The search for ancestors is associated with brilliant guesses and beautiful legends that tell about the appearance of a person from “nothing” or by the will of the gods or about spontaneous generation from nature itself. Scientific research the process of human origin (anthropogenesis) was laid in the 19th century. the publication of Ch. Darwin's book "The Origin of Man and Sexual Selection", where the idea of origin was first formulated modern man and modern great apes from a common ancient ancestor. Another factor of anthropogenesis is revealed by the work of F. Engels “The role of labor in the process of transformation of a monkey into a man”, where he substantiated the position that it was labor that was the decisive factor in the evolutionary transformation of an ancient human ancestor into a social and cultural-creating being. In the XX century. these ideas were combined into a common concept biosocial nature person. According to modern concepts, the beginning of the process of becoming a person refers to the appearance of Ramapithecus (14-20 million years ago) - a creature that steadily switched to a lifestyle in the savannas with the systematic use of tools. Australopithecus appeared 5-8 million years ago, widely using partially processed tools or found in nature. About 2 million years ago, the first representative of the genus Homo, Homo habilis, or Handy Man, originated from them. Species Homo erectus -- Homo erectus appears 1--1.3 million years ago. He had a brain volume in the range of 800-1200 cm 3 (the brain volume of a modern person is 1200-1600 cm 3), knew how to make quite perfect hunting tools, mastered fire, which allowed him to switch to boiled food, and, apparently, possessed speech. His direct descendant was Homo sapiens, or Homo sapiens (150-200 thousand years ago). This human ancestor at the stage of Cro-Magnon man (40--50 thousand years ago) has already quite approached the modern one not only in external physical appearance, but also in terms of the level of intelligence, the ability to organize collective forms of labor activity, build dwellings, make clothes, use highly developed speech, as well as interest in beauty, the ability to feel compassion for one's neighbor, etc. Scientists believe that the process of evolution was influenced by cosmic factors: the degree of solar activity, the periodic change of the Earth's magnetic poles, in the pauses between which there is a shield of electromagnetic fields, protecting the biosphere, weakened so much for several millennia that ionizing radiation of cosmic origin increased, according to estimates, by 60%. This significantly increased the frequency of mutations in the germ cells of hominids. Archaeologists also drew attention to the fact that the discovered sites of ancient people coincide with places of heavy traffic. lithospheric plates, faults and cracks in the earth's crust, which caused elevated level radiation. It is possible that tectonic, volcanic, seismic and radiation cataclysms had a significant impact on the plant and thus climatic panorama of the ancestral home of man. One of such periods of change of magnetic poles falls precisely on 40 thousand years ago.
One of options reasons that served as an impetus for the crisis of a purely animal mode of existence of our distant ancestor - a change in the structure and structure of the brain (damage to one of the brain regions connected to each other - the amygdala, cingulate gyrus or cerebral fornix - a change in the structure of the medial side of the cerebral hemispheres of the brain, fixed genetically), which led to the differentiation of the functions of the hemispheres themselves. In animals, the hemispheres essentially duplicate each other, doubling the capabilities of the organism and allowing, in the event of damage to one, the other hemisphere to take over all the functions of the damaged one. In humans, both hemispheres operate according to a different program. Thus, the possibilities of the psyche, its plasticity increase significantly. The information-adaptive possibilities of the psyche are many times higher than the possibilities of physiological changes in the body. Instead of adapting to the environment, a person modifies his own behavior. Under the influence of radiation, the higher herbivorous primates dramatically changed their behavior patterns: they began to prefer meat to plant foods, they have the ability to bear children throughout the year. And more importantly, there was a liberation from the blind power of animal instincts. There is also an opinion that the factor that accelerated the evolution of hominids was stress caused by a whole complex of external and internal causes. External influences could act through internal mechanisms of self-preservation and transmission of hereditary information. These changes also caused a restructuring of the main types of activity, in which labor activity and communication gradually acquired specifically human forms. However, there is a limit to the growth of the size of the head (the impossibility of the normal birth of such a "tadpole"). The selection for high intelligence came into conflict with the selection for the survival of a woman during childbirth. As a result, the advantage turned out to be on the side of those individuals in whom the degree of "filling" of the skull with the medulla increased (complication of the structure of the hemispheres, differentiation of their functions, the birth of a child with a relatively undeveloped brain that develops over a longer period of childhood than in other animals). Caring for offspring, bearing a fetus, learning basic behaviors after birth - all this required changes in the organization of life in the hominin community. Concerning general theory anthropogenesis, then its basis throughout the XX century. was the idea of labor activity as a leading factor in the formation of man and human society. But she did not remain unchanged during all this time. The main change in this theory is associated with the realization of a whole range of conditions in which tool activity and labor are considered as the most important factors. community development only in interaction with such factors as language, consciousness, morality, mythology, ritual practice, etc. All these factors of human development are possible in society, and they are embodied in culture. In other words, a person becomes fully human only in unity with other people.
The search for ancestors is associated with brilliant guesses and beautiful legends that tell about the appearance of a person from “nothing” or by the will of the gods or about spontaneous generation from nature itself.
1) The scientific study of the process of human origin (anthropogenesis) was established in the 19th century. book release Ch. Darwin "The origin of man and sexual selection", where the idea of the origin of modern man and modern great apes from a common ancient ancestor was first formulated. D another factor of anthropogenesis reveals the work of F. Engels "The role of labor in the process of turning a monkey into a man", where the position was substantiated that it was labor that was the decisive factor in the evolutionary transformation of the ancient human ancestor into a social and cultural-creating being. In the 20th century. these ideas were combined into a general concept of the biosocial nature of man.
2)According to modern concepts, the beginning of the process of becoming a person refers to the appearance of Ramapithecus (14-20 million years ago) - a creature that steadily switched to a lifestyle in the savannas with the systematic use of tools. Australopithecus appeared 5-8 million years ago, widely using partially processed tools or found in nature. About 2 million years ago, the first representative of the genus Homo, Homo habilis, or Handy Man, originated from them. Species Homo erectus - Homo erectus appears 1-1.3 million years ago. He had a brain volume in the range of 800-1200 cm 3 (the brain volume of a modern person is 1200-1600 cm 3), knew how to make quite perfect hunting tools, mastered fire, which allowed him to switch to boiled food, and, apparently, possessed speech. His direct descendant was Homo sapiens, or Homo sapiens (150-200 thousand years ago). This human ancestor at the stage of Cro-Magnon man (40-50 thousand years ago) has already quite approached the modern one not only in external physical appearance, but also in terms of intelligence, in the ability to organize collective forms of labor activity, build dwellings, make clothes, use highly developed speech, as well as by interest in the beautiful, the ability to experience a feeling of compassion for one's neighbor, etc.
Scientists believe that the process of evolution was influenced by cosmic factors: the degree of solar activity, the periodic change of the Earth's magnetic poles, in the pauses between which the shield of electromagnetic fields protecting the biosphere weakened for several millennia so much that ionizing radiation of cosmic origin increased, according to calculations, by 60%. This significantly increased the frequency of mutations in the germ cells of hominids.
Archaeologists also drew attention to the fact that the discovered sites of ancient people coincide with places of intense movement of lithospheric plates, faults and cracks in the earth's crust, which caused an increased level of radiation.
It is possible that tectonic, volcanic, seismic and radiation cataclysms had a significant impact on the plant and thus climatic panorama of the ancestral home of man. One of such periods of change of magnetic poles falls precisely on 40 thousand years ago.
One of the possible reasons that triggered the crisis of a purely animal mode of existence of our distant ancestor is a change in the structure and structure of the brain (damage to one of the connected parts of the brain - the amygdala, cingulate gyrus or cerebral fornix - a change in the structure of the medial side of the large hemispheres of the brain, fixed genetically), which led to the differentiation of the functions of the hemispheres themselves. In animals, the hemispheres essentially duplicate each other, doubling the capabilities of the organism and allowing, in the event of damage to one, the other hemisphere to take over all the functions of the damaged one. In humans, both hemispheres operate according to a different program. Thus, the possibilities of the psyche, its plasticity increase significantly.
