Elevator Speech

"Excuse me ma'am, what are those papers you are carrying? You sure seem to have a lot of them."

"These are articles and studies about human evolution. What separates us from other species that have been seen throughout history and how we have evolved."

"I've never taken much of an interest in human evolution, I was a political science major in undergrad. Whats the importance of evolution, it's all in the past anyways."

"Yes, it is all in the past but it can have the ability to shape our future. Knowing where we came from and how we evolved can give scientists clues as to how we might possibility evolve in the future. If more funding was put into the study of human evolution it gives us a better picture of the species we derived from and a clearer phylogenetic tree. These phylogenies show which traits died off and which kept moving throughout generations. With more information being discovered everyday about human evolution it is difficult to keep up with all of the information and many discoveries can go unpublished because of lack of funding. If you put in a good word and have more funding distributed to these research facilities they can publish more data for the world to have access to. I know it might not seem like the most important way to spend government money right now in a post-corona virus world where we are still trying to find a vaccine but more information about our past can give us ideas and predictions as how how we could evolve. Here, take my articles and read about how humans have evolved and transpired throughout the last 1000 years, I promise you will learn something and even inspired."

Blog Post 5 - When Two Hominin's Meet

     If two different species of hominin's met way back 1.26 million years ago how would they interact with one another? So a couple of hypothetical questions arise here for me. Were ancestral hominin's eyes just as temperamental as they are today? While they didn't have mirrors to view themselves could they distinguish the looks between their species and another? Different species but maybe same language? And the most important, did they really care?

     So the first question I have to think about, were ancestral hominid eyes just as temperamental as they are today? I say temperamental because modern day human eyes are completely unreliable. From personal experience, my eyes are absolutely useless. If glasses weren't invented I would have been killed off because I am completely useless with partially working eyes. If ancestral hominid eyes were only half as blind as me, could they really see the difference in species? Two species of hominin's look generally the same in height, build and posture. With bad eyesight they would be able to roughly recognize the outline of someone approaching them but not be able to make out and distinguishing features of their face. If a species that look similar to them is walking towards them they would register them as a friend, not a foe because they look like their family/tribe members. Granted, this all depends on the possibility that they are near or far-sighted.

     Mirrors weren't invented yet, meaning that these ancestral species didn't have a clear picture as to what they looked like themselves. Yes there are water reflections and such but those aren't as clear of an image. Not knowing what you look like exactly could give a sense of dissociation, you aren't aware whether or not you look like everyone else around you. Yes, they were seeing the people around them and that lived with them either in the same family or tribe but that still brings about variation. If two different species interacted with each other and only looked slightly different from each other in only trivial things such as skull size and bone length they might not even recognize them as a different species. There is variation in physical characteristics within species so if those characteristics in others aren't too vastly different it might not be registered as a different species but as just a different looking person.

     They biggest problem I see arising in two different species is the mode of communication. The different forms and ways of communicating is what would set apart different species or even same species but different tribe/family. There was no consensus of language back then, no parameters to follow, they were just communicating however worked for them. While another species might look similar enough in physicality to not pose an immediate threat, once one species doesn't respond to the communication the other is imposing I would imagine problems would start to arise. Even today it can get frustrating communicating with someone who speaks another language because there is so much misunderstanding. I find it very doubtful that two different species had the same form of language. Pointing only goes so far and could be good to use temporarily but I also doubt if that didn't get in the way of species. 

     My last question posed is, did they even really care? In modern times it is seen as important to know where someone came from but back over a million years ago it might not have. Yes these are clearly two different species but maybe they didn't see it that way. Maybe they coexisted either together or peacefully separately, we are unaware if they felt threatened or not by one another. If there was no threat to their safety I like to think that they wouldn't even bother with each other because there was no reason to. Also, their similarities could have made them to believe that they were the same, again meaning that they didn't care or recognize the differences between them. It was a very different world back then and it is impossible to truly understand how they thought, acted and felt towards themselves and one another. It is fun to speculate about who they were and how they interacted and I like to guess that they had bad eyesight and found a way to coexist.

Bipedalism

     The evolution of bipedalism have set humans apart from other apes entirely, we are the only ones who exclusively walk in an upright position. There are many features of bipedalism but what I find interesting is the curvature of the spine. The spine of humans is curved in the lower back as to absorb shock when walking. Early humans also had a similar curve to their spine. While the lower back is meant to absorb the shock of walking, humans do experience spinal injuries and problems do to the amount of stress placed on the spine. The unique curvature of the human spine helps us keep standing upright and keeping our balance. The lower backbone is strongly curved so that the upper body sits above the pelvis and the backbone is aligned for an upright position.
     There are many aspects of the human body that went into the evolution of bipedalism but I feel like the spine was one of the more important transitions. It has to be strong enough to absorb shock and support the body while also having the ability to move around. 

If humans came from chimps, why are there still chimps?

