Each week we are learning more and more about anthropology and I keep finding all this information extremely interesting. This week we learned about the evolution of humans. I noticed that language and bipedalism were two traits that really stuck out to me. What I did not realize was that each chimpanzee community had their own particular language and symbols in order to communicate with each other. Which is due to the size of the hominin brain compared to the human brain. The hominin brain was incredibly smaller than our brains today. It is important to consider the difference in brain size while looking at evolution due to the behavioral traits that each species possessed. Though, it makes sense. I found it interesting to read about how it was like different accents. For example, if you travel around the United States of America. There honestly, truly is a different accent for every state you cross over into, whether it is just on a couple of words they speak, or on everything. Furthermore, if you travel around the world in English speaking countries, each one has a different accent. Since my mom was born and raised in England, I had to privilege of going there a lot when I was younger. If you traveled even 30 minutes into a different town or city, each person had their own accent. So, the fact that chimpanzees are able to learn and understand the language of their communities was shocking. Though, we can see how as humans, that we have a clearly more evolved brain because we are able to learn different languages and symbols due to our advanced technology in order to help us. Bipedalism was really intriguing to me because I had never truly understood the meaning until this week. One of our distinct traits as humans is that we are bipedal. I did not realize that it started millions of years ago with primates. With the help of paleoecological findings of fossil remains, we have been fortunate enough to learn that the first bipedal apes still lived in the forest and climbed trees instead of using the forest floor to walk on. Due to their short legs and short stature, we know that they were not evolved enough to walk long distances like we, as humans, are able to nowadays. Even though those bipedal legs that the apes used were utilized differently, it slowly evolved into the bipedal legs that we are able to use today. Through the findings of fossil remains, we are able to see our ancestors and how they evolved throughout time in order to better understand how we became what we are today as humans. Whether it is how our limbs have been utilized differently and that is the reason for shorter statures of past primates or the brain size that allowed primates and humans to be capable of understanding behavioral and language skills. Fossils and the study of them allows anthropologists to further research into our ancestral primates.
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I agree with you also, each week the leanings about anthropology keeps getting more and more interesting. Learning about the evolution of humans was so eye opening, and cool because centuries ago, someone was here before us and through out time, they evolved and where their finished product. Another cool thing was the language and bipedalism trait. And how each chimpanzee community had their own particular language and symbols in order to communicate with each other, due to the size of the brain. Cool information and great post
I really liked the comparison to accents in order to help us learn about chimps! It is interesting because I think that when we hear an accent that is different that ours sometimes it can take a few seconds for us to switch over to listening to it. It’s not like listening to a different American accent is like listening to another language, but we definitely have to be more attentive. I went to Boston for spring break and I remember a few times when my brain lagged behind a few seconds because I had heard a vowel pronounced very differently. The communities of chimps also reminded me of the fact that each Whale community has their own language, and if you just put a bunch of unrelated whales into a group, they’ll have a hard time communicating because they don’t speak the same “language”.
I found your post to be extremely interesting, especially when discussing language and bipedalism. Similar to you, I found the concepts within this lecture and readings to be very interesting and relates to humans and understanding the physical traits throughout evolution. I think it’s so interesting to see how physically hominins have changes over time, for example with brain size. I also really like your own unique experience traveling abroad and how there are different accents. I think understanding how language developed and the diversity of it is truly so interesting. It’s insane how much we have evolved and understanding the reasoning behind each change in physical traits over time. I think continuing to learn about these changes along with the changes in environment throughout history will allow us to better understand our world now, and hopefully will help us predict the future for humans and other species.
Hello! I agree with this class and the information over the weeks keeps getting more interesting as well! Before this class I didn’t really think too much about how primates communicate compared to humans as well. I found it very interesting that the human language sticks out so much because it’s a form of language that can express emotion the easiest. But then I learned that chimpanzees have their own symbols and sounds the use to communicate but their form of communication can’t express emotion as well as humans. Lastly I really liked your personal example about your england. I have no idea that each town or city have their own accent that is super cool and I’d love to experience that myself by just driving thirty minutes. How cool!
I liked that you brought up a lot of different concepts we learned about that other people did not choose to talk about. I think it is so cool that we are able to learn about their styles of communication by looking at their symbolic way of talking to each other. I think this is something we can use to learn a lot more about our similarities and differences in our communication behaviours. I found your comparison of the accents really interesting especially since coming to MSU meeting other students form other states there are certain words which you can distinctly tell where someone is from by how they pronounce it. I think there is so much more that we can learn from these fossils.
Hi Megan! I’m also loving the pace that we’re going as we are going further and further into understanding human evolution. I also loved that language was mentioned this past week, especially when it covered how chimp communities had learned to create their own particular language and symbols to communicate with one another — their brains may have been small, but we shouldn’t underestimate their abilities! This is only a part of the evidence that proves the brains of humans and hominins are fairly similar in structure, despite their difference in size. It was also my first time learning about the term “bipedal” and looking for these characteristics in bones makes such a huge impact in finding where an individual belonged during prime times of evolution.
Hi Megan,
I really enjoyed reading what you said about accents! I think linguistics having to do with history is very interesting. I personally think looking at behavioral traits and how they effect culture is much more interesting than just biology alone. Language effects culture in a lot of ways, I learned alot about this in my cross cultural psychology course. I was also surprised that monkey’s have specific ways of communication within their groups. I always thought that animals of the same species had the same way as communicating. I love that this is tied all the way forward in time to human accents and language. All around the globe we can communicate with one another in different ways. I would love to study the evolution of languages and accents, and all of their origins.
Thanks so much.
Hi Megan, I really enjoyed reading your post for week 5. I really enjoy this class because it keeps getting more interesting each week and we keep discussing great topics. I love reading about other people’s perspectives on the weekly content and how everyone picks out different topics to focus on. I was most interested in the part of your blog where you talked about language and how that correlates to brain size. In my post, I also discussed bipedalism and how that evolved over time. Overall, I think it’s so cool how we know all of this information just based off of fossils. I sort of still don’t understand that! Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and I’m looking forward to reading your posts in the future!