The information-adaptive possibilities of the psyche are many times higher than the possibilities of physiological changes in the body. Instead of adapting to the environment, a person modifies his own behavior.
Under the influence of radiation, the higher herbivorous primates dramatically changed their behavior patterns: they began to prefer meat to plant foods, they have the ability to bear children throughout the year. And more importantly, there was a liberation from the blind power of animal instincts.
However, there is a limit to the growth of the size of the head (the impossibility of the normal birth of such a "tadpole"). The selection for high intelligence came into conflict with the selection for the survival of a woman during childbirth. As a result, the advantage turned out to be on the side of those individuals in whom the degree of "filling" of the skull with the medulla increased (complication of the structure of the hemispheres, differentiation of their functions, the birth of a child with a relatively undeveloped brain that develops over a longer period of childhood than in other animals). Caring for offspring, bearing a fetus, learning basic behaviors after birth - all this required changes in the organization of life in the hominin community.
As for the general theory of anthropogenesis, its basis throughout the 20th century. was the idea of labor activity as a leading factor in the formation of man and human society. But she did not remain unchanged during all this time. The main change in this theory is connected with the realization of a whole complex of conditions in which tool activity and labor are considered as the most important factors of social development only in interaction with such factors as language, consciousness, morality, mythology, ritual practice, etc. All these factors of development of a person are possible in society, and they are embodied in culture.
In other words, a person becomes fully human only in unity with other people.
1. What is the name of the process of the origin of man from an animal?
2.Which scientific papers we are talking about anthropogenesis, who are their authors?
3. Draw in a notebook the chain of origin of a person according to modern theory.
4. What (what factors) influenced the evolution of man, write down in your notebooks.
- the subject of study of both the sciences of nature (natural science) and the sciences of the spirit (humanitarian and social knowledge). between natural and humanities there is a continuous dialogue on the human problem, the exchange of information, theoretical models, methods, etc.
At present, science has established the notion that - a biosocial being that combines biological and social components. It should also be borne in mind that not only a person has social form existence, but also many animals.
From point of view modern science to more accurately separate the biological predetermination of human existence and its (actually human) essence. The search for boundaries between the biological and the specifically human is engaged in a science called sociobiology. This science in the study of man is at the junction of natural science and humanitarian knowledge.
Thus, it can definitely be argued that the problem of man is interdisciplinary in nature, and the modern natural-scientific view of man is complex knowledge obtained within the framework of various disciplines. A holistic view of a person, his essence and nature is also impossible without drawing on the data of humanitarian and social knowledge and philosophy.
The emergence of scientific anthropology. The theory of the origin of man from anthropoid apes
Anthropology The science of the origin and evolution of man. Anthropogenesis- the evolutionary process of the formation of man. The main questions of anthropology are questions about the place and time of the appearance of man, the main stages of his evolution, driving forces and factors, correlation of anthropogenesis and sociogenesis.
initial presentation about the origin of man and society already reflected in ancient mythologies. Later, various versions of the religious view of the origin of man appeared.
So, for example, in Christianity it is believed that the first man Adam was created by God from dust, and the first woman Eve was created from Adam's rib. Regardless of the specific version, the essence of the religious answer to the question of the origin of man remains the same: man is the creation of God, and the specific questions that accompany and make up the creative, divine act are a mystery.
However, already in ancient philosophy, the idea of the natural origin of man appears. But the ancient ideas about the origin of man were speculative, and sometimes simply fantastic, being not so much the result of a generalization of objective data, but the product of the sophisticated imagination of ancient philosophers.
Anthropology developed rapidly in the second half of the 19th century. after the creation of Ch. Darwin theories of evolution.
The German biologist Haeckel put forward a hypothesis about the existence in the past of an intermediate species between apes and humans, which he called Pithecanthropus(monkey-man). He also suggested that the ancestors of man were not modern monkeys, but dryopithecus(ancient monkeys). From them, one line of evolution went to chimpanzees and gorillas, the other to humans. Twenty million years ago, under the influence of a cold snap, the jungle retreated, and one of the branches of Driopithecus had to leave the trees and switch to upright walking. Their remains have been found in India.
In 1960, the English archaeologist L. Leakey found in East Africa a “handy man”, whose age is 2 million years. The brain volume was 670 cm 3 . In the same layers, tools were found made of split river pebbles, sharpened with several chips. Later, the remains of creatures of the same type, 5.5 million years old, were discovered in Kenya.
After that, the opinion was strengthened that it was in East Africa in the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era that the separation of man and great apes occurred. It was then that the evolutionary lines of man and chimpanzee diverged.
Modern Data molecular biology make it possible to establish that humans and modern chimpanzees have 91% similar genes, humans and gibbons have 76%, and humans and macaques have 66%. In a genetic sense, the chimpanzee is considered to be the closest modern great ape to humans. However, the study morphological features indicates that a person has the most similarities with a gorilla - 385. Next comes the chimpanzee - 369, the orangutan - 359 and the gibbon - 117.
Great apes are more similar to humans than to lower apes, however, since the ancestors of the lower and higher apes were common, there is still a similarity between them, while when comparing lower apes with humans, there is no similarity.
What was the reason for the appearance of a person in a particular place? In East Africa, outcrops of uranium rocks have been noted and increased radiation has been recorded, which, as proven by genetics, causes mutations. Thus, here evolutionary changes could proceed more rapidly.
The emerging species, physically weaker than those around it, had to start making tools and leading a social lifestyle in order to survive. All this contributed to the emergence of the mind - a powerful tool of a naturally weak creature that does not have sufficient natural organs of protection.
“Handy man” (“southern monkey”) is attributed to Australopithecus, the remains of which were first found in Africa in 1924. The volume of the Australopithecus brain did not exceed the brain volume of great apes, but, apparently, this was enough to create tools.
In 1891, the remains of the Pithecanthropus predicted by Haeckel were discovered on the island of Java. Creatures that lived 0.5 million years ago had a height of more than 150 cm, a brain volume of about 900 cm 3. They already used knives, drills, hand axes.
Found in China in the 1920s synanthropus("Chinese man") with a brain volume close to Pithecanthropus. He used fire and vessels, but did not yet possess speech.
In 1856, the remains of a creature that lived 150-40 thousand years ago, called Neanderthal. He had a brain volume comparable to the brain of a modern person, a sloping forehead, brow ridges, and a low cranium. The Neanderthal lived in caves and hunted mammoths. Neanderthals buried their dead relatives, which was noted for the first time.
Finally, in the Cro-Magnon cave in France in 1868, the remains of a creature (called Cro-Magnon) were found, similar in appearance and volume of the skull (up to 1600 cm ") to a modern person, having a height of 180 cm. Its age is determined - from 40 to 15 thousand years This is - reasonable person. In the same era, racial differences appeared. The isolated groups developed special characteristics—light skin in whites, and so on.
So, the line of human evolution is built as follows: “handy man” (Australopithecine), “upright man” (Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus), “Neanderthal man”, “reasonable man” (Cro-Magnon).
After the Cro-Magnon man did not change genetically, while his social evolution continued.
Anthropologists of the beginning of the XXI century. argue that a modern type of man arose more than 100 thousand years ago in East Africa. This hypothesis was called "Noah's Ark" because, according to the Bible, all races and peoples descended from Noah's three sons - Shem, Ham and Jophet.
In accordance with this version, Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and Neanderthal are not the ancestors of modern man, but various groups of hominids (humanoid creatures) displaced by Homo erectus from East Africa. Genetic studies support this hypothesis, but they are considered unreliable by some anthropologists and paleontologists.
An alternative view of multi-regional human evolution argues that only archaic humans originated in East Africa, while modern humans originated where they live today. Man left Africa at least 1 million years ago. This hypothesis is based on the paceontological similarity between modern humans and distant ancestors who lived in the same places.
