ANT 150 Video Becoming Human PDF

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Notes on the video for human development from Neanderthals to modern humans...

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Anthropology 150 Video Notes; Becoming Human: First Steps

Salam was an early type of the human species called the Australopithecus or more commonly the Pith. Salam was discovered in what is believed to be the original location of the first humans; Ethiopia, Africa. Salam was very young when she died, which was the age of three. However, we must take into consideration the average life-span of the early humans. Most of them didn't make it past 30. Even then it’s still young. They were able to determine Salam’s age by looking at her teeth. They were looking for the development of adult teeth behind her baby teeth. Salam and her family did not live in the Ethiopia we know today. It was a grassy landscape with forests and lakes. The weather seems to have had an extreme impact on the biome and subsequently the people in it. Salam’s species was one of the first that were bipedal, which means that they would walk on two legs predominantly. They knew this because of her knee bone, the bones were connected by another bone and it could bend all the way down. There are a ton of arguments for why we developed from the way apes and monkeys walk to how humans walk but the most convincing argument is that through tests and studies it was found that it saves a lot of energy, that energy is essential for surviving. When they looked at Salam’s brain they found that her brain had developed a lot slower than a chimp’s brain, which means that her brain was developing more like a modern human’s brain. Scientists found that the first man-made tools were not just rocks or stones, they were broken in a particular way which is far from random.

There is a big difference between the brains of a pith and a homohabilus, it was an expansion of the frontal lobe which means that there is a doubling of reasoning....