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HUMANS AND COLLECTIVE LEARNING
Humans are a unique species in the animal world because they have the ability for collective learning. In most species,
individuals acquire knowledge over a lifetime, but this knowledge is lost when the individual dies. This is not the case with
humans, who have language and can pass on knowledge from individual to individual and generation to generation.
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Humans are primates, a special type of mammal. Primates began to evolve at the time that dinosaurs became extinct. Homo
sapiens, or modern humans, appeared only recently, about 200,000 years ago.
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The ingredients and Goldilocks Conditions necessary for collective learning are powerful brains and precise and versatile
symbolic language. The Goldilocks Conditions are the interactions between individuals and between communities that enable
the transfer and storage of information.
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Collective learning allowed humans to innovate and learn to a degree not possible before, and it allowed humans to share,
preserve, and build upon the knowledge of an individual rather than losing that knowledge when the individual died.
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LUCY AND THE LEAKEYS / JANE GOODALL
Articles / Cynthia Stokes Brown
Anthropologists have discovered important evidence to show how humans differ from their cousins, the primates.
Louis and Mary Leakey worked for many years in East Africa, in Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift Valley, studying the
evolution of early humans.
In 1976, Mary Leakey discovered a set of footprints made by a group of early humans about 3.6 million years ago, which
showed that early humans could walk upright on two legs.
Louis Leakey showed that humans were making tools about 2.5 million years ago.
In 1974, Don Johanson found about 20 percent of a female hominine skeleton that dated to roughly 3.2 million years ago. There
were enough pelvis and leg bones discovered to confirm that “Lucy” walked upright.
Jane Goodall was sent by Louis Leakey to Africa to study chimp populations, in order to better understand how humans relate
to their closest relatives in the animal world. Living among the chimps for the better part of her life, Goodall discovered that
chimps use tools, make war, and have complex social relationships in their chimp communities. These discoveries transformed
human understanding of chimp behavior.
Write down 5 facts about this passage
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INTRO TO ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropology is the holistic study of humankind; the study of how, when, and why humans and different cultures develop and
live. Anthropologists work to fill in gaps in our knowledge about humans by finding missing links in the human story. This can
be done by studying humans in a number of different ways: by focusing on culture, by focusing on physical traits and
adaptations, by focusing on language, or by focusing on prehistory.
There are different types of anthropologists. Two types are particularly interested in the story of early humans. Physical
anthropologists study fossil evidence to learn about our direct ancestors but also our “cousins,” closely-related species.
Paleoanthropologists focus on human evolution.
INTRO TO ARCHAEOLOGY
Archaeology is the study of ancient people and the world they lived in.
Archaeologists gather evidence about ancient peoples by identifying sites where they lived, by exploring and surveying these
sites, by digging for artifacts at these sites, and then by analyzing the sites and artifacts from them. Archaeology has both a field
component, where the evidence is gathered, and a lab component, where the evidence is analyzed.
There are different types of archaeology. Historical archaeologists study people who left behind written records. Prehistoric
archaeologists study people who lived before the invention of writing and have only left artifacts behind. A third type,
experimental archaeologists, try to re-create how people made things like tools.
Archaeologists ask important questions about the past. What is driving human evolution? What accounts for the changes in how
humans lived, which we see in the archaeological record?
How are the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology similar and how are they different?
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• Anthropology
• Marsupials
• Archaeology
• Migration
• Australopithecines
• Neanderthal
• Bipedalism
• Nomadic
• Collective Learning
• Paleolithic Era
• Culture
• Paleontology
• Foraging
• Primate
• Fossils
• Symbiosis
• Genealogy
• Symbolic Language
• Genetics
• Taxonomy
• Hominines
• Homo Ergaster Or Homo Erectus
• Homo Habilis
• Homo Sapiens