It is still impossible to say which of these hypotheses is correct, since the paleontological record is incomplete, and intermediate species are still not fully known. It is impossible to find the point at which biogenesis was replaced by anthropogenesis, for a long time biological and social factors acted in parallel. Despite numerous archaeological and paleontological data, the picture of anthropogenesis remains still incomplete, many intermediate links between man and ancient apes remain unknown. Difficulties also arise because the process of anthropogenesis was not linear.
The evolution of not only man, but also all living things, is carried out through the gradual emergence of lateral branches, many of which disappear almost immediately, others are taken aside, and only one line leads, in the end, to the appearance of Homo sapiens. Graphically, the evolution of hominids can be represented as a tree with many branches, some of which are long dead, others are still alive.
Undoubtedly, scientific ideas about anthropogenesis will not only be replenished, but, possibly, will change significantly.
The hypothesis of the origin of people from the proto-human (Homo pre-Sapiens)
ten unanswered questions
The theory of the origin of people from great apes in natural science in general counts installed. However, for example, the prudent Charles Darwin did not use the phrase "man descended from apes." In his book "The Origin of Species by natural selection» (1859) there is no such wording. Even after 12 years in special work The origin of man and sexual selection” he writes only about evolution in general, without touching on the “intermediate link” at all.
The origin of man from apes was announced in 1863 by Darwinists Focht, Huxley and Haeckel. It was Haeckel who spoke of the “missing link” between the higher primates and man, referring to the described Linnaeus"a man of troglodytes", called by Haeckel "an ape-man, devoid of speech."
At the same time, such an approach to the history of the emergence of man has raised and continues to raise many questions that remain unanswered to this day. The entire musculoskeletal system of a person, his overly large and inflexible legs, and weak arms are clearly not adapted for fast climbing and jumping through trees.
Traces of two feet in the petrified volcanic ash (Tanzania), dated 3.5 million years ago, prove that the straightened bipedal walking preceded labor by millions of years. Labor led to the improvement of upright walking, but upright walking is a prerequisite for the release of the forelimbs for work. Why did the monkey ancestors, descending from the trees, choose such a strange mode of movement, although the four-legged move is easier, faster and is used by all current monkeys?
Why have the forelimbs of people become so shortened and weakened, although strong hands give clear advantages in hunting and labor, especially with primitive tools?
Why did living chimpanzees or extinct Australopithecus not go to work, although they have been for millions of years semi erect, ate meat and often used sticks and bones? Consequently, it was not labor that created man (as Engels believed), but labor and speech.
If the ancestors of man were hunters (the famous painting "Hunting the ancient "people" for a mammoth") and ate meat, then why jaws and teeth were weak for raw meat, and the intestines were almost twice as long relative to the body as those of carnivores? Moreover, the jaws are reduced in the earliest upright animals (prezinjantrops), although they did not know fire and could not soften food on it. What then did human ancestors eat?
Why did a person's body hair disappear? Although the nights in Southeast Africa are very cool and all the monkeys living there retain their wool.
How did animals, the ancestors of people, with the slowness of movement and the absence of tools, except miserable sticks and stones, escape from predators?
Why reasonable people en masse (wars) kill each other?
Why did man spread throughout the earth?
So many mysteries in the reconstruction of the original form of man indicate that in There is some major gap in the modern theory of anthropogenesis.
All of the above and many other questions about the origin of man were convincingly answered by the hypothesis put forward in the 1970s by the Soviet researcher, Professor B.F. Piston.
Who are we?
Thirty-five million years ago, a group separated from the ancient insectivorous mammals primary animals(Fig. 1), from which between ten and seven million years ago was formed ancestral trunk of African great apes(gibbon, gorilla).
Between seven and six million years ago, the ancestral trunk shared with African apes split into two parts: the hominoid line (troglodytid family) and the pongid line (higher ancient anthropoid apes: bonobos, chimpanzees).
Upright, bipedal, two-armed, but dumb troglodytids were not yet people, but they were no longer monkeys either.
If we unbiasedly raise the question of the distinctive features of man, given by the experience of history, and which cannot be extended to animals, then there are only two such features.
- Humans are the only species within which large-scale, rationally inexplicable, mutual killing is systematically practiced.
- Humans are the only species capable of absurdity, and logic and syntax, practical and theoretical thinking, is its de-absurdization.
The organism of an animal, on the other hand, behaves in any situation, even in an artificially created one, from a physiological point of view, completely correctly - it gives a picture of a nervous breakdown, to construct the absurdity of it nervous system not capable.
Rice. Fig. 1. A variant of the anthropogenesis process diagram: A - hominid line; B - hominoid line; B - pongid line; G - ancestral stem of African monkeys; 1 - fossil gibbon; 2 - ancient gorilla
Three genera are clearly distinguished in the troglodytid family: Australopithecus, Archeoanthropes, and Paleoanthropes (see Fig. 1). The lower form, Australopithecus, in terms of the volume and structure of the brain, according to the morphology of the head, is very similar to the anthropic monkeys, but radically differs from them in upright posture.
The highest form of upright paleoanthropes, according to the structure of the body, skull, brain - in the highest degree looks like a human.
Troglodytids, starting from Australopithecus and ending with Paleoanthropes, were only able to find and master the bones and corpses of animals that died and were killed by predators. But even this was a very difficult task for them. Neither teeth nor nails, like the chewing muscles and the digestive apparatus, were adapted to such a "labor occupation." To master the bone and brain and break through the thick skin was helped only by a skill that goes back to the instinct of breaking nuts, mollusks, reptiles with stones, which manifests itself everywhere in the phylogenesis of monkeys. It was a purely biological adaptation to a fundamentally new way of eating - necrophagy.
Troglodytids not only did not kill large animals, but also had a strong instinct not to kill under any circumstances, otherwise their fragile biological niche in the biocenosis would be destroyed.
The upright-walking smasher primates must also have been carriers at the same time, since they had to either carry the stones to the location of the meat food, or carry the food to the stones. Therefore, troglodytids were upright: the upper limbs had to be freed from the function of swinging (on trees) to perform the function of wearing. So that "tools" in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic were means of butchering the remains of large animals and absolutely nothing more. There are three major steps in this process.
First stage at the level of Australopithecus. The time of the richest fauna of killer predators. And Australopithecus, apparently, then did not even use the abundant supply of meat left by powerful predators, but only the bone and brain, for which it was only necessary to dismember and break the bones. To do this, it was enough to use ordinary stones, which is why the fossil Australopithecus did not leave “the tools of their labor”, they did not yet need this skill.
The bone marrow of herbivores is about 5% of their mass, so that the same deceased ancient elephant had 200-300 kg of this highly nutritious substance, plus the brain weighed the same amount. There were practically no applicants for this protein-rich food, with the exception of rodents and insects.
In the second stage a deep crisis of predatory fauna manifested itself, marked by the complete extinction of killer predators. Consequently, Australopithecus was also doomed to extinction. Only one branch of triglodytids survived the crisis and gave a completely updated picture of ecology and morphology - archeoanthropes. The role of collectors and accumulators of relatively fresh corpses was played by widely branched river currents. All reliably localized Lower Paleolithic sites are located near river bends, near ancient shallows and rifts, etc., natural traps for carcasses floating and dragging along the bottom. The task of the archeoanthropes was to pierce their skins and cut the bundles with stones in the form of axes (Fig. 2).
Rice. 2. "Tools of Labor" of Archeoanthropists
Thus, at this stage, eating not only the brain, but also meat developed, probably in competition with the vulture raptors.
Third stage characterized by the onset of a crisis due to the growth of the fauna of the so-called cave predators (cave lions, bears). The rivers began to account for a small part of the total mass of dying herbivores. The genus of archeoanthropes was thus doomed to extinction. And again, only one branch emerged from the crisis morphologically and ecologically renewed - paleoanthropes (troglodytes). Their sources of meat food can no longer be described unambiguously. Their stones are increasingly adapted for cutting and butchering the meat of animals and fish damaged by predators, although they are still attracted to extracting the brain. This genus is already able to spread in search of food, but they still did not hunt anyone.
