OVERVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY : WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY ABOUT ?

OVERVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY : WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY ABOUT ?

By Professor Charles D. Brown , Esq.

Wayne County Community College District’s Anthropology 152 introduces students to the four classical and overlapping branches of anthropology.

Anthropology 153 focuses on PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, however, the other 3 branches are interwoven with the physical or biological or evolutionary anthropological investigations.

1) PHYSICAL or EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY discovers the truth of the biological theory and facts of human evolutionary origins and human physical diversity.

2) ARCHAEOLOGY and ETHNOLOGY explore the development of culture through the Truly Civilized Stone Age and so-called Civilization, examining artifacts, material culture, fossil remains, etc. and examining theories about Modes of Making a Living from cooperative/egalitarian foraging and horticulture to large scale domestication of plants and animals with private property, greed, economic classes, the state and male supremacy.

3) ETHNOLOGY OR SOCIO-CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY , also gives an understanding of diverse customs , histories, traditions and religions , economic classes, nations and “race” in the present historical era of capitalism and globalism.

4) LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY investigates language or symbolic communication , like culture, an exclusive human capacity enabling us to share knowledge and experience with people remote from us in time and space; and like culture , shaping our worldviews and perception and interpretation of events; and , importantly, like culture, inherited from past generations of humans.

In this class, I teach the essential principles and truths discovered by anthropology .

Anthropology is the study of human beings in all times and place; study that is historical , systematic and objective, empirical , that is to say scientific : based on logical consideration of material evidence, and testing natural theories ; from 100's of thousands of years ago to the present; from Detroit to the other ends of the Earth. This is in contrast with understanding humans based on whims, superstition, untested intuition , uncritical faith or unquestioned authority or supernatural beings. It is an understanding of human societies and individuals biologically and historically, that is as they have changed and developed , evolved ,over time and many generations of individual selves. It seeks to be truly holistic in approach and scope , looking for the _whole_ truth, nothing but the truth. It welcomes contributions to its understanding of people from all the other academic disciplines, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. It even considers respectfully and sympathetically systems of thought and belief from cultures very different than our own.

In fact , learning the culture or customs, beliefs , ideas, religions of foreign and other peoples is the original focus of anthropology in contrast to sociology, psychology and history , the other social sciences , and literature and the arts, which focus on Western and European society's ways of being. In this regard , it is important to be honest and confess that anthropology and ethnology was often a "handmaiden" of European colonialism and imperialism, especially in its beginning. Anthropology and ethnology have significantly , though not completely, overthrown that legacy today and, predominantly champions the interests of the foreign peoples who are the main subjects of its study. Also, many anthropologists today study American and European culture, with applied anthropology to practical problems "at home" a major section of the discipline today (“ see ourselves as others see us “). There is a sense in which sociology is the anthropology of capitalist societies .

Symbolic communication Anthropology's special contribution to scientific understanding of humanity is the concept of _culture_, or the symbolic nature of human behavior, communication and social organization. Culture is behavior ruled by a mental system of shared customs, traditions, values, ideas and material products of a particular group of people. Culture and language , or symbolic communication , are unique and exclusive characteristics of human beings, the species Homo sapiens . No other animal species has them, despite the exaggerated claims of some primatologists for chimps and gorillas.

What is symbolic communication ? What is a symbol or symbolic sign in the technical linguistic and anthropological sense ? It using something to represent something it is not. Almost all words are symbolic signs. Here is my name : CHARLES BROWN. Those marks on the paper are not me; But they are used to represent me. This is using something to represent something that it is not. The technical term is that there is an arbitrary relation between the sign and the thing signified.

The opposite of a symbolic sign is an indexical sign . The relationship between an indexical sign and what it signifies is not arbitrary (conventional, traditional) but necessary. The classical example is smoke and fire. Smoke is an indexical sign of fire.

The fact that a symbolic sign is not what it signifies , give humans the power to talk , communicate with each other about things and the experiences of people that are not immediately present but DISPLACED IN TIME OR SPACE from them ! And cultural/linguistic learning is learning from the experience of other people, including learning from people who are now dead, learning about experiences that are not ours ; are displaced from our immediate senses.

So, signing or symboling , in the forms of both language and culture, is our species’ unique activity. And, importantly , also, most of human _learning_ is through symbols, culture, not so much by imitating, like other species. Not by "monkey-see, monkey do" imitation. Most of our learning ( as opposed to inborn or genetically based knowledge) is through culture, not from experience.