     Wow, well isn't this the million dollar question. How did humans evolve? Where did humans come from? While I have accepted the fact that I will never have a definitive answer within my lifetime, I still like to exhaust some possibilities.
     Growing up I wasn't religious, never went to church, never learned the story of Adam and Eve and didn't really know who Jesus was until probably around the 6th grade. Around that age I had never thought about where humans came from evolutionarily until it was brought up by a peer. A very basic 7th grade education of evolution had me pretty convinced that humans did in fact evolve from primates and not knowing how phylogenies worked, in my head humans came directly from primates. Fast forward a few years into college when I got a much better education on evolution I learned that there are a several ways humans could have evolved and that not one of them is technically more accurate than the other, just accepted by the greater majority.
     While I am still a firm believer in evolution, I have come to the conclusion that I can never make a definitive conclusion/decision about the evolution and origin of humans because new information is arising every single day! Coming to that, the question posed was, "If humans came from chimps, why are there still chimps?" This question makes me think, "Well maybe we didn't come from chimps but instead we just share a common ancestor and we both have derived traits." This seems like the most logical answer in my mind because why wouldn't all chimps undergo this evolution. Evolution is involuntary, it happens over thousands of years so how come only a select few of chimps evolved to become present day humans and others stayed chimps. Something there just doesn't add up...
    A post I read said that humans didn't come from apes, humans ARE apes. We belong to the same subcategory of "great apes" that orangutans, gorillas, apes, bonobos and chimpanzees also belong to. I don't know why in common conversation we don't refer to ourselves as apes, maybe there is an underlying pretext that makes it sound inherently bad. Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor that I believe took two routes in the evolution fork in the road. One evolved to become present day chimps and the other evolved to become present day humans and a lot has happened between when they were the a common ancestor and the versions of which we recognize today. So many other influential aspects have been introduced that complicate the problem and make it harder to understand. Hopefully a common ancestor can be found and analyzed to answer this question but with that answers comes a million more unanswerable questions.
     This isn't an easy question to answer because it is very controversial but there is one known aspect of it all, humans and chimps share 98.7% of their genetic sequencing. Theoretically, if humans came from chimps wouldn't they share 100% of their genetic sequencing? Or at least 99.9% of it? We are so similar yet have a difference of 1.3% that distinguishes us drastically from one another.

Decolonizing Human Evolution

     While I was reading these three articles I kept jotting down notes and copying certain words or phrases that really stood out to me as provoking thoughts that say what we've been thinking for years but almost too afraid to say out loud. Being in classes where it is free to speak your mind and racial topics come up, I am very comfortable to be the first to point out my privilege as a white person and my disadvantages of being a woman. Reading Kathleen Sterling's journal article I kept thinking how hard some situations have been for me because I am a woman but how much harder they probably would have been if I was a black woman. I think it is important to keep the conversation going about the discriminations and obstacles different groups of people see on a day to day basis and to keep gender and race in those discussions because it is affecting someone. Just like Sterling said, Discussion is not action and discussion is not enough to counter the effects of a broader racist and sexist system, we need to keep talking about it. Once we stop discussing and pushing the conversation forward, the moment these groups of people get left out of the conversation because society is so quick to silence people who don't "fit in to the status quo".
     I think that in my college lectures, students and professors are very willing to have these controversial discussions and be very open about privileges of groups of people and point out flaws in  the way evolutionary thinking has been altered. In my professional life it seems like the last thing anyone wants to talk about and are so close-minded or in the dark about problems because they refuse to address it or talk about it. If I went into work and started talking about bad evolutionary thinking, I bet money that at least one of my coworkers would say something along the lines of "well it's better than it was" or "we have come such a long way". That's what Dunsworth mentioned, that bad evolutionary thinking is used to justify civil rights restrictions, human rights violations, white supremacy and the patriarchy. Evolution should not justify these.
     There was a sentence in Dunsworth post that I just really liked and felt was very prevalent in our world today, "Standard English is unequipped to deal with many of the ambiguous aspects of sex and gender." I think this statement is so true and I have run into this problem myself even this past semester in Biological Anthropology. Reading articles or posts about sex and gender can be very confusing and I do think that a big part of that is the language we are using, these two terms are so intertwined with each other that it's difficult to separate them anymore and make the difference. Maybe new definitions or new terms all together could help with clarification in the future and pave the way for new thinking and more modern ideas.


References

https://app.perusall.com/courses/human-evolution-3/03_athreya-and-ackermann-2018-colonialism-narratives-human-origins-asia-africa

https://evolution-institute.org/it-is-unethical-to-teach-evolution-without-confronting-racism-and-sexism/

https://app.perusall.com/courses/human-evolution-3/05_sterling_2015_black_feminist-theory-in-prehistory

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog for my summer Anthropology course! Here I will share and post ideas, reflections, thoughts and opinions on articles and prompts.