However, this third stage also comes to an end with the next zigzag of fluctuations in fauna and flora in the Late Pleistocene.
In the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era (Pleistocene), a cooling set in (Fig. 3), which led to glaciation of a large part of the Earth. The ice age began with the spread of ice over a significant part of even the southern hemisphere. Many species of woody plants died. There was an intensive evolution of mammals with a change of fauna and extinction of species. New biogeocenoses formed at the end of the Middle Pleistocene replaced upright carnivorous higher primates, despite all their sophisticated adaptability.
Rice. 3. Pleistocene landscape
For this amazing animal, which has developed so rapidly and is now doomed to extinction, nature left only a very narrow exit. It consisted in violating the same, previously salutary, principle “do not kill”, which was the deepest foundation, the secret secret of their stay in various forms of symbiosis with animals. The first condition for their unhindered access to the remains of dead meat was that the living and even dying animal should not be afraid of them.
The solution to the biological paradox was that the instinct did not forbid them to kill members of their own species, i.e. it was possible to use part of its population (eating fellows) as a self-reproducing source of food.
All signs of cannibalism in troglodytes, which are known to anthropology, directly speak of the posthumous eating of the cranial and bone marrow, probably, and the entire corpse of creatures like themselves. This trend still could not solve the problem of food: a species that feeds on itself is hopeless. Therefore, a completely new phenomenon arose - the rudimentary splitting of the species itself on the basis of the specialization of a special passive, eaten part of the population, which, however, then very actively buds into a special species, in order to eventually become a special family.
Thus, relatively quickly and violently, a new one broke away from the former species, becoming its ecological opposite.
If paleoanthropes (troglodytes) did not kill anyone except their own kind, then these others (a new species Homopre- Sapiens - the emerging man (see Fig. 1) represented an inversion: as they turned into hunters, they did not specifically kill paleoanthropes. At first, they differed from other troglodytes only in that they did not kill these other troglodytes. However, much later, having separated from the troglodytes, they not only killed the latter, as well as any other animals, as “non-humans”, but also killed their own kind, i.e. others Homo pre- Sapiens.
There is no need to talk about the discovery of fire at all - it appeared (during the impact of stones) against the will and consciousness of the troglodytes and caused them great inconvenience (smoldering of the litter of the troglodytes' lair). They needed a “discovery” of a different kind: how to make sure that the fire does not arise at all.
In the course of the fight against fire, its useful properties were also discovered: from bonfires, fire in a coal pit, to a pit - a stove and a lamp.
In addition, the use of fire contributed to the loss of hairline by troglodytids, which is so mysterious phenomenon. This method of thermoregulation is almost unique among mammals. However, a combination of such environmental factors as collecting bones in the midday heat (during the rest of real predators) and exposure to the heat of bonfires (coal pits) led to this method of heat exchange, which is effective only in the sun and constant contact with the heat of the fire. The hairline on the head was preserved, probably as a protection against exposure to sunlight in the midday heat (see above).
Where are we going?
It is time to discard all those absurdities with which the problem of the formation of Homo sapiens is littered. It is a scientific inconsistency to think that all individuals of an ancestral species have evolved into humans. It is even more senseless to think that they have ceased to be born into the world since some, through evolution, became human beings.
As for the person Homo sapiens), then it appeared (see Fig. 1) only 35-40 thousand years ago. The history of people is an explosion! The impetus for the explosion was a violent divergence of two types - Trog- lodites and Homo pre- Sapiens, rapidly moving away from each other to different levels of organization of matter - biological and social. Only extremely tense ecological relations between the two divergent species can explain such an unusual speed of budding of a new, progressive species. Therefore, we have before us the product of some special selection mechanism, which is opposite to Darwin's, "natural".
"The riddle of man" is fully included in the inexhaustible difficult topic divergences of paleoanthropes and Homo pre- Sapiens. Translated into chronology, the length of this interval is only 15-25 thousand years, and the whole mystery of the divergence that gave birth to people fits into it.
Having made a pathological transition to predatory behavior in relation to his own species, the paleoanthropist - the aggressor - introduced fear of "one's neighbor" into the world of hominids. Having been fixed genetically, this fear has become innate (and now a child of 5-7 months is afraid when a stranger approaches).
Only a very few, selected by paleoanthropes (troglodytes) for "big forehead", could survive and fall into the number of those adults whose descendants later budded from paleoanthropes, forming isolated populations of tributaries of these paleoanthropes. However, in the end they were still destroyed, but this was already done Homo pre- Sapiens. This aromorphosis was a fairly local phenomenon: according to modern genetic studies of human hemoglobin, it turned out that all of humanity is the descendants of only 600-1000 ancestral males.
There is another very specific fact: the resettlement of early Homo Sapiens almost throughout the habitable territory of the Earth, including America, Australia, and Oceania. They did not become "cramped" in the economic sense, they undoubtedly became cramped in the sense of the difficulty of existence with their own kind. They fled from the neighborhood with those populations Homo pre- Sapiens, who did not themselves struggle with these factors, but shifted their hardships to part of their own and neighboring populations.
Finally Earth ceased to be open to free movement, and its surface was covered with a system of mutually isolated cells, using their own language (the help of misunderstanding) as a means of protection against alien behavior and aggressive aspirations. And yet this mutual avoidance was too late a means to thus protect against interbreeding with troglodytes - adelphophages(fratricides). Consequently, “reasonable man” failed to “leave honestly” from the animal world, “without getting dirty”.
Exactly species heterogeneity makes the life of mankind (of which the infiltrated troglodytes make up a part) so unstable and fraught with the most terrible consequences.
Predatory hominoids today - the so-called " powers of the world this." And their unreasonable dominion brought all life on Earth to the brink of death. However, the way to salvation is in the hands of the Man himself.
"Science" of the origin of man
Physical anthropology (or paleoanthropology) is a relatively new field of science that claims to be able to detect evolutionary development"homo sapiens" from an unknown non-human ancestor. Her data is fossils and artifacts from ancient humans and their alleged ape-like ancestors.
Lack of data
In reality, the data are embarrassingly few and far too rare to support the theory of human evolution. Since there would have to have been countless billions of these ancient humans and their anthropoid ancestors during the supposed millions or more years of their existence, and since they are supposed to be the latest (and therefore probably best preserved) indicators of evolutionary history, one might speculate that at the disposal of anthropologists will be big number transitional fossils. In fact, there was none!
Yes, there are some fossilized bones and teeth, but total amount all the fossils that could be shown and that could be a link between apes and humans, or between something else and humans, would not fill a coffin box (Science Digest, May 1982, p. 44). Even those that have been found have given rise to various conflicting interpretations, and there are almost as many different human evolutionary lineages as there are anthropologists who have come up with it all. In fact, it is noticed that there are no less anthropologists than the fossil samples they study (ibid.). Malcolm Muggaridge, a well-known British writer, has given the remarkable information that 500 or more doctoral dissertations have been written on the bones of the "Piltdown man" and that these bones are ultimately a hoax (The End of Christianity, Hermans Publication Co., 1980). year, p. 59). One can be excused for suspecting that anthropology, the science of man, is an easy field for a PhD, but hard enough to earn a living!
In 1984 at the annual conference American Association To promote science, anthropologists from all over the world came to New York to view together a publicized exhibition of all these fossils, organized by the American Museum of Natural History for special viewing, and then discuss the meaning of what they saw. The meeting was announced in scientific journal following:
“Sometimes you start to wonder if orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas once sat around a tree, pondering which of them is the closest relative of man. (And did they want to be?) Maybe they even chuckled at the machinations of human scientists competing to draw a complete map of evolution on Earth. If you put them on top of each other, all these competing versions of our evolutionary highway, the Los Angeles Freeway would look like Rural Route 41 in Elkhart, Indiana" (Science News, vol. 125, June 9, 1984, p. 361 ).
