental reality is more firmly related to things as they are: it comprises that which they will become as their potentialities unfold in nature toward the end that is theirs in nature. Man, in his nature, is moral, rational, and social, and his law may be judged by the extent to which it facilitates the development of these innate qualities.
in philosophy, Western: Philosophy )...more important for humankind to do in regard to itself. The first question, then, is what kind of perfection a human being, as human, can reach. In answering this question, Aristotle observed that human beings, as social animals par excellence, can reach as individuals only some of the perfections possible for humans as such. Cats are more or less all alike in their functions; thus each can...
...supposed supernatural creation of life and society. Darwin had Unitarian roots, and his breathless notes show how his radical Dissenting understanding of equality and antislavery framed his image of mankind’s place in nature: “Animals—whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals.—Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind?” Some...
...this work to Princess Elizabeth (1618–79), daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, titular queen of Bohemia, in correspondence with whom he developed his moral philosophy. According to Descartes, a human being is a union of mind and body, two radically dissimilar substances that interact in the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland must be the uniting point because it is the only...
in Cartesianism: Mind, body, and man )Most Cartesians believed that the mind and body interact. When asked how this is possible, Régis gave the standard Cartesian reply: human beings experience the interaction, and God can and does make it take place, even if we cannot understand how. As for the question of how ideas represent objects, Rohault spoke for all Cartesians when he asserted that God can make ideas represent...
Existentialism, true to its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was oriented toward two major themes: the analysis of human existence, or Being, and the centrality of human choice. Thus its chief theoretical energies were devoted to ontology and decision.
in Existentialism: Nature of Existentialist thought and manner )...man’s relationships with things and with other men, existence is always a being-in-the-world—i.e., in a concrete and historically determinate situation that limits or conditions choice. Man is therefore called Dasein (“there being”) because he is defined by the fact that he exists, or is in the world and inhabits it.
in Existentialism: Social and historical projections of Existentialism )...It is indispensable, moreover, that a positive datum be perceived in possibility, a datum that is verifiable with appropriate techniques and that, while not offering infallible guarantees, allows man to project and to act in the world with calculated risks and with a prudent trust.
Sartre’s definition of man as a being of possibilities that finds or loses itself in the choice that it makes in regard to itself refers to Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as a being that has to materialize itself. For Sartre, freedom is the basic characteristic of man; thus Sartre belongs to the tradition of the great French moralist philosophers.
...to detect that structure and its dialectic; but nature, as the realm of externality, cannot be rational through and through, though the rationality prefigured in it becomes gradually explicit when man appears. In man nature rises to self-consciousness.
in Hegelianism: Theological radicalism )...infinite; and Feuerbach established a philosophical anthropology in his major work Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; Eng. trans., The Essence of Christianity, new ed. 1957), in which man reappropriates his essence, which he had alienated from himself by hypostatizing it in the idea of God. The essence of man is reason, will, and love; and these three faculties comprise the...
These attitudes took shape in concord with a sense of personal autonomy that first was evident in Petrarch and later came to characterize humanism as a whole. An intelligence capable of critical scrutiny and self-inquiry was by definition a free intelligence; the intellectual virtue that could analyze experience was an integral part of that more extensive virtue that could, according to many...
in philosophy, Western: Humanism )...study of Classical literature became the foundation of the philosophy of Renaissance humanism. Generally suspicious of science and indifferent to religion, humanism emphasized anew the centrality of human beings in the universe and their supreme value and importance. Characteristic of this emphasis was the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) by Giovanni Pico della...
...existence and to its subjective, living, emotional character. What a human being requires in life, said Kierkegaard, is not infinite inquiry but the boldness of resolute decision and commitment. The human essence is not to be found in thinking but in the existential conditions of emotional life, in anxiety and despair. The titles of three of Kierkegaard’s books—Fear and...
