¶ … human? This might seem to be a simple question, but that is probably because we have not thought very deeply about the issue. For decades physical anthropologists and other scholars have investigated this question. Their early efforts tended to take the form of trying to find one single trait that defined humans as different from all other species - whether it was our opposing thumb or the way in which we use language or in our recognition of our own mortality or even in the fact that we murder others of our own species.
Related to this search for the "missing trait" was the search for a "missing link" - a species that would link Homo sapiens to the species that had come before us historically on the evolutionary train. The thinking behind both of these searches was very much the same: Scientists could not believe that we (that is, we humans) existed on a continuum with other primates. There must be, the conventional thinking went, something that set us aside from all of these other animals. Some missing, linking species that showed the first signs of whatever bright intelligence it is that sets humans off as being on a different order of development than all other primates, not to mention all other species.
But within the last few decades such a search for what it is that makes us different from all other species has become less and less of a concern for scholars. Certain, humans are considered by biologists and anthropologists to be unique - but so are all other species. Much of the recent research in physical anthropology, paleontology and primatology has helped to fill in the gaps in knowledge about how humans are in fact connected to other primates rather than in how we are set apart from all other species.
Shirley Strum's book on her research on baboons is an example of this more recent kind of research, work that has as its focus an attempt to understand human development and human behavior from a broader perspective, one that places it within...
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