However, there is no direct evidence that, in his evolution, man made an "ascension" from someone other than other people. There may be fossilized evidence of some extinct apes or human tribes, but no real ape-men or other evolutionary intermediates. Some of the circumstantial evidence offered (such as similarity) is not real evidence, since they can be explained by creation as much as by evolution. This whole spectacle is simply wishful thinking by evolutionary humanists, as they are determined to destroy the frank, realistic, hopeful, true biblical evidence for the origin of the human race at any cost.
australopithecines
When I went to school, I was taught that the three strongest pieces of evidence for human evolution are Piltdown, Sinanthropus, and Javanthropus. However, these famous discoveries are no longer taken seriously. Piltdown turned out to be a hoax, Sinanthropus was lost for 40 years, and Javanthropus, as its discoverers later admitted, was an artificial construction from a human femur and a gibbon skull. Other former "stars" in the man-ape buffoonery were Nebraska Man (an extinct pig) and Neanderthal Man (now universally recognized by modern man).
The real "star" in this long-running show is a putative hominid (ape-man) named Australopithecus (meaning "monkey of the south") associated with a diverse collection of fossils, including a sinatrop found by Lewis Leakey, Richard Leakey's "1470 skull," Lucy" by Carl Ioganson, as well as fossilized footprints discovered in Letoli by Mary Leakey. Although there was sharp disagreement between Johanson and Leakey regarding their role in evolution, they all now argue that these so-called australopithecines walked upright like humans, although they had monkey brains and skulls.
However, evidence against this view is mounting. Dr. Joel Rak describes the importance of the first discovered Australopithecus ear bone:
“It differs significantly from the ear bone of modern humans, and the differences are much greater than between the ear bones of Homo sapiens and African monkeys. The new "anvil" is of particular interest due to the particular importance of these ear ossicles for taxonomic and phylogenetic (evolutionary) studies. The only other fossilized humanoid ear ossicle is indistinguishable from that of modern humans” (“Australopithecine Ear Bones,” Nature, vol. 279, May 3, 1975, p. 62).
Dr. Charles Oxnard, who of all anatomists has conducted the most extensive and thorough study of Autralopithecine fossils, writes: "Fossil fragments are usually very different from any living form... They may or may not be the remains of an orangutan" (American Biology Teacher, vol. 41, May 5, 1979 year, p. 273). He also categorically argued that these creatures could not walk upright at all (ibid.).
That the Australopithecus were simply great apes is evident from their skulls, which were long believed to have a brain volume of about 500 cc. see and corresponds to an ordinary monkey. However, for a long time it was believed that their brains were at least human in shape. Now this has turned out to be a complete misconception.
“I expected Australopithecus craniums to be miniature human replicas, because this view has prevailed in the scientific literature since 1925 ... My analysis of several known Australopithecus craniums shows that Radinsky's guess turned out to be correct: all the preserved curves were ape-like” (Dean Faulk, Fossilized Brain, Natural History, vol. 93, September 1984, p. 38).
As for the alleged footprints of Australopithecus, they have no connection with other fossils and they are probably human footprints: "preserved footprints show the full morphological form that is observed in modern humans, strikingly human in form" (Science, t 208, April 11, 1980, p. 175).
We have every reason to conclude that Australopithecus, whatever they may be, did not have genetic connection with a person.
The Homo Erectus Mystery
There is another group of scattered fossils generally known as "Homo erectus", and many paleoanthropologists believe that this is an intermediate creature between "Australopithecine" and "Homo sapiens". The Beijing Sinanthropus and Javanese Pithecanthropus, once thought to belong to this group, are now mostly hushed up. Since then, however, other "homo erectus" fossils have been found in Asia and Africa, and apparently even in Australia. Most of them were identified by the volume of the brain, equal, as a rule, to 700-800 cubic meters. cm.
By itself, this proves nothing, since a significant number of perfectly normal people are known to have a brain volume of this size. Moreover, many modern humans have heavy brow ridges and low, sloping foreheads, so these traits don't really matter either. The problem is that the possible period of existence of "homo erectus" coincides with the dates assigned to Australopithecus, so that these two known branches lived simultaneously and even in the same geographical areas.
There is no doubt that "homo erectus" ("straight man") had an upright gait. That he is indeed a human, and not a hind-legged ape, has recently been confirmed by examination of the internal brain impressions of a skull known as "Skull-1470" found several years ago by Richard Leakey.
“Internal impressions of a Homo habilis specimen known as Skull-1470, taken from the Kenya National Museum, reproduce a humanoid frontal lobe, including what appears to be a “speech center” (Dean Faulk, op. cit., p. 38 ).
Since this part of the brain (the speech center) is known to control speech and is found only in humans, it is clear that this particular Homo Erectus specimen was indeed a human, although its skull volume is just over 750 cc. cm.
“If we are to understand what was the important driver of human brain evolution, then the internal impressions of the 1470 skull, with their human-like frontal lobe containing what looks like a speech center in the left hemisphere, confirm that, as suggested by the comparison behavior of monkeys and humans, this is language” (ibid., p. 39).
That "homo erectus" was a human rather than an intermediate being between an ape and a human is further confirmed by the discovery in Kenya in late 1984 of the most complete "homo erectus" skeleton ever known, belonging to a boy of twelve years of age. Evolutionists believed it lived about 1.6 million years ago, based on radiometric dating of ash located at the site where it was found by anthropologists Richard Leakey and Alan Walker.
“A new find shows that these ancient people had a body structure that is practically no different from our own ... The skeleton testified that the boy was 5 feet 6 inches tall; he was taller than many twelve-year-olds today” (Boyce Rensberger, “Human Fossils Dug Out of the Earth,” The Washington Post, October 19, 1984, p. A1).
Except for the size of the brain (between 700 and 800 cc), the skull and jawbone looked "like a Neanderthal" (ibid.). As all evolutionary anthropologists now confirm, the Neanderthal man was undoubtedly a man - "Homo sapiens". Thus, if Australopithecus is just a kind of monkey, then probably "homo erectus" - true man, very similar to the disappeared Neanderthal tribe. It is possible that the fossils were assigned "homo erectus" rather than "homo sapiens" simply because they turned out to be members of the human race, whose brain sizes were at a lower level than the usual brain size spectrum, but, nevertheless, they were normal people.
Evolution of apes from humans?
If evolution really took place, then the various stages of human evolution should be best reflected, since man is supposedly a recent evolutionary acquisition. Most experts look for fossil evidence in this area, and not in any other. However, as stated above, the actual evidence is extremely scarce and highly questionable. Exactly which hominid fossils could have belonged to human ancestors, as well as in what order to arrange them, is still the subject of heated debate even among evolutionary anthropologists.
But that's not all. Common ancestors of humans and apes that were objects long searches, especially 'Lucy' and other 'Australopithecines', appear to be alive today - at least according to the strange theory that some anthropologists are now putting forward. This is a pygmy chimpanzee, "bonobo", inhabitant of the jungles of Zaire, who is "almost identical in body size, figure and brain size" to Lucy, supposedly the oldest fossilized hominid (Science News, February 5, 1983, p. 89). According to many scientists, there are only a few differences with "Lucy" and Australopithecus in this common ancestor of Australopithecus, as well as humans and modern apes. Leading anthropologists such as Vincent Sarich (UC Berkeley), Adrianna Sieglman (UC Santa Cruz), Douglas Cramer (New York University) “became proponents of the bonobo model and base their thesis largely on the study of the anatomy of living apes and fossilized hominids” (ibid.).
Amazing! The pygmy chimpanzee turns into, on the one hand, Lucy, the Javanese Pithecanthropus, Neanderthal and modern man, and, on the other hand, turns into chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas and pygmy chimpanzees (!). Such an unsubstantiated scenario is currently being put forward.