. Just to further explain the concept of arbitrariness, it refers to the relationship between the signifier and the signified. So, if the sounds d-o-g are used to refer to things that are dogs, we see that those sounds do not "imitate" or are not naturally related to dogs. The arbitrariness of a sign refers to the fact that in a sign something is used to represent something that it is not. Two _different_ things are arbitrarily identified, treated as the _same_.

I have theorized that the reason culture became our unique characteristic is that once some hominin discovered them way, way back when, they were highly adaptive because they allowed past generations to pass on their experience to future generations across the "death barrier" . Why ? Because a symbol represents something by something it is not ( the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified) so that living generation can learn from a symbol about the experience of dead generations, when it could not learn from directly observing and imitating the dead, since the dead aren't able to demonstrate things to be learned, obviously, because they are dead.

But since a symbol uses something, a signifier, to represent something that it is not, the signified, because of this _arbitrary_ ( non-imitative) relation, the dead ancestor's "demonstration" can be learned by the living descendent through the signifier, through the thing (word or cultural object) that is _not_ the dead ancestor. Cultural learning allows us to learn from the experience of many, many...many of our ancestors. This was its main adaptive advantage when our species originated in founding culture. Culture also allowed learning more from other living members of the species. Human children could learn a lot more from their parents than other species, who were restricted to teaching their young by demonstration and imitation.

Other species have to "give a picture" or demonstration of what they are teaching. They can show, but not tell. That a signifier is not what it signifies means it communicates by a non-picture or non-imitation of what it represents. Culturally inherited adaptations give human species high Darwinian fitness, because cultural adaptations are caused by the adaptive problem that they solve . 1) Symbolic thinking allows imagination and invention of tools and organized activities that adapt to survival problems. 2) Symbolic communication also allows inheritance of inventions.

These 2 capacities of Culture and language, symbolic communication, provided the human species with an enormous adaptive and Darwinian selective advantage compared to other animal species in the hundreds of thousands of years that the human species came to be and inhabit the whole globe, again to a greater extent than other animal species. This is because it made humans extremely interconnected both with living other humans, so that human labor and methods of physical survival are very _social_, not individualistic; and perhaps more importantly, connected to dead generations of the species through , again, language and culture, as in ancestor veneration : myths, legends, stories, customs, historical accounts of past generations' experiences. Two (or a thousand ) heads are better than one in the struggles for survival and snuggles for reproduction . By sharing the experiences , discoveries, knowledge of many generations past and those of fellow living people, humans had and have a big Darwinian or natural selective advantage especially in the stone age in prehistoric times over the course of 100's of thousands of years and, starting going back about 2.5 million of years with the species Homo habilis . Again , this enormous social networking within living generations and between living and dead generations is encapsulated in the concepts of culture and language and symbolic communication , the _differentia specifica_ of the human species. Culture is founded in kinship; symbolic communication across generations; progeny care/ancestor "worship"

Another special contribution of anthropology to our wisdom is the idea of ethnocentrism or anti-ethnocentrism; and the concept of culture-bound. Ethnocentrism is the belief that the ways of one's own culture are the only proper and moral ones. It is a form of racism and xenophobia. Culture-bound ideas are theories about the world and reality based on the assumptions and values of one's own culture. A big part of the study of anthropology is to broaden one's scope, make one less parochial , open one's mind to a wider world of people. In a way, anthropology is theoretical world travel, that is going other places without having to actually go there physically; and trying on different ways of thinking about the world; with the effect that when one looks back at oneself, one gains a more objective and full understanding one's own culture, philosophy, beliefs, society, etc. It can give us a gift of seeing ourselves as others see us, as the poet once wished for.

The growth of "applied anthropology" ( "applied" to domestic or Western society) is an institutional development within the discipline expressing this metaphor of looking at ourselves through the eyes of others.

Thus, if some of the ways of anthropology are a bit foreign to you , I hope you will use this course as an opportunity to step out of your intellectual comfort zone and think a little differently than you usually do; a chance to "travel" and broaden your scope without having to go through all the physical discomforts and annoyances of an actual trip abroad. It is also travel in a "theoretical time machine "through evolution. Hopefully it will give you some new knowledge about your humanity and fundamental commonality with all humans from all times and places; and encourage you to respect some of the differences you might have with others; you might even decide to adopt some of other people's culture a bit. On the other hand, you might understand yourself and your history and culture better and be happier with whom you are.

Finally , I add sixth and seventh sub fields to the conventional 5 (PHYSICAL, ETHNOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, LINGUISTICS, APPLIED) : 6)philosophical anthropology raising questions like "What is life ? " , "What is human life and human nature ?", etc.