...Materialists, such as Julien de La Mettrie, the French physician whose appropriately titled L’Homme machine (1747; Man a Machine, 1750) applied Descartes’s view about animals to man himself. Denis Diderot, an 18th-century French Encyclopaedist, supported a broadly Materialist outlook by considerations drawn from physiology, embryology, and the study of heredity; and his...
(from Greek mikros kosmos, “little world”), a Western philosophical term designating man as being a “little world” in which the macrocosm, or universe, is reflected. The ancient Greek idea of a world soul (e.g., in Plato) animating the universe had as a corollary the idea of the human body as a miniature universe animated by its own soul. The notion of the...
...Hegel maintained, to the sphere of mind or spirit, which was characterized instead as involving a continual drive toward self-transcendence and the removal of limitations upon thought and action. Man was not to be conceived according to the mechanistic models of 18th-century Materialism; essentially he was free, but the freedom that constituted his nature could only achieve fulfillment...
...man of action. The end of the first is wisdom; of the second, the gratification of appetite; and of the third, practical distinction. These reflect the three elements, or active principles, within a man: rational judgment of good; a multitude of conflicting appetites for particular gratifications; and spirit, or will, manifested as resentment against infringements both by others and by the...
...law?” In response to this challenge he produced a masterpiece of speculative anthropology. The argument follows on that of his first Discourse by developing the proposition that natural man is good and then tracing the successive stages by which man has descended from primitive innocence to corrupt sophistication.
...questions, he suspends judgment about all matters whatsoever. On the contrary, he has some ethical convictions about which he is completely confident. As he tells his judges in his defense speech: human wisdom begins with the recognition of one’s own ignorance; the unexamined life is not worth living; ethical virtue is the only thing that matters; and a good human being cannot be harmed...
in Socrates: The human resistance to self-reflection )But this can only be the beginning of Socrates’ explanation, for it leads to further questions. Why should Aristophanes have written in this way about Socrates? The latter must have been a well-known figure in 423, when Clouds was produced, for Aristophanes typically wrote about and mocked figures who already were familiar to his audience. Furthermore, if, as Socrates...
...of the flow of passions, or apratisamkhyānivodha), is momentary. The primary object of this exhaustive analysis was an understanding not so much of outer nature as of the human person (pudgala). The human person, however, consists in material (rūpa) and mental (nāma) factors, which led to an account of the various elements of matter....
...understood as one world created by God according to definite laws and principles and according to an inner plan. The decisive aspect of creation, however, is that God fashioned humans according to the divine image and made the creation subject to them. This special position of humans in the creation, which makes them coworkers of God in the preservation and consummation of...
in Christianity: What it is to be human )The starting point for the Christian understanding of what it is to be human is the recognition that humans are created in the image of God. This idea views God and humans joined with one another through a mysterious connection. God is thought of as incomprehensible and beyond substance; yet God desired to reflect the divine image in one set of creatures and chose humans for this. Man as the...
Augustine conceived of human beings as composites of two substances, body and soul, of which the soul is by far the superior. The body, nevertheless, is not to be excluded from human nature, and its eventual resurrection from the dead is assured by Christian faith. The soul’s immortality is proved by its possession of eternal and unchangeable Truth.
in Platonism: Augustinian Platonism )...cannot act on the superior. This affected both his ethical doctrine and his epistemology. On the other hand, he differed from the philosophers who influenced him in his insistence that not only man but higher spiritual beings as well are mutable and peccable, liable to sin and fall, and in his consequent stress on the necessity of divine grace. His crucial doctrine that man’s destiny is...
Thomas, on the contrary, noted the inclusion of the history of nature in the history of the spirit and at the same time noted the importance of the history of spirit for the history of nature. Man is situated ontologically (i.e., by his very existence) at the juncture of two universes, “like a horizon of the corporeal and of the spiritual.” In man there is not only a distinction...
According to the Qurʾān, God created two apparently parallel species of creatures, man and jinn, the one from clay and the other from fire. About the jinn, however, the Qurʾān says little, although it is implied that the jinn are endowed with reason and...
