Analyze the Significance of Cultural, Social, Political and Economic Symbols and Practices

1. Analyze the Significance
of Cultural, Social,
Political and Economic
Symbols and Practices
Quarter 2: Lesson 1

2. Objective
-The human origins and the capacity for culture.
-The role of culture in human adaptation.
-Processes of cultural and sociopolitical evolution.

3. 1. What does the picture tell about?
2. What are the different activities that you observed in the
picture?

4. ● This lesson entails the understanding of human evolution
and its implication on the transformation of cultures
across time periods.
● The lesson covers the appearance of the early hominins of
which the modern humans are classified.
● The long process of human evolution and the human
remains such as fossils have been gathered and kept in
museums for further studies that illustrates complex
relationships of human biology and culture.

5. ● To study and understand the processes of
becoming human, it is important that we look
back to the past.
● Humans evolved as they made use of their
peculiar biological features in harnessing the
natural environment and in propagating
themselves widely across the planet as social
beings.

6. Early Homo

7. ● At two million years ago, there
was East African evidence for two
distinct hominin groups:
○ Early Homo and A. boisei,
Early Homo

8. ● The hyper robust australopithecines,
which became extinct around 1.2 million
years ago
● A. boisei became increasingly specialized,
dependent on tough, coarse, gritty,
fibrous savanna vegetation.
A. boisei

9. H. rudolfensis
and H. habilis

10. ● On the basis of its brain size, it
seemed to belong Homo. On the basis
of its back teeth, it seemed more like
Australopithecus.
● Some paleoanthropologist assigned
1470 to H. habilis while others saw it
as an unusual australopithecine.
H. rudolfensis
and H. habilis

11. ● In 1986, it received its own species
name, Homo rudolfensis, from the
lake near which it was found.
● The habilis skull has a more marked
brow ridge and a longer, flatter face.
H. rudolfensis
and H. habilis

12. ● Some think that rudolfensis lived earlier
that and was ancestral to habilis.
● Some think that one or the other gave
rise to H. erectus.
● The only sure conclusion was that
several different kinds of hominin lived
in Africa before and after the advent of
Homo.
H. rudolfensis
and H. habilis

13. H. habilis
and H. erectus

14. ● Another important habilis discovery was
made in 1986 by Tim White of the
University of California, Berkeley.
● Scientist had assumed that H. habilis
would be taller than tiny Lucy (A.
afarensis) because of its small size and
apelike limb bones, its arms were longer
and more apelike than expected.
H. habilis and
H. erectus

15. ● The limb proportions suggested greater
tree-climbing ability than later
hominins had.
● H. habilis may still have sought
occasional refuge in the trees.
H. habilis and
H. erectus

16. ● Two recent hominin fossil unearthed from
Ileret, Kenya were very significant for two
main reasons: they show that
○ (1) H. habilis and H. erectus overlapped
in time rather than being ancestor and
descendant, as had been thought
○ (2) sexual dimorphism in H. erectus was
much greater than expected.
H. habilis and
H. erectus

17. ● One of these fossils was the upper jawbone of
a 1.44-million years old H. habilis.
● The other was the almost complete but
faceless skull of a 1.55-million-year-old H.
erectus. Their names come from their
catalog numbers in the Kenya National
Museum-East Rudolph
H. habilis and
H. erectus

18. ● and their dates were determined from
volcanic ash deposits. These Ileret finds
negated the conventional view that habilis
and then erectus evolved one after the
other. Instead, they apparently split from a
common ancestor prior to 2m.y.a. They lived
side by side in Eastern Africa for perhaps
half a million years.
H. habilis and
H. erectus

19. The Significance
of Hunting

20. ● The ecological niche that
separated H.erectus from both
H.habilis and A.boisei probably
involved greater reliance on
hunting, along with improved
cultural means of adaptation,
including better tools.
The Significance
of Hunting

21. ● Chewing muscles developed less, and
supporting structures, such as jaws
and cranial crests, also were reduced.
● With less chewing, jaws developed less
and so there was no place to put large
teeth.
The Significance
of Hunting

22. ● The size of teeth, which form before they erupt,
is under stricter genetic control than jaw size
and bone size are.
● Natural selection began to operate against the
genes that caused large teeth. In smaller jaws,
large teeth now caused dental crowding,
impaction, pain, sickness, fever and sometimes
death.
The Significance
of Hunting

23. ● As hunting became more important, encounters
with large animals increased.
● Individuals with stronger skulls had better-
protected brains and better survival rates.
● The base of the skull expanded dramatically,
with a ridge of spongy bone across the back for
the attachment of massive neck muscles.
The Significance
of Hunting