7) Anthropological psychology because psychology is study of the Individual , the Self, that idol of American culture and symbolic inheritance . So, learning about individuals is automatically more relevant to individual student's interests , which is of course , especially in themSELVES. Anthropological Psychology ,is especially in opposition to evolutionary psychology, socio/biology , all social phony "darwinisms". Anthropological psychology places emphasis on culture , language and inter and intra - generational memories in the psyches and personalities of individual humans ; it emphasizes the "We" in the "I". The human "I " is more "We" than other animal species' "I"'s BUT NOT ABSOLUTELY DETERMINED BY THE "WE. "; not absolutely _socially_ constructed. What is unique about the individual human psyche as compared to other primate or mammal individual's psyches , minds, brains , memories, perceptions ? The human difference is so many of our memories are symbols , words, drawings , music, dance or Symbolic communication or the whole collection of word memories held in our INDIVIDUAL minds.

Each human individual has her WHOLE language and culture and symbols in her MEMORY ; and memories directly imitative ( not symbolic) of sensations or perceptions of the world outside her individual mind, of objective reality . We have memories. We also have direct sensation of our immediate , here and now , surroundings . BUT most of the time that we see or hear or smell or touch something or somethings there must right way come to our mind a MEMORY of it or something like it or a SYMBOL OF IT. at the same time. Why ?Because it's familiar . We recognize it. Otherwise we would constantly feel lost . Every new sensation would be strange .

A main current new thought for me here is to focus on memories. Most thought is memories not perceptions and sensations of your individual external surroundings However this is true of all animals ! All individual animals have most of their thoughts as MEMORIES ! Chimps have lots of picture similar images proportionately . We have proportionately more symbolic memories: words , sentences, conversations .

Again , Anthropological Psychology : On the Self, I'd say every individual animal has an instinct of SELF-preservation , and therefore a self. Every brain is a Self. Humans have a personality , which is a cultural , symbolic self, with a name; an individual . It is socially constructed in association with other people; in communication between brains. The Self is in the brain, consisting of memories in brain cells. Language is in brain cells, memory cells. When you say "you" exist in language , that means "you" exist in brain cells, memory cells specifically.

WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY ABOUT ? The book _The Essence of Anthropology_, at page 3 defines Anthropology as the _study_of humankind in all times and places, systematically and objectively, a very good definition. More candidly anthropologists believe that we have a profound understanding of the truth about human societies and Individuals biologically, historically and scientifically.

There is but one science, the science of history. Anthropology is the life science of human beings; the natural and cultural history and evolution of the species Homo sapiens. Studying "all" of something , the whole or holistically, systematically and objectively is scientific study and knowledge , because the truth must be the whole truth. So, to say anthropology is open to evidence of human endeavor from wherever it might be is to declare anthropology has a scientific approach to knowledge of the truth about human beings . We follow the motto of the poet Terrance: Nothing human is alien to anthropology , so to speak.

Originally , anthropology specialized among the academic disciplines in studying human beings in times and places remote from the present and the West-Europe , traveling far in time and space , expanding the representative quality and quantity of the sample of the social sciences, such as they were , of evidence on human activity and behavior , bodily motion. Anthropology aimed in part to expand the sample of data Western academe had on humans in a scientific endeavor to represent more fully the whole of humanity , "all" of the object of study, that is humans in _all_ times and _all_ places, not just the history of Europe - a correct scientific mission.

Another main and unique contribution of anthropology in expanding the sample of human life studied by modern science, including natural history, is the study of early humans and humans' immediate ancestor species , of the evolutionary origin and development of the Genus Homo species, which include _Homo sapiens_. This evidence and sample represent at a minimum 200,000 years of human society and as much as 2.5 million years when the whole of the Genus _Homo_ is considered human society, that the human specieses originate with _Homo habilis_ and _Homo erectus_.

“_Sapiens_" means "wise" In Latin. Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise being" ) What is culture, language or _symbolic_ communication ? For anthropology, culture, language or symbolic communication are the unique species characteristic of _Homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture" is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality _passed down through many generations_ that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. That is we are successful relative to other species the Darwinian struggles to increase the species population. The human population has grown more than other species in its ecological niche, meaning Genus Homo has a high Darwinian fitness, has been selected for.

Since the advent about 6,000 years ago of so-called civilization, as you have no doubt heard it referred to, sometimes, it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools or controlling fire made through culture or symbolic or imaginary thinking and communication, etc. ,raising our species fitness, the growth of our population . This is evidenced by _Homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now named Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species ' existence, 95% or more. The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 100 people living in ecological food chain location , in a very challenging struggle for existence and survival against predators , would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies or selves. Ancient kinship /family/culture /symbolic communication systems from around 2.5 million years ago ( the beginning of the Truly Civilized Stone Age) were almost super-organic bodies; the human social group was a harmonious , multi-individual Body, quasi-organism. The Individual human bodies, Selves, were very frail and weak in contrast with the bodies of the field of predators they were prey for .