Humanity
From the ancient Middle Eastern point of view, man was created to serve the gods, and he does so in the hope that the gods appreciate it and will reward him for it. The gods need food and drink and depend on men to supply them. After the Flood the biblical Noah won God’s goodwill, for “the Lord smelled the pleasing odor” (Genesis 8:21) of the tasty flesh and fowl offered up to...
Also important is an Old Babylonian “Myth of Atrahasis,” which, in motif, shows a relationship with the account of the creation of man to relieve the gods of toil in the “Enki and Ninmah” myth, and with a Sumerian account of the Flood in the “Eridu Genesis.” The Atrahasis myth, however, treats these themes with noticeable originality and remarkable depth. It...
in Mesopotamian religion: Human origin )Two different notions about human origin seem to have been current in ancient Mesopotamian religions. Brief mentions in Sumerian texts indicate that the first human beings grew from the earth in the manner of grass and herbs. One of these texts, the “Myth of the Creation of the Hoe,” adds a few details: Enlil removed heaven from earth in order to make room for seeds to come up, and...
The origin of man is usually linked immediately to the cosmogony. Man, for instance, is placed on the earth by God, or in some other way his origin is from heaven. Nevertheless, it is only in mythologies influenced by philosophical reflections that the place of man becomes the conspicuous centre of the cosmogony (e.g., Pythagoreanism, a Greek mystical philosophical system; Orphism, a Greek...
in myth: Animals and plants in myth )The Great Chain of Being that dominated Western thought throughout the Middle Ages made man both the highest of the animals and the lowest of the gods. Man’s body was like that of the animals: corporeal, sensate, and mortal. Man’s spirit or intellect resembled the gods: incorporeal, rational, and immortal. The great surge of ethnological and biologic data and theories from the 16th century on...
In Shintō it is commonly said that “man is kami’s child.” First, this means that a person was given his life by kami and that his nature is therefore sacred. Second, it means that daily life is made possible by kami, and, accordingly, the personality and life of people are worthy of respect. An individual must revere the basic human rights of everyone...
The idea of man as a microcosm, already illustrated in the cosmogony, is further developed in the Bundahishn .
the total cessation of life processes that eventually occurs in all living organisms. The state of human death has always been obscured by mystery and superstition, and its precise definition remains controversial, differing according to culture and legal systems.
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) first appeared in Africa about 200,000 to 150,000 years ago. They arrived in the Middle East about 100,000 years ago, apparently living in the same environmental settings as the Neanderthals. Not until 40,000 years ago did modern humans arrive in Europe, but in less than 10,000 years they supplanted Neanderthals completely. Homo sapiens also spread...
...the early Pleistocene and is known from northern China and Java by roughly 1 million years ago. Representatives of this group are known from many sites, and these beings constituted the dominant human species for more than a million years. The species H. sapiens, to which all modern humans belong, evolved in the later part of the middle Pleistocene, and early forms of the species are...
Because energy, in the form of heat, is lost at each step, or trophic level (q.v.), chains do not normally encompass more than four or five trophic levels. In overpopulated areas people commonly increase the total food supply by cutting out one step in the food chain: instead of consuming animals that eat cereal grains, the people themselves consume the grains. Because the food chain is...
...of 20 kilohertz would have a period of 0.00005 second (20,000 wavelengths/second × 0.00005 second/wavelength = 1). Between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz lies the frequency range of hearing for humans. The physical property of frequency is perceived physiologically as pitch, so that the higher the frequency, the higher the perceived pitch. There is also a relation between the wavelength of...
A different type of natural selection occurs when the fitness of a heterozygote exceeds the fitness of both homozygotes. The maintenance in human populations of the severe hereditary disease sickle cell anemia is owing to this form of selection. The disease allele (HbS) produces a specific type of hemoglobin that causes distortion (sickling) of the red blood...
in heredity: Nonrandom mating )In humans, various degrees of inbreeding have been practiced in different cultures. In most cultures today, matings of first cousins are the maximal form of inbreeding condoned by society. Apart from ethical considerations, a negative outcome of inbreeding is that it increases the likelihood of homozygosity of deleterious recessive alleles originating from common ancestors, called homozygosity...