However, this imaginary sequence runs into further difficulties when an attempt is made to arrange it in chronological order, since the dates are rarely consistent with the intended sequence. In fact, the dates are so uncertain that some scientists now seriously speculate that chimpanzees are descended from humans. That is, apes have human-like ancestors, instead of humans having ape-like ancestors! Two British scientists recently came to the following conclusion: "We think that chimpanzees are descended from humans, that the common ancestor of both was much more human than ape" (New Scientist, September 3, 1981, p. 594) .
Of course, there are no intermediate species, so neither ape nor man really evolved from each other. As scientists (John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas) note: “The problem facing paleontologists is that they do not have the evidence to make decisions” (ibid., p. 592). Evolutionary paleoanthropology is a wonderland where you can be your own ancestor, and no one knows how it really happened,
Chronological entanglement in human evolution
The great uncertainty that exists in the relationship between apes, humans and extinct hominins is further complicated with each new fossil discovery. One not-so-well-known fossil called the Petralonian Man (Archahthropus europaeus petraloniensis), discovered a few years ago in a Greek cave, is the subject of careful study by the Greek anthropologist Aris Paulianos. Dr. Paulianos states that "Petralonian Man" "died out more than 700,000 years ago, and is by far the oldest European known" (Current Anthropology, vol. 22, p. 287).
It seemed that this would be a very important "missing link", but the discovery in Africa of Australopithecus, apparently living simultaneously with both "homo erectus" and "archanthropus", attracted much more attention. One of the reasons is the modern appearance of the latter.
“The dating of the skull and its classification is controversial for several reasons. The skull embedded in calcite was not photographed prior to extraction, and the sequence of deposition is not certain. sedimentary rocks In a cave. Moreover, anatomically, the skull is a confused mixture of primitive and modern features, some of which are characteristic of "homo erectus" and others that can be attributed to "homo sapiens" (New Scientist, vol. 91, August 13, 1981, p. 405 ).
That the skull resembles in appearance a human skull is not emphasized in the limited technical literature on this discovery, and that the calcite in which it was found to be a stalagmite is generally ignored. To get acquainted with the necessary information, you should look at the report on this discovery and the first-hand reports of Dr. Paulianos:
“At the time of its discovery, the skeleton was in a stalagmite in the Petralona cave on the Halkidiki peninsula in southern Greece,” said the friday dr Aris Paulianos, President of the Hellenic Paleontological Society (Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1976, citing a Reuters report from Europe).
It is known that stalagmites usually form extremely slowly due to the evaporation of water dripping from the cave ceiling. Fossils cannot be embedded in the rock and preserved under such conditions, and this indicates that stalagmites could form quite quickly under certain conditions.
The following speaks of the full human status of the "Petralonian Man":
""The discovery proves that the cave, which contained primitive tools and cooked food, was inhabited by people of the ape era who skillfully used fire. We found fried meat from rhinos, bears and deer, which proves that people who lived in the cave used fire for its intended purpose,” said Paulianos” (ibid.).
These discoveries, as well as much evidence from other parts of the world, suggest that modern man lived at the same time as Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and his other alleged ancestors. Whoever these extinct creatures were, they could not be human ancestors.
There is another very "vague" line of evidence used by some evolutionists in an attempt to establish the putative dates for the evolutionary budding of various apes from the family tree, resulting in "homo sapiens", or modern man. This is the so-called "molecular clock", which indicates the similarity of DNA, blood proteins, cytochrome C and other biochemical factors as indicators of the degree of relationship between creatures. The clock aspect is particularly tied to the assumption that the rate of DNA mutation is constant over time, so that the degree of difference in DNA sequence can be thought to measure the time of evolutionary divergence.
There is no need to discuss the details of this problem here. That it does not work can be established by the results of a recent wide statistical research. Alan Templeton, in the official journal of the Society for the Study of Evolution, concludes:
“So, in that part of the phylogeny that concerns the gorilla-chimpanzee-human lineage, there is a strong rejection of the molecular clock hypothesis ... Moreover, the molecular clock hypothesis was rejected, since only 1% of specialists support it (Evolution, vol. 37, March 1983, her. 238, 242).
This means, in fact, that there is a 99% certainty that the molecular clock is meaningless as far as the evolutionary chronology of ape-to-human transformation is concerned.
Templeton also speaks about the general anthropological confusion in the evolutionary relationships between various primates, as discussed above. He's writing:
“Recent studies of bipedal locomotion in hominins and comparative studies of other great apes suggest that bipedal locomotion may have preceded hominids and that quadrupedal locomotion, or even the use of forelimbs for climbing as arms, is a very pale model. for the hominin ancestor. Therefore, these studies suggest that it was not man that arose from ancestors who moved on four legs, but rather the opposite - those who moved on four legs arose from those who moved partially on two legs” (ibid., p. 241).
According to these data, these human ancestors - hominids - could walk on two legs (bipedalism), before they turned into either walking on four limbs or using them as hands (tree climbing).
To conclude our discussion of this very confusing subject, we will only note that there is not the slightest evidence for the truth of human evolution. All the tragic consequences of such a false position in human society, summarized in chapter 2, were based entirely on the humanistic speculations of a strange, vague science called paleoanthropology (“the study of ancient man and his ape-like ancestors”). Christians should give a sharp rebuff to all these evolutionary speculations. Man has always been a man from the very day he was directly created by God.
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TEST
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Modern science of the origin and evolution of manIntroduction
Own pedigree has always interested people more than the origin of plants and animals. Attempts to understand and explain how man arose are reflected in the beliefs, legends, tales of various tribes and peoples. In the solution of this problem, the struggle between materialistic and idealistic views is especially acute.
For a long time, scientific knowledge was too abrupt and incomplete to solve the problem of the origin of man. Only in 1857, Charles Darwin made a hypothesis, and in 1871, in his work “The Origin of Man and Sexual Selection”, he convincingly proved that people originated from apes, and were not created by an act of divine creation, as the church teaches. “If we do not deliberately close our eyes, then with the current level of knowledge we will be able to approximately recognize our ancestors, and we have no reason to be ashamed of them,” Charles Darwin wrote.
The role of social factors, which was also pointed out by Ch. Darwin, was disclosed by F. Engels in the work "The role of labor in the process of turning a monkey into a man" (1896). By the 80s of our century, numerous fossil finds and the use of a wide variety of research methods made it possible to significantly clarify the questions of the evolution of anthropoids, although even now it is impossible to say with complete certainty from which particular ape-like ancestors man descended.
A careful study of the higher nervous activity of great apes revealed the proximity of these animals to humans and in a number of their behavioral reactions.
The relevance of the topic is due to the fact that it is of great interest at any stage of human development. The question of the origin of man remains open to this day.
Labor theory of anthropogenesis
F. Engels - about the role of labor in the transformation of ancient apes into humans: “Deep, qualitative differences between humans and anthropoid apes are associated with the social labor (social) activities of people. Distinctive feature man - the creation and use of tools. With their help, he changes the environment, he himself produces the necessary; animals use only what is given by nature.
The use of labor tools sharply reduced man's dependence on nature, weakened the effect of natural selection. In the process of labor (joint hunting, making tools), people united, which gave rise to the need for communication and led to the emergence of speech as a way of this communication. Under the influence of labor and speech, "the brain of a monkey gradually turned into a human brain, which, with all its resemblance to the monkey, far exceeds it in size and perfection" 1 .
The development of the brain and sense organs, the improvement of consciousness "had a reciprocal effect on labor and language, giving both more and more impetus to further development" 2 .
Engels first pointed out the role of labor as a decisive factor in the development of man. Labor, in his words, is “... the first basic condition for all human life, and, moreover, to such an extent that we must say in a certain sense: labor created man himself.” The data of modern anthropology confirmed the theory of F. Engels on the role of labor in the origin of man.
For many millions of years there has been a selection of individuals capable of tool activity, more savvy, with more dexterous hands. Throughout the path of the human paleontological record, the remains of our distant ancestors are accompanied by the remains of tools of varying degrees of complexity.
All the conditions of the material and spiritual life of modern man are the product of the labor of many generations of people.
