Determining Human Life

Many people can’t properly define the term human. It is a struggle to many who have no background with even coming close to the actual answer. In anthropology we can commonly define exactly what a human is. Whether it is through the changes of species throughout life or even the development of tools. No one really, truly understands a human, and when to properly use that term. Throughout the millions of years we have come to terms of the appropriate use of the term human. To me being human before never included body aspects. Such as the skeletal make-up or little things that differ from others. I had always thought it as an emotional aspect. I honestly didn’t even know the difference really from any other species before now. I just thought since we all lived and breathed we were all connected in some way Not completely but that was the main idea. During this class I learned differently from that and I know see the differences that were made before humans were even evolved. There are many aspects associated with defining a human. One of those of course would be the brain size of an individual human. As all of us know that an average human’s brains size is approximately 1350 cc... Throughout the study of the different species we had noticed a pattern. The closer to modern life we get the bigger the brain sizes are. We see that the brain size has hit the same amount as the modern human and that does indicate that it seems that we can show the comparisons to them. Species have gone past the human brain size. Once they had gone past the brain size of humans we tend to not compare them as closely as we did before. We can still compare the closer ones to the humans themselves with the comparison to the brain size. Another main feature that was presented in the determination of becoming a human would be the term bipedalism. Bipedalism is a main staple in humans today. They show that we now walk on all fours at all times. With species gaining this ability we see that the foramen magnum is now being placed at the bottom of the skull, letting the spin go straight down the body. While the early Homo erectus show little signs of bipedalism they do have the foramen magnum moving closer to the bottom of the skull. This development occurs in the fact that humans walk on twos and now these species related to humans will also start to walk on twos. This affects the make-up of the entire skeletal structure as well. While these species are now turning to bipedalism we see that the structure of the skeleton is shifting as well. With early hominids they were completely different structurally. Let’s take the feet as an example. Before they had an opposing big toe that helps them with many activities. This was used to grab items with their feet and made climbing trees a lot easier. With bipedalism coming into effect they now have no reason for that opposing big toe and there for it becomes a loss. They now develop a big toe where it is closer to the others and not as strong and useful as it once was. This is a major difference in the skeletal structure that leads to these early hominoids being compared to humans. As we move closer to human life we seem to understand the development of tools in these species. Many of us today think about tools as an electric drill or saw. Before all of that we didn’t have anything like that. These species had to develop and create their own tools and start to develop a plan in making them. This was a huge step in the making. Once tools were developed this gave us the certainty that those species can be compared to humans. This is so because in the making of tools they have to use the mind in many different ways. First they had to develop the idea and have a thought process of what they wanted to do. Next they needed to memorize what they had thought of from the beginning. Once memorized they then had to make that what they had developed in their minds. This was a huge step due