anthropology, humanity refers to the human species, a group of life forms with the following characteristics:
Bipedalism (walking on two legs)
Relatively small teeth for primates of our size
Relatively large brains for primates of our size
Using modern language to communicate ideas
Using complex sets of ideas — called culture (discussed later) — to survive
Standing on two legs and having particularly small teeth and large brains are all anatomical characteristics, and they’re studied by anthropologists focusing on human biological evolution. Surviving by using a wide array of cultural information (including instructions for making a fur cloak in the Arctic or a pottery canteen in the desert Southwest) are behavioral characteristics. Each requires different kinds of anthropology to understand.
Two types of culture
With a basic handle on what we mean by human, we need some understanding of the things that are uniquely human. An important one is culture. Culture is the whole set of information a human mind uses to describe what the world is like and what’s appropriate behavior for living in that world. Cultural differences are basically different conceptions of what is appropriate in a given situation. For example, women in traditional Tibetan culture often have more than one husband, whereas men in traditional Tajikistan (a country in central Asia) often have multiple wives. Each culture, then, has specific ideas about what’s appropriate marriage-wise, and the difference between what each considers appropriate can be surprising.
Some anthropologists extend culture to the objects (called artifacts) that humanity makes or uses to aid in survival. In this case, culture is both the information stored in the brain (shared among a group) and the objects that group uses to survive. For example, artifacts (also called material culture) include the distinctive Inuit harpoon carved from bone and used to hunt seals. Not all artifacts have such obvious survival value, though. From the outsider’s perspective, the specially made drum an Arctic shaman (healer) uses in a healing ritual isn’t directly related to staying alive by hunting the landscape. But as far as the shaman is concerned, that specific drum is very important. It has to be made the right way and carry the right tone; otherwise, the healing would be jeopardized. In this way, the drum is just as important to survival as the harpoon. Note that the drum, the healing ceremony, and even the hunting harpoon are all things constructed according to the culture in a specific region. In this way, they are “cultural artifacts.”
Two types of modernity
The term humanity can be a little tricky because anthropologists use it to refer to our biological species, Homo sapiens sapiens, as well as some of our most recent ancestors in the more general species Homo sapiens (lacking the very specific subspecies sapiens.) When the human species should be referred to as Homo sapiens versus Homo sapiens sapiens depends on whether you’re talking about being anatomically or behaviorally modern.
Anatomical modernity is being anatomically indistinguishable from modern, living populations. This term really comes into play only when anthropologists are looking at the bones of ancient human-like creatures and asking whether these creatures were human. Strictly speaking, if anthropologists can’t distinguish the bones they’re looking at from those of modern populations, the bones are those of an anatomically modern person.
Behavioral modernity is behaving in a way that’s indistinguishable from modern, living populations. This label also really comes into play only when anthropologists are looking at the complexity of behavior in the past — for example, at the objects made by ancient proto-humans. Asking whether the creatures that made these objects were behaviorally human is a tough question that I re-examine in Chapter 7, but for the moment it’s enough to know behaviorally modern people employ symbolism, the use of one object to stand for another. Blood, for example, is a common substance, but humanity can also use it — or its properties, such as the color red —symbolically to activate emotions, memories, and actions in other people. This uniquely human capacity for the complex use of symbols is a big part of behavioral modernity.
I explore just when and where humanity became behaviorally and anatomically modern in Chapter 7.
-Isms and the Making of Anthropology
Like most scholarly disciplines, anthropology wasn’t just tidily invented overnight; I think of it as a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas and questions culled from other disciplines, cobbled and stitched together into a more-or-less functional whole. (You can read more about the various subdisciplines of anthropology in Chapter 3.)
But even before anthropology existed as a discrete academic field, its foundations were being laid by people doing other things that would later be called anthropology (or act as guidelines for building anthropology). Herodotus, a 6th-century Greek scholar, described the peoples and antiquities of Egypt, and Julius Caesar described the people he encountered in France (the Gauls) and southern England (the Britons) in the 50s BC. And the ancient Egyptians wrote about their neighbors to the North (in the Near East) and to the South (the Nubians of modern-day Sudan); clearly, people have been interested in other people for a long time. But these reports were often curios, or passages written