Background of anthropogenesis
It is assumed that the common ancestors of great apes and humans are gregarious narrow-nosed monkeys that lived on trees in tropical forests. Their transition to a terrestrial way of life, caused by a cooling of the climate and the displacement of forests by steppes, led to upright walking. The straightened position of the body and the transfer of the center of gravity caused the restructuring of the arched vertebral column, characteristic of all four-legged animals, into an S-shaped one, which gave it flexibility. A vaulted springy foot was formed, the pelvis expanded, the chest became wider and shorter, the jaw apparatus was lighter, and most importantly, the forelimbs were freed from the need to support the body, their movements became freer and more varied, their functions became more complicated 3 .
The transition from the use of objects to the manufacture of tools is the boundary between ape and man. The evolution of the hand went through the natural selection of mutations that are useful for work. Thus, the hand is not only an organ of labor, but also its product. The first tools were tools for hunting and fishing. Along with vegetable, more high-calorie meat food has become more widely used. Food cooked on fire reduced the load on the chewing and digestive apparatus, and therefore lost its significance and gradually disappeared during the selection process, the parietal crest, to which the chewing muscles are attached in monkeys, and the intestines became shorter.
Along with bipedalism, the most important prerequisite for anthropogenesis was the herd way of life, which, with the development of labor activity and the need to exchange signals, led to the development of articulate speech. Slow selection of mutations transformed the undeveloped larynx and mouthparts of monkeys into human speech organs.
The origin of the language was the social labor process. Work, and then articulate speech, are the factors that controlled the genetically determined evolution of the human brain and sense organs. And this, in turn, led to the complication of labor activity. Concrete ideas about the surrounding objects and phenomena were generalized into abstract concepts, mental and speech abilities developed. Higher nervous activity was formed, and articulate speech developed.
Transition to bipedalism, herd way of life, high level the development of the brain and psyche, the use of objects as tools for hunting and protection - those prerequisites for humanization, on the basis of which labor activity, speech and thinking developed and improved.
Man's Predecessors
At the beginning of the Cenozoic, more than 40 million years ago, the first primates appeared. Several branches of evolution separated from them, leading to modern great apes, other primates and humans. Modern great apes are not the ancestors of man, but descend from common with him, already extinct ancestors - terrestrial great apes - driopithecus. They appeared 17-18 million years ago, at the end of the Neogene, and died out about 8 million years ago. They lived in tropical forests. Some of their populations apparently laid the foundation for the evolution of man, his predecessors, the Australopithecus.
Australopithecus (from Latin Australis - southern, Greek pitekos - monkey) is an extinct group of hominids (upright primates). Their skeletal remains have been found in South Africa. These two-legged creatures the size of chimpanzees had many features that bring them closer to humans (the shape of the teeth, the structure of the skull, the shape of the pelvis). However, their brain size (650 cc) did not exceed modern great apes 4 .
Excavations of the last 30 years in East Africa (D. Leakey and others) have shown that Australopithecus lived more than 5 million years ago, and therefore, there was enough time for the evolution of human ancestors through selection. The later australopithecines were apparently the direct ancestors of humans. They received the name "handy man" Homo habilis. In terms of appearance and structure skilled man did not differ from the great apes, but already knew how to make primitive cutting and chopping tools from pebbles. Many groups, embarking on the path of humanization and not completing it, perished in the struggle for existence. Natural selection contributed to the survival of individuals and groups with the skills to work.
Stages of human development
In the evolution of man (Homo) there are three stages:
- The oldest people, which include Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and heidelberg man(Homo erectus species - Homo erectus).
Ancient people - Neanderthals (the first representatives of the Homo sapiens species).
Modern (new) people, including fossil Cro-Magnons and modern people (the kind of Homo sapiens).
The oldest people lived 2 million - 500 thousand years ago.
Pithecanthropus - "ape-man". The remains were first discovered on about. Java in 1891 by E. Dubois, and then in a number of other places. Pithecanthropes walked on two legs, their brain volume increased, they used primitive tools in the form of clubs and lightly hewn stones. A low forehead, powerful brow ridges, a half-bent body with abundant hair - all this pointed to their recent (monkey) past.
Sinanthropus, whose remains were found in 1927 - 1937. in a cave near Beijing, in many respects similar to Pithecanthropus, this is a geographical version of Homo erectus. Sinanthropes already knew how to maintain fire.
The main factor in the evolution of ancient people was natural selection.
Ancient people characterize the next stage of anthropogenesis, when social factors also begin to play a role in evolution: labor activity in the groups they lived in, a joint struggle for life and the development of intellect. These include Neanderthals, whose remains were found in Europe, Asia, and Africa. They got their name from the place of the first discovery in the valley of the river. Neander (Germany).
Neanderthals lived in the Ice Age 200 - 35 thousand years ago in caves, where they constantly kept fire, dressed in skins. Neanderthal labor tools are much more perfect and have some specialization: knives, scrapers, percussion tools. Neanderthals lived in groups of 50 to 100 people. Men collectively hunted, women and children gathered edible roots and fruits, old men made tools. The last Neanderthals lived among the first modern people, and then they were finally forced out by them. Some scientists consider Neanderthals a dead-end branch of hominin evolution that did not participate in the formation of modern man.
Modern people. The emergence of people of the modern physical type occurred relatively recently, about 50 thousand years ago. Their remains have been found in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. In the grotto of Cro-Magnon (France), several skeletons of fossil people of the modern type were discovered at once, who were called Cro-Magnons. They possessed all the complex of physical features that characterizes a well-developed articulate speech, as indicated by a developed chin protrusion; the construction of dwellings, the first rudiments of art (rock paintings), clothing, decorations, perfect bone and stone tools, the first tamed animals - all indicate that this is a real person, completely isolated from his animal-like ancestors. Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons and modern people form one species - Homo sapiens - reasonable man; this species was formed no later than 100 - 40 thousand years ago.
In evolution, social factors were of great importance, the role of education and the transfer of experience grew immeasurably.
Driving Forces of Anthropogenesis
In human evolution - anthropogenesis - the most important role belongs not only biological factors(variability, heredity, selection), but also social (speech, accumulated work experience and social behavior).
Human characteristics, due to social factors, are not fixed genetically and are not inherited, but in the process of education and training. In the first stages of evolution, selection for greater adaptability to rapidly changing circumstances was of decisive importance. Subsequently, however, the ability to pass on genetic acquisitions from generation to generation in the form of a variety of scientific, technical and cultural information began to play an increasingly important role, freeing man from the strict control of natural selection.
Social patterns have become important in human evolution. The winners in the struggle for existence were not necessarily the strongest, but those who kept the weak: children - the future of the population, old people - the keepers of information about ways to survive (hunting techniques, tool making, etc.).
The victory of populations in the struggle for existence was ensured not only by strength and intelligence, but also by the ability to sacrifice themselves in the name of the family, the tribe. Man is a social being, the distinguishing feature of which is consciousness, formed on the basis of collective labor 5 .
Social relations play an ever-increasing role in the evolution of Homo sapiens. For modern people, social and labor relations have become leading and determining. This is the qualitative originality of human evolution.
human races
Labor, the social way of life and the nature of labor had a great influence on the evolution of all mankind. There is currently only one species of human on earth. The unity of the structure of their skull, brain, foot, the presence of the same blood groups, easy interbreeding and fertility of offspring indicate that all people belong to the same species.
Humanity is divided into three large races: Australo-Negroid (Equatorial), Caucasoid (Eurasian), Mongoloid (Asian-American).
Differences between races lie in morphological features: in the color of skin, hair, eyes, the shape of the nose, lips, etc. Such differences once appeared in people in populations living in various natural conditions. For example, dark pigmentation of the skin could have arisen as a protective adaptation of the body against the bright rays of the sun; curly hair creates air layers that protect against heat. The light skin of Caucasians transmits ultraviolet rays and thus protects against rickets, the narrow protruding nose warms the inhaled air. There are no significant differences in mental abilities, thinking, speech between representatives of different races, all races are biologically equivalent.