24. Paleolithic
tools

25. ● The stone-tool-making
techniques that evolved out of
the Oldowan, or pebble tool,
tradition and that lasted until
about 15,000 years ago are
described by the term Paleolithic.
Paleolithic tools

26. ● It has three divisions: Lower,
Middle and Upper.
● Each part is roughly associated with
a particular stage in human
evolution.
Paleolithic tools

27. ● Lower Paleolithics roughly associated with H.
erectus;
● Middle Paleolithic with archaic H. sapiens,
including the Neandertals of Western Europe
and the Middle East; and
● Upper Paleolithic with anatomically modern
humans.
Three Paleolithics divisions

28. ● The Acheulian hand axe, shaped like a
tear drop, represents a predetermined
shape based on a template in the mind
of the toolmaker.
● Evidence for such a mental template in
the archaeological record suggests a
cognitive leap between earlier
hominins and H. erectus.
Acheulean hand axe

29. ● The Acheulian tradition illustrates
trends in the evolution of technology:
○ greater efficiency, manufacture of
tools with predetermined forms and
for specific tasks, and an
increasingly complex technology.
Acheulean hand axe

30. Archaic H. Sapiens

31. ● In Africa, which was center stage during the
australopithecine period, is joined by Asia and
Europe during the H. erectus and H. sapiens
periods of hominin evolution.
● This doesn’t mean that H. sapiens evolved in
Europe or that most early H. sapiens lived in
Europe.
Archaic H. Sapiens

32. ● Indeed, the fossil evidence suggests that H.
sapiens, like H. erectus before it, originated in
Africa.
● H. Sapiens lived in Africa for more than 100,000
years before starting the settlement of Europe
around 50,000 before present.
● There were probably many more humans in the
tropics than in Europe during the ice ages.
Archaic H. Sapiens

34. Neandertals

35. ● Neandertals were first
discovered in Western Europe.
● The first one was found in 1856
in a German valley called
Neander Valley – tal is the
German word for a valley.
Neandertals

36. ● There have been numerous subsequent
discoveries of Neandertals in Europe and the
Middle East and of archaic human fossils with
similar features in Africa and Asia.
● The Kabwe skull from Zambia is an archaic
H.sapiens with a Neandertal-like brow ridge.
Archaic Chinese fossils with Neandertal-like
features have been found at Maba and Dali.
Neandertals

37. ● By 75,000 b.p after an interglacial interlude, Western
Europe’s hominins again faced extreme cold.
● To deal with this environment, they wore clothes, made
more elaborate tools and hunted reindeer, mammoths and
woolly rhinos.
● The Neandertals were stocky, with large trunks relative to
limb length-a phenotype that minimizes surface area and
thus conserves heat.
Neandertals

39. ● The front teeth show heavy wear,
suggesting that they were used for varied
purposes, including chewing animal hides
to make soft winter clothing out of them.
● The massive Neandertal face showed the
stresses of constantly using the front
teeth for holding and pulling.
Neandertals

40. Homo
Floresiensis

41. ● In 2004 news reports trumpeted the discovery of
bones and tools of a group of tiny humans who
inhabited Flores, an Indonesian island 370 miles of
east of Bali, until fairly recent times.
● Early in hominin evolution, it wasn’t unusual for
different species, even genera, of hominins, to live
at the same time.
Homo Floresiensis

42. ● But until the 2003-2004 discoveries on Flores,
few scientists imagined that a different human
species had survived through 12,000 b.p., and
possibly even later. These tiny people lived,
hunted and gathered on Flores from about
95,000 b.p until at least 13,000 b.p. One of
their most surprising features is the very small
skull, about 360 cm3 – slightly smaller than
the chimpanzee average.
Homo Floresiensis

43. ● A skull and several skeletons of these
miniature people were found in
limestone cave on Flores by a team of
Australian and Indonesian archaeologist,
who assigned them to a new human
species, H. floresiensis (Additional
specimens have been found and
described subsequently; Gugliotta2005;
Roach 2007).
Homo Floresiensis

44. ● The discovery of H. floresiensis, described as a
downsized version of H. erectus, shows that archaic
humans survived much later than had been thought.
● Before modern people reached Flores, which is very
isolated, the island was inhabited only by a select
group of animals that had managed to reach it. These
animals, including H. floresiensis, faced unusual
evolutionary forces that pushed some toward
gigantism and some toward dwarfism.
Homo Floresiensis

45. ● As reported in 2009, an analysis of
the lower limbs and especially an
almost complete left foot and
parts of the right shows that H.
Floresiensis walked upright, but
possessed apelike features (Wilford
2009).
Homo Floresiensis