Either a single factor or a great number of minor factors, all culminating at or near one date, determine the length of gestation. Several minor variations are known: in man, gestation for males is three to four days longer than that for females; and in cattle, bulls are carried about one day longer than heifers. In both species gestation of twins is five to six days less than for singlets. In...
mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.
...a transition to the mid-Holocene, marked by a progressive change to pine forest and then oak, beech, or mixed forest. The mean annual temperature reached 2.5° C above that of today. Neolithic humans pressed forward across Europe and Asia. In the Canadian Arctic and in Manitoba the mean temperature passed 4° C above present averages. It was a “milk-and-honey” period for...
One attribute that sharply distinguishes man from the rest of nature is his highly developed capacity for thought, feeling, and deliberate action. Here and there in other animals, rudiments, approximations, and limited elements of this capacity may occasionally be found; but the full-blown development that is called a mind is unmatched elsewhere in nature.
in mind )To the extent that mind is manifested in observable phenomena, it has frequently been regarded as a peculiarly human possession. Some theories, however, posit the existence of mind in other animals besides human beings. One theory regards mind as a universal property of matter. According to another view, there may be superhuman minds or intelligences, or a single absolute mind, a transcendent...
in humans, the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself. Relations found between various types of stimulation (e.g., light waves and sound waves) and their associated percepts suggest inferences that can be made about the properties of the perceptual process;...
the process by which human beings developed on Earth from now-extinct primates. Viewed zoologically, we humans are Homo sapiens, a culture-bearing, upright-walking species that lives on the ground and first evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. We are now the only living members of what many zoologists refer to as the human tribe, Hominini, but there is...
any activity—solitary, between two persons, or in a group—that induces sexual arousal. There are two major determinants of human sexual behaviour: the inherited sexual response patterns that have evolved as a means of ensuring reproduction and that are a part of each individual’s genetic inheritance, and the degree of restraint or other types of influence exerted on the...
Extensive experience with mouse embryonic stem cells made it possible for scientists to grow human embryonic stem cells from early human embryos, and the first human stem cell line was created in 1998. Human embryonic stem cells are in many respects similar to mouse embryonic stem cells, but they do not require LIF for their maintenance. The human embryonic stem cells form a wide variety of...
Yet another provisional conception of thinking applies the term to any sequence of covert symbolic responses (i.e., occurrences within the human organism that can serve to represent absent events). If such a sequence is aimed at the solution of a specific problem and fulfills the criteria for reasoning, it is called directed thinking. Reasoning is a process of piecing together the results of...
View-of-the-base-of-the-human-skull-showing-theView of the base of the human skull, showing the central location of the foramen magnum.[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]
Major-sources-of-natural-background-radiation-and-their-respective-contributionsFigure 4: Major sources of natural background radiation and their respective contributions to the …[Credits : From the National Radiological Protection Board, Living with Radiation, 3rd ed., Reading, …]
Skeletal-and-muscular-structures-of-a-humans-leg-and-aSkeletal and muscular structures of a human’s leg (left) and a gorilla’s leg (right).[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]
The-skeletal-structure-of-a-human-being-and-of-aThe skeletal structure of a human being (left) and of a gorilla (right)[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]
Comparison-of-the-pelvis-and-lower-limbs-of-a-chimpanzeeComparison of the pelvis and lower limbs of a chimpanzee, an australopith, and a modern human.[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]
Amount-of-change-in-the-evolutionary-history-of-three-hypothetical(Left) Amount of change in the evolutionary history of three hypothetical living species (C, D, and …[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]
Human-being-maleHuman being (Homo sapiens), male.[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]
Click-on-each-individual-for-a-larger-imageClick on each individual for a larger image.[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]
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