Chapter 14, Early Species of the Genus Homo, is the beginning of the Stone Age and the origin of We human beings ! This age is named after the stone tool artifacts MADE ACCORDING TO SYMBOLIC THINKING; artifacts found in association with the fossils of HOMO HABILIS hominins, with its skull size larger than those of australopithecine hominins from Chapter 13. All of the Genus Homo fossils discussed in Chapters 14 and 15 Were found in association with artifacts, stone tools and others, that are MADE ACCORDING TO A DESIGN, A PATTERN, IN A STYLE, A TYPE, WHICH MEANS THE MAKERS HAD SYMBOLIC THINKING AND LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL BEHAVIOR

LECTURE 3

Chapter 14, Early Species of the Genus Homo, is the beginning of the Stone Age and the origin of We human beings ! This age is named after the stone tool artifacts MADE ACCORDING TO SYMBOLIC THINKING; artifacts found in association with the fossils of HOMO HABILIS hominins, with its skull size larger than those of australopithecine hominins from Chapter 13. All of the Genus Homo fossils discussed in Chapters 14 and 15 Were found in association with artifacts, stone tools and others, that are MADE ACCORDING TO A DESIGN, A PATTERN, IN A STYLE, A TYPE, WHICH MEANS THE MAKERS HAD SYMBOLIC THINKING AND LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL BEHAVIOR

What is Symbolic Thinking ? Why is the concept of symbolic thinking , behavior and communication important in understanding the uniqueness of stone artifacts that begin the Stone Age ?

Symbolic Communication and Behavior or Language and Culture

Anthropology's special contribution to scientific understanding of humanity is the concepts of _language and culture_, or the symbolic nature of human behavior, communication and social organization. Language and culture make human evolution unique in comparison with the evolution of other species ( see below).

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 cultural behavior, despite the exaggerated claims of some primatologists for chimps and gorillas. Other animals have communication between them BUT NOT SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION LANGUAGE.

See handout on Differences Between Human and Other Animal Communication

ANCESTOR VENERATION THROUGH FILIAL PIETY (respect for elders) - The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain , symbolic immortality , and are part of the society of living generations in the form of the living generation’s culture/language . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations through SYMBOLIC INHERITANCE to by parental generations to offspring Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Isaac Newton put it in the context of the history of Physics

+ . Accumulated knowledge gives a growing ability over the many generations to adapt, in Darwin’s sense , to problems in the struggle for existence .

The essential characteristics of culture and language in the anthropological sense are that they are symbolically constituted and inherited from dead generations of a group of people.; and language and culture can be inherited from dead generations __because_ it is symbolically constituted ( see below)

1) CULTURE human _acts_ following rules and pursuing purposes. Rules and purposes can be expressed IN WORDS, SENTENCES, PARAGRAPHS, etc. (symbolic signs). A specific Culture is learned; it is not genetic, not instinctive; it is learned from other living people, and _inherited from dead generations_ of the group (shared).

2) I repeat: an essential characteristic of culture is that it originates in past generations , and it passed on to next and future generations. A specific culture or language is learned. The capacity of a brain to learn them _is_ genetically based and unique to humans’ genes, but the _culture is not_ in our genes

3) All culture can be represented in language. Language is critical in teaching culture.

4) All language _is_ culture; _but_ not all culture is language; that is , language is a form of culture.

5) ACTS are _bodily_ action, activity, motion, behavior.

But what is symbolic communication ? What is a symbol or symbolic sign in the technical linguistic and anthropological sense ? Symbolic signing is 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, conventional, artificial or human made 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 , natural. The classical example is smoke and fire. Smoke is an indexical sign of fire. A finger print is an indexical sign of a specific finger having touched something. Lightening is an indexical sign of thunder and rain. Trees with no leaves on them is an indexical sign that the season is winter; trees with colorful leaves on them is an indexical sign that the season is fall. Snow is an indexical sign that the season is winter. Darkness is an indexical sign that it is night.

An iconographic sign is a drawing or picture. A drawing is not what it represents. But it is not arbitrarily related to what it represents. A drawing imitates or simulates what it represents so it is not arbitrarily related to what it represents, unlike a word. A word or sentence does not imitate or simulate what it represents. It is completely _not_ what it represents

DISPLACEMENT

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 individual humans ! 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 ; that are displaced from the immediate objects of our senses; experiences that are not available to us to see, hear, touch, smell or taste.

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 as much by imitating, like other species. Not as much by "monkey-see, monkey do" imitation. Most of an individual human’s learning ( as opposed to inborn or genetically based knowledge) is through culture and language, not from that individual’s experience. This unique human ability is possible because of the DISPLACEMENT communication capacity of language or symbolic signs.

Just to further explain the concept of arbitrariness/conventional , 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_.

IMAGINATION

Human imaginative thinking or communication is using something to represent ….NOTHING. For example , the words Mickey Mouse or Romeo and Juliet represent nothing because Mickey Mouse, Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters ; they don’t exist.

However, an architect imagines as building as a blue print before it exists. The blueprint represents nothing or represents an invention that will be made in the future. Referring to the Origin of the Stone Age on the Scientific Cosmology/ Natural History Timeline . The Stone Age consisting of the Old and New Stone Ages , with the Old Stone Age beginning about 2.5 million years ago with the fossil Homo Habilis found associated with very uniquely and stereotypically shaped stones. This is the beginning of humanity ! Hurrah ! Hurrah ! Why do I call this Our beginning ? Because the unique shapes of the stones are due to their being MADE BY DESIGN, ACCORDING TO A PATTERN. This means that they are made be primates-hominins with imaginative thinking; they are made according to an abstract plan all in the same style. Imaginative thinking is a form of SYMBOLIC thinking. And it means these are artifacts made by hominins with Symbolic communication, language and culture. Having these unique abilities defines them as human , as I said in previous classes. The Missing Link species discussed last test on Chapter 13, the middle link in Darwin’s hypothesized chain or line of descent leading to humans , Ardipethicus and Australopithicus , etc., are before the Stone Age . They are not human. At least , they are not associated any symbolically designed artifacts. 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. HUMAN NATURE CHART (Handout) This is one of my favorite handouts; because among the academic intelligentia there is a large crowd who want to claim humans have no _natures_ ! That we are not animals ?That with culture , language, tradition ,customs, “soul”, we humans have transcended nature; that we are super-natural beings. Anthropology, especially physical or biological or Darwinian anthropology refutes this. The chart is the human slice of the Tree of Life/Phylogenetic Natural History. On the right is a summary of many human natural characteristics or Human Nature. I had to add that humans are sexually reproducing and that primate’s , unlike most mammals, have eye-sight as our primary sense, not smell or hearing. Page 56 of the text explains primate Binocular and stereoscopic vision. The handout with what I call the Human Nature Chart, also has several definitions , including the definition of SPECIES, critical and unique phylogenetic ( and taxonomic) Category. Two animals of the opposite sex are members of the same species if they can mate and produce viable and _fertile_ offspring. This definition gets at the essence of a species which is necessarily MULTIGENERATIONAL . Who ever heard of a one generation species ? If there is no reproduction of a new generation that can produce new generations , that produce new generations…perpetuate, the species is extinct or not a species anymore. I demonstrate the idea of same species, by the example of the mule. A mule is the product of the union of a horse and a donkey. But a mule is not _fertile_. It is viable , lives a life, can pull wagons for humans, but it cannot reproduce. Therefore, a horse and a donkey are not the same species. That differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining specieses’ Darwinian fitness is demonstrated by praying mantis females biting the head off of males immediately after the male fertilizes the female (!). Sent from my iPhone