Anthropology at WIC

"similar patterns of adult mortality,"

a demographic advantage for early modern humans,

it must have been the result of increased fertility and/or reduced immature mortality."

Neanderthals, like modern humans, are thought to have arisen on the continent.

Though no fossil evidence has been found for Neanderthals and modern humans coexisting in Africa,

interbreeding occurred just after our species had left Africa

Neanderthals, the study team says, probably mixed with early Homo sapiens just after they'd left Africa but before Homo sapiens split into different ethnic groups and scattered around the globe.

60,000 years ago

the skills to make a lethal weapon.

Ape Genius - which gives a fascinating insight into the depth of intelligence of animals who share 99 per cent of human genes

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And most important of all although they can imitate, they can't teach or build on the achievements others have made - unlike more successful humans.

But if apes have the power to reaso

n, learn skills, feel emotion and co-operate in a frenzied tree-top hunt for Colobus monkeys as chimpanzees do, why don't we have a planet of the apes?

Competition

simple

Hair and eye color may be such neutral variations in human beings

variations a

antelope’s speed m

water retention in a desert plant

survive to maturity

favorable variations

passed from generation to generation natural selection.

relationship

simply by looking at it.

“survival of the fittest.”

“Fittest” means that organisms must not only survive to adulthood, they must actually reproduce.

advantageous genetic variations are passed along and become represented with increasing frequency in succeeding generations.

breeding programs.

Canis familiaris

several discipline

The Chihuahua

Saint Bernard

breeding programs.

Artificial selection

the same gene pool

the ability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring.

“man’s best friend.”

20 years

natural selection.

Organisms produce more offspring than the environment can support

It's clearly male-dominated.

matriarchy within the family is very strong

When you watch a young male growing up, all his relationships begin to change. He begins to dominate the females

it's completely amazing how even a fully adult male is usually very respectful of his ancient mother.

And she hears this and she comes charging over, rushes up the tree, and hauls herself on this melee of three enormous males. I think the two others were so amazed that they stopped attacking Satan

still a hard core of people who are very resistant

doing invasive experiments on animals

made a difference with the way the world views chimpanzees

Has it made a difference in the way scientists view them

It's much better to cling to the old ideas that animals are just little machines and they have stimulus and response

It's a communication

sophisticated brains

haven't during evolution developed a sophisticated spoken language

not capable of planning the distant future

can't

discuss an idea

communication is very immediate

Mike learned to use empty kerosene cans because he was very low ranking

He accidentally hit an empty 4-gallon kerosene can and noticed that other chimps ran away

Within 4 months, he'd risen to the top

never saw him fight

Only Mike capitalized on that and developed the technique and won.

Chimpanzees become sexually mature between the ages of 10 and 13

both have an insatiable appetite for play, are extremely curious, learn through observation and imitation,

The anatomy of the chimpanzee brain and central nervous system is startlingly similar to our own.

Chimpanzees and humans belong to the animal order “primates”

belong to the superfamily hominoid

Chimpanzees and humans belong to the animal order “primates”.

Large brains

opposable thumbs

flexible joints

belong to the superfamily hominoid

chimpanzees and humans share the most similar genetic makeup, sharing 98.6% of our genes.

Females show their first very small sexual swellings at age eight or nine, but are not sexually attractive to the older males until they reach age 10 or 11.

almost every young chimp gets lost from their mother at some point during their exploration.

chimps have a long childhood

Bonds

likely to persist throughout life.

This learning is the means by which certain actions are passed from one generation to the next—the beginnings of culture.

capable of intellectual performances

capable of reasoned thought

memory

symbolic representation

feel and express emotions

chimpanzees can be taught human languages

skills on computers

wide range of complex emotions

possess an almost human-like enjoyment of physical contact, laughter, and community.

chimpanzees can learn from humans

Language is believed to have played a major role:

How did a group of ground-dwelling flightless dinosaurs evolve to a feathered animal capable of flying?

used its feathered limbs, along with a long, feather-fringed tail, to glide from tree to tree.

new species, Microraptor gui

dated at between 128 to 124 million

four feathered limbs,

birds are most closely related to dromaeosaurids

dromaeosaurs were small, feathered animals with forelimbs similar to those of Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird at around 150 million years old, and feet with features comparable to modern tree-living birds.

All of us solve problems effortlessly and routinely.

We want to see our dogs charm us, appeal to our emotions, imagine they too can suffer and have pity, love and hate and all the rest

our brain parts can be replaced with silicon parts

Thousands of scientists and philosophers over hundreds of years have either recognized this uniqueness of ours or have denied it

Even though we have all of these connections with the biologic world from which we came, and we have in some instances similar mental structures, we are hugely different.

exploring the effects of new media on society and culture

The knowledge is all around people and a lot of advanced technology is so ubiquitous that it makes connection, organising, sharing and learning easier than ever before

new culture and environment

they mediate relationships. Media changes, relationships change and the culture changes.

media helped the people there in a big way

Media is therefore not just tools and communication

Think about how we watch TV. We watch TV for the content, but the content drives relationships. We watch TV while at dinner, we congregate in groups to watch sport. These are the conversations that create our culture

a brief history of the phrase

it's a way for people to raise their personality and not be indistinguishable. More people want to be important today - more people want to be the new American Ido

We all need identity and recognition and the media keeps bombarding us with messages of the kind of people we should become. The search for the authentic self leads us towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment and disagreement on several things - values, views, approaches. We're more disengaged and more fragmented. The new media revolution is creating the cultural background for this kind of a change.

micro-learning

So being human might all be down to energy.

Cooking is essentially a form of pre-digestion, which has transferred energy use from our guts to our brains.

comparative psychology,

animal intelligence

mostly concerns mammals, especially primates, cetaceans, and elephants, as well as dogs, cats, and rodents.

and fish,

began in the late 1950s

John Lilly

other animals do have minds and that humans should approach the study of their cognition accordingly.

bottlenosed dolphins

particularly monkeys

Spatial cognition

The ability to properly navigate and search through the environment is a critical task for many animals.

Research in 2007 shows that chimpanzees in the Fongoli savannah sharpen sticks to use as spears when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans.

Language

The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal language research.

Consciousness

The sense in which animals can be said to have consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated; it is often referred to as the debate over animal minds.

It has been suggested that metacognition in some animals provides some evidence for cognitive self-awareness.[11] The great apes, dolphins, and rhesus monkeys have demonstrated the ability to monitor their own mental states and use an "I don't know" response to avoid answering difficult questions. These species might also be aware of the strength of their memories.

This page was last modified on 26 November 2011 at 11:42.

She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language.

They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree.

many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought.

controversial.

How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?

Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and being creative.

chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task.

Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results.

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