Because this is the Stone Age is the origin and founding of human’s unique _nature_, human species society , and that it is dependent upon highly socially harmonious individuals, I say human _nature_ is social, not _selfish_

The dominance of the food chain that humans, ultimately reached even in the Stone Age with relatively _frail_ individual bodies. could only be reached by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony . This was only possible with symbolic communication both within a living generation and across generations, It is clear to me that natural selection , in the classical Darwinian sense, elected hominin groups with policies and practices of of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization.

Anthropology demonstrates its holistic/ whole truth, and thereby scientific method of study by specialization into sub-disciplines of cultural anthropology, physical or biological anthropology, archaeology and linguistics. Paleontological anthropology, study of early and proto-humans, is something of a combination of evolutionary-biological anthropology and archaeology. Clearly , the pre-eminent and world changing natural historian Charles Darwin is an initiator of paleontological anthropology with his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex ( although for some reason anthropology classes do not name Darwin's book as the beginning of physical anthropology; I think it is) .

By the title to his book, Darwin may have been signaling a correction to the popular , so-called Social Darwinist distortions of the theory which imply that "survival of the toughest warriors" rather than the "gentlest lovers" are the fittest and selected for naturally. Or as Antoinette Blackwell, excellent Darwinist theoretician termed it, cooperation and balance was selected for over competition and savage rivalry; this is beyond a reasonable doubt. ( The Sexes Throughout Nature is a book written by Antoinette Brown Blackwell, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1875. ). In other words, human evolutionary, natural selective success was based on a high level of internal social cooperation and harmony , not competition and savage rivalry, as I argue above that human nature is _social_, not selfish.

Blackwell, as I said, chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. She also criticized Darwin for basing his theory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species".[7] She wrote that (Herbert) Spencer scientifically subtracts from the female and Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6] “

What is FIT in the famous phrase “survival of the fittest “ ? Physically fit , in the sense of bodily fit, fit to literally fight for success in the struggle for existence ( the Darwinian term of art for longevity in an individual organism ): surviving , getting enough to eat , not getting eaten , not falling out of a tree or off a cliff , not freezing to death , not overheating to death BEFORE REPRODUCING , BEFORE BEING FERTILE, passing on one’s genes to next generations . The latter, differential fertility, is more important in determining fitness than differential mortality. Cooperation and balance between the sexes is most important is raising species fitness. _Fitness is passing on genes to the next generation_, and reproductive behavior, cooperation and balance between the sexes is critical to success in passing on genes to the next generation.

Darwin’s principle is actually survival of the _fertile_ in the first place ; the fit are more fertile . Fertility success is the Darwinian definition of fitness success. Being nice , cooperative is a better way to be fertile .

As renowned anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once wrote, “The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species." — Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87.

http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_036.pdf v> Men being nice, “cooperative and balanced”, toward women , the Blackwellian hypothesis on human evolution, was the key to humans high Darwinian fitness through our evolutionary origin and development .

Please critique and challenge the following statement: In Darwin's theory of natural selection concerning living beings, the "struggle" in the struggle for existence, to live, is not between Individual Selves of the same species to the point of Individual Bodies, somebodies,of the same species killing each other except very rarely. Most of the deaths before passing on genes to the next generation, are due to failures in struggles with some Individual Body of _another_ species, plant and animal, as predator and prey; or struggle against bad weather, heat exhaustion, sunburn.

It is easy to see how some people get a misconception of Darwinian natural selection because it _is_ posed in most of it prime formulations with a sort of emphasis on the fact of indirect "competition" in the sense that for the typical bodily form of a species to change over generations under Darwin's theory, some members with genes that change species typical traits must more successfully pass them on than members with species typical traits over successive generations until the new trait is universal , and the old typical trait is extinct. But this does not necessarily or even conventionally imply direct physical conflict between Individuals of the two types but the same species in the day-to-day struggle for existence to survive as Individual Bodies.

This is demonstrated by the famous anthropological micro-evolutionary study of sickle cell genes on pages 44 to 46 of _The Essence of Anthropology_. There is no direct physical competition between the people of the various genotypes with different fitnesses in the different environments in the study. It is not an Individual , but a species over generations , a group of the same type who "evolve", "adapt" or "survive". Individuals must live their individual life long enough to reproduce for the species to survive. However, every individual eventually dies. "Survival" of the individual means living long enough to pass on genes or a geno-type to the future generations. If mutated genes, changed geno-type, are passed on, there is a potential unit of evolution between the parent and the offspring. That is evolution occurs between Individuals of different generations, not in one Individual Self. If the mutated genotype results in a phenol-typical trait that is adaptive in some significant way, it may become an evolutionary change by the species through several individuals of different generations.

