Homo gravitas, Quo Vadis?

2017 ICOMOS CIPA-ICORP-ISCARSAH Joint Meeting, 2017

The paper deals with human condition, gravitationally regarded from the perspective of Cultural Heritage. The secrets of the universe unlocked by Stephen Hawking at the end of the 20 th century were received with great hope worldwide. Later he admitted that the mystery of gravity could not be disclosed. Since the case persisted, in 2017 he AI from destroying the human race. Looking back, history has shown that homo erectus had a natural evolution. The transitory process of acquiring consciousness by receiving a mind passed discretely. It was recently proved that the Sphinx in Egypt is a memorial devoted to that event. Then, the Legend of Oedipus disclosed the true identity of homo gravitas. Meanwhile other legends were decrypted. An advanced gravitational civilization was created on the Earth along a few millennia. Unexpected problems arouse by the growth in population. At the end of the 19 th century Nietzsche asked for a Superman. A few decades later, in 1907, Brancusi carved in stone a little sphinx statue as though bewilderedly asking Quo Vadis? Thirty years later, in 1937, the same sculptor gave a revolutionary solution to the control of the body-mind equilibrium. That solution

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

Early evolutionary biologists answered the question of human origins by searching for the precise location of “man’s place in nature,” in T.H. Huxley’s phrasing, based on comparative anatomy between living species. Research has moved from viewing humanity at the top of the scala naturae to seeing it as “just” a big-brained, bipedal primate, and the focus shifted to explaining how we arrived at “our” place. The post-nineteenth-century focus has been on understanding the evolutionary circumstances that produced Homo sapiens, based on the idea that human-specific traits are the product of the same evolutionary processes that led to all other species. This effort is notably multidisciplinary: human origins fall within the remit of anthropology, biology, genetics, zoology, primatology, geology, and psychology. The (occasionally contentious) synthesis of work within these fields has produced a coherent, albeit pixelated picture, of which this summary is a sketch. It first reviews hominin evolutionary history chronologically and then explores evolutionary patterns, including the evolution of cognition, in more depth.

Erect position and growth of brain are two fundamental facts in human evolution. For many years, researchers put forward various theses on how these two changes in human evolution have taken place. Theoretical discussions aimed at finding answers for basic questions have highly significant influence in the development of a science. The subject of this article is the causes of erect position and brain grow in human evolution. I will comment, in ecological viewpoint, on how erect position come forward in human evolution and I will try to disclose growth of human brain in a completely new perspective and through an hypothesis based on embryonic development. My aim is to clear the way by my new perspective for the discussions in the world of paleoanthropology on these subjects.

Human Evolution

Mètode Revista de difusió de la investigació, 2017

This paper examines two contentious areas within the theory of evolution: the divergence between primates and humans, and the unique development of human con- sciousness. Specifically, it reviews the fossil record, genetic data, and theoretical per- spectives to assess claims that evolution alone may not fully explain these phenomena. By focusing on the limited fossil evidence for human-primate ancestry and the appar- ent absence of gradual, observable changes in consciousness among other species, this paper seeks to present a factual discussion of these challenges.

While anthropology is often concerned with the question of how humans make meaning in the world, paleoanthropologists tend to avoid questions of human dis-tinctiveness. This is not to say that there are not many hypotheses explaining human origins, only that there is a tendency to see the answer in terms of a specific evolutionary change. This research agenda is often couched in terms of the origins of 'behavioral modernity' as the key event making 'us' human. Here we present a brief overview of how researchers have used the concept of a 'symbol' to contextualize the debate. Then, we move to examining the archaeological record for indicators of when members of the human lineage began to produce and expand their cultural niche via symbolic means. Over the course of our evolution humans developed distinctive capacities to navigate social networks, live in complex communities, and interact with the biotic and abiotic world through symbol making. We propose that this process, in part, can be described as the evolution of human wisdom.

F OR A HIGHLY egocentric species that is exquisitely conscious of both its unusual anatomical structure and its unique way of mentally processing information, the otherwise self-obsessed Homo sapiens has shown remarkably little interest in formally defining itself relative to the rest of the living world. Back in the eighteenth century the Swedish savant Carolus Linnaeus, father of the system of classifying animals and plants we still use today, established the practice of using particular biological features to define each genus and species in his classification. Yet, in the case of our genus Homo—and only in that case—Linnaeus departed from this sensible procedure, casually advising his readers, nosce te ipsum (know thyself). Even at the time, this exhortation toward introspection might hardly have appeared the ideal approach to biological self-definition. But in practice few cared: after all, Linnaeus's lexicographer contemporary Samuel Johnson was satisfied with defining man as a human being, and human as having the qualities of a man. Quite simply, everyone then thought they knew that human beings were so different as to require no definition at all. Of course, in the eighteenth century, nobody had any idea that creatures had once lived that were structurally intermediate between us modern humans and the great apes, our (then barely known) closest living relatives. People lived in a world in which their own distinctiveness was self-evident. But this blissful ignorance could not continue forever, and when it was finally dispelled in the mid-nineteenth century by the emergence of evolutionary thinking, the entire perspective on humanity's place in nature changed. You might thus be tempted to imagine that, in the century and a half since Charles Darwin pointed out that we are joined to the rest of nature by common ancestry, science might have begun to make some progress toward a biological definition of the human genus. But if so, you would be doomed to disappointment. Scientists are still arguing vehemently over which ancient fossil human relatives should be included in the genus Homo. And they are doing so in the absence of any coherent idea of what the genus that includes our species Homo sapiens might reasonably be presumed to contain.

One contribution of 17 to a discussion meeting issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.