Exam 1: What Is Biological Anthropology

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The six distinguishing features of humanity are bipedalism, nonhoning chewing, complex material culture and tool use, hunting, speech, and dependence on domesticated food.The commitment to walking on two legs is usually considered the most profound physical difference between humans
and other primates.After bipedalism, according to the fossil record, the large honing canine tooth
was lost as a result of the ability to make and use tools for processing food.Culture, pervasive for humans, is defined in the text as learned behavior, transmitted from person to person, that facilitates survival through adaptation to varied settings.Material culture is the part of culture that is expressed as objects that humans use to manipulate our environment.The archaeological record of past cultures' material remains goes back to the simple rock tools that date from 2.5 mya.Humans require some form of technology to regulate temperature, acquire food, and so on in our varied environments.Some chimpanzees and other primates have simple material culture and even nonmaterial culture.Humans' other key attributes-hunting, speech, and dependence on domesticated foods-appeared much later in human evolution.Hunting refers to cooperative hunting, which likely emerged 1 million or more years ago.Speech is very distinctive of humans but difficult to pinpoint in the fossil record.Domestication of foods is the most recently developed unique human behavior, usually traced to 10,000 years ago.Increasing dependence on culture for survival makes us quite distinct among
species and necessitates a biocultural approach to both human origins and human behavior.