Human uniqueness

Abstract

Humans are commonly held to be qualitatively different from other animals, especially in their unique mental abilities. Darwinian theory, which provides the only known way of explaining the origin of complex adaptations, assumes that evolution works on quantitative variation within species. It therefore affords no way of explaining qualitative uniqueness. Anthropologists have attributed human uniqueness to cognitive capacity, symbols and language, prosociality, cumulative culture, and complex imitation, and have tried to explain these faculties as the historical products of various combinations of tool use, cooperative hunting and breeding, fire and cooking, and brain enlargement. Because human traits with no nonhuman precursors are not amenable to evolutionary explanation, these debates can be expected to persist so long as anthropology defines itself and its mission in terms of the animal–human boundary.

Developing evolutionary anthropology in local ecosystems

“…Numerous biological anthropologists have lamented how a perceived need to focus on primates epistemologically limits what can be potentially known in evolutionary anthropology. This observation is neither original nor inconsequential 1–3 . For example, Cartmill 2 ,p.188 ), in discussing this issue, states “It is noteworthy, for instance, that not one of all the physical anthropologists who has studied and theorized about the mystery of human bipedalism and its origins has ever undertaken a systematic comparison of human beings with large flightless birds.” Evolutionary anthropology's cynosure with humans and nonhuman primates is compounded by the recognition that the four subfields that traditionally represent American anthropology have been increasingly disassociated 4 .…”