An Individual organism, Some Body, has an instinct for self-preservation. This is said to be the first law of nature. This is an instinct to live as long as possible before the inevitable end, as all animals are mortal. Every Individual Some Body has a lifetime or ontogeny in which it is born, develops, exists and dies. The development of an Individual overtime is not evolution , but ontogeny. Significantly, the institution of war which arises in human history with so-called civilization around 6,000 years ago involves human Individuals violating their natural instinct of self-preservation. Going into battle is to risk one's individual life for a social value of some type, nationalism or religion, not the exercise of a non-existent "instinct of aggression". Humans do not even eat those they kill in most war ( joke) , another unnatural aspect. No animal species kills without the motive of getting food.

((((((((( Culturally inherited adaptations give human species high Darwinian fitness, because cultural adaptations are caused by the adaptive problem that they solve Culturally inherited adaptations give human species high Darwinian fitness- How ? Darwin’s natural laws , physiology laws , DNA-gene laws, and ecological laws are the central organizing principles of Modern Biology. The laws of symbolically constituted language and culture as the defining characteristics of humans are the central organizing principles of anthropology. Symbolic communication and behavior give humans a way of adapting ( in the Darwinian sense ) that is more efficient than adapting based on random genetic mutation, because cultural adaptations are caused by the adaptive problem ( problems in the struggle for existence) that they solve ; the adaptive problem causes humans to invent in symbolic thought , imagination, a solution to the adaptive problem .

With language and culture , Necessity is the mother of invention ( which is a materialist philosophical , not idealist , explanation, because the material survival necessity changes the ideas of the human inventor , changes her culture ) Culture allows non-random Darwinian adaption , unlike genetic adaptations ; the adaptive solution does not arise only coincidentally with the problem it solves , not just by luck as with genetic adaptations. For example , we might hypothesize that Homo erectuses invented clothes or controlled fire in response to moving into colder regions North of Africa . The acts of invention were caused by the problem in the struggle for existence of cold body temperature. The adaptive problem caused its own solution. Relying on the adaptation by way of genetic changes ( maybe to grow fur) would mean waiting on a genetic mutation NOT CAUSED BY THE COLDER TEMPERATURE, a mutation not caused by the adaptive problem, but arising coincidentally with the problem it solves. In this hypothetical thought experiment, survival in the struggle for existence, material necessity, changes the cultural ideas of the inventors , adds a custom of clothes , costumes to the their customs , their traditions , their culture. Non-randomly arising solutions to adaptive problems are La Marckian-LIKE. In LaMarck’s famous thought experiment as to “how the giraffe got its long neck”, the adaptive problem of food only available high up _causes_ the giraffe to solve the problem by stretching its neck ( this is a fictional account). The solution does not arise _randomly_ relative to the problem it solves.

More adaptive problems are solved if the problem tends to cause its own solution than if the solutions just happen luckily to occur as with _random_ genetic mutations solving adaptive problems. Thus , with culture, language (symbolic inheritance, symbolic imagination and symbolic communication ) humans have a more efficient adaptive process than all other life forms. Humans have both cultural , non-random adaptation and random genetic mutation adaptation . Other life forms , species , only have random genetic mutation adaptation.

How does symbolic thinking allow humans to invent solutions to adaptive problems in response to the problem arising ? Because symbolic thinking allows imaginative thinking or imagination is a form of symbolic thinking ; imagination empowers invention.

Furthermore, symbolic thinking allows SYMBOLIC INHERITANCE of adaptive inventions by future generations ! Genes and culture/words are inherited - IN DIFFERENT WAYS . For example , almost all the words in the vocabulary of a living generation were invented by dead past generations , inherited. (paragraph) Ancestor veneration The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain immortality and are part of the society of living generations . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations through SYMBOLIC INHERITANCE . Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Issac Newton put it . Accumulated knowledge gives a growing ability to adapt, in Darwin’s sense , to problems in the struggle for existence .

Symbolic Inheritance For anthropology, culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is the unique species characteristic of _homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Greed, slavery, war, male supremacy, Egoism originate with Civilization ! It is better termed Savagery and Barbarism. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species.

Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools , scientific knowledge (!) standing on the shoulders of dead generations , raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized , peaceful and sharing societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species ' existence, 99% plus