The science of races - racial science - studies the origin of races, kinship between them, characteristic features and environmental conditions to which this or that race is historically confined. Some scientists preach a reactionary doctrine - racism. Its essence lies in the assertion that the human races are allegedly unequal: some are superior, others inferior.
Adjoining racist theories is social Darwinism, an anti-scientific reactionary theory about the operation of the laws of the struggle for existence and natural selection in human society, just as they operate in all living nature.
Social Darwinists believe that modern society provides every opportunity for natural selection of biologically more valuable people.
All humans have very similar genetic texts. Any two people, except for identical twins, differ by only one nucleotide letter out of 300. But from our closest relatives in the animal world - the great apes - we already differ by one nucleotide out of 30. The further the relationship, the greater the differences in genetic texts. The study of DNA similarity makes it possible to find out the relationship between people - from the establishment of paternity, often used in criminological examination, to the establishment of the origin of entire ethnic groups 6 .
At the same time, sometimes geneticists make seemingly amazing discoveries that turn out to have long been known to people from tales and legends. For example, an ancient legend says that all Mongols descended from three mothers. The study of DNA, inherited only through the maternal line, showed that most of the population of Mongolia, according to genetic characteristics, is very clearly divided into three groups.
A genetic study of people of the European race showed that people with white skin color descended from a group of about 20 people, while the number of men was twice that of women.
In October 1997, a conference on human evolution was held in Cold Spring Harbor (USA). The constant references to the theory of African origins of man and studies of African and non-African populations provoked a disturbing remark by one of the participants about the ethics of such a division of humanity, associated with the scrupulousness of public opinion in the United States regarding racial issues.
The Swiss geneticist Dr. André Langani reacted wittily to this: instead of the planned report on genogeography, he gave a lecture that, judging by the genetic data, we are all Africans, there are simply Asian Africans, European Africans and African Africans.
Today, most scientists adhere to the theory of the African origin of man and believe that the future winner in the evolutionary race arose in Southeast Africa about 200 thousand years ago and settled from there throughout the planet.
Since man came out of Africa, it would seem that it goes without saying that our distant African ancestors were similar to modern residents this continent. However, some researchers believe that the first people who appeared in Africa were closer to the Mongoloids.
The Mongoloid race has a number of archaic features, in particular in the structure of the teeth, which are characteristic of Neanderthals and Homo erectus (Human erectus). Populations of the Mongoloid type are highly adaptable to different conditions habitats, from the arctic tundra to the equatorial rainforests, while children of the Negroid race in high latitudes with a lack of vitamin D quickly develop bone diseases, rickets, i.e. they are specialized to conditions of high insolation. If the first people had been like modern Africans, it is doubtful that they would have been able to successfully carry out migrations around the globe. However, this view is disputed by most anthropologists 7 .
The concept of African ancestry is contrasted with the concept of multi-regional ancestry, which suggests that our ancestral kind of Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens in various points the globe regardless.
Homo erectus appeared in Africa about 1.8 million years ago. He made the stone tools found by palaeontologists, and possibly even better bamboo tools. However, after millions of years, no trace remains of bamboo. Over several hundred thousand years, Homo erectus spread first through the Middle East, then into Europe and to the Pacific Ocean.
The formation of Homo sapiens on the basis of the Pithecanthropus led to the coexistence of late forms of Neanderthals and the emerging small groups of modern people for several thousand years. The process of replacing the old species with a new one was quite lengthy and, consequently, complex.
Interesting, in its unusualness, Porshnev's concept, an alternative to Darwinism. Porshnev considers the change in the way of nutrition of the ancients to be the determining factor in evolution. Their gradual transition from eating scraps and carrion “from someone else’s table” to overcoming the internal prohibition “Thou shalt not kill!” and cannibalism. Porshnev distinguishes three branches: predators, manipulators and victims. He extrapolates their development to representatives of modern, heterogeneous human society. He considers the richest class to be the descendants of predators, the richest class, the descendants of manipulators - politicians, the bureaucratic class, and the victims - of course, poor people. The weakness of his theory, in my opinion, is that he considers the fate of each person predetermined, his teaching denies freedom of choice, his theory cannot explain the transitions of people between these three classes that take place in real life.
Biological evolution of man today
Social information is transmitted with the help of the word during training and determines the spiritual appearance of the individual. It is created with the dominant role of socio-economic factors - social formation, the level of production forces, production relations, national characteristics.
Man as a social being evolves faster than as a biological being, therefore, despite the enormous achievements of civilization, there are no significant biological differences between a man who lived millennia ago and a man who lives now.
Abilities, talent, emotionality, virtues, vices of a person depend on hereditary predisposition and the actions of the social environment. The human genotype provides the possibility of perceiving the social program, and the full realization of its biological organization is possible only in the conditions of the social environment.
Although the mutation process continues, the biological evolution of man will continue to slow down due to the weakening of natural selection, the termination of its species-forming function. However, fluctuations within a species are possible: in body length (the armor of medieval knights is small for most modern Europeans), changes in the rate of ontogenesis (acceleration of adolescents), etc.
The viability of human society as a whole increases, since as civilization develops, national and racial barriers are eliminated, genes are exchanged between previously isolated populations, heterozygosity increases and the possibility of recessive genes decreases.
In the process of humanization, there is a decrease in fertility, a lengthening of the period of childhood, a slowdown in puberty, and an increase in the life expectancy of one generation.
The means that control human evolution are protection from the effects of mutagenic factors, the development of methods for treating hereditary diseases, the disclosure of human abilities in childhood and adolescence, and the creation of optimal conditions for training and education, for raising the cultural level of the whole society 8 .
And so we saw the natural origin of man. We saw that earlier, many thousands of years ago, man was a part of nature equal to others. But in the process of evolution, step by step, man separated from it. Starting with the exit from the forest and a stick in his hands, a person has already reached atomic bombs but still hasn't stopped. Now a person is able to process and use virtually anything for his own purposes. Man imagines himself great, the king of nature, pointing at the same time to the creations of his own hands. Man created more and more perfect tools, first of labor, then of hunting, and then of killing others and his own kind.
For the first time we understood, that mankind is capable of destroying itself, analyzing the consequences of a possible nuclear conflict. The threat is gone and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. meanwhile, the energy of the explosion of all thermonuclear charges is less than the energy, generated by the power plants of the world in just a year. Giant masses of matter move and transform every year, huge tracts of virgin land surface are being disturbed, plant and animal species are disappearing, radioactive background is growing.
And now the man changed his mind and decided to at least save what was left. To protect anything from itself, It is said that the basic principle of nature is rationality and correctness. It really is. And this is exactly the only thing that Homo sapiens, an animal named Man, lacks so much. It is very difficult to talk about any prospects if a person does not acquire this necessary detail. Before it's too late.
Self-consciousness and reason have turned a person into an anomaly. Man is the only creature that can be bored, unhappy, or feel ostracized. Man is the only creature for whom his own existence can constitute a problem to be solved and which cannot be avoided. The fact that death is inevitable for a person, this, by the way, shows that the primitive, but very necessary instinct of self-preservation has been replaced by awareness and somewhat dulled. It is in connection with this that suicide is not uncommon among people (among animals this phenomenon is extremely rare)
Restlessness is the condition that awakens a person to reveal his powers. One of the most striking features of man is the great depth of passions and drives he demonstrates. Which, in other matters, are, as it were, an “evolved form” of instincts.
Even with the full satisfaction of hunger, thirst, sexual desires, a person may remain unsatisfied. In contrast to animals, in humans, these problems are not solved.
Man has religious needs that cannot be explained. And the responses to the human need for orientation and worship are very different in content and form (from totemism to Buddhism and other religious and philosophical communities). Religion is not always the object of worship, it is not uncommon that it is an object not originally intended for this (money, power, paintings, films). At its core, all people are “idealists” and strive for something other than physical satisfaction.
