The Relevance Of Paleoanthropology
Paleoanthroplogy = the study of the fossil and cultural remains and other evidence of humans’ extinct ancestors
It may not be immediately obvious what possible relevance ancient bones and stones have to our present occupations and problems. Almost any branch of science can immediately be seen to have a greater impact on the present world than the study of human evolution.
This is not, however, a realistic assessment of the value of our study. We all know that we are the product of our genes and our environment and have been fashioned over millions of years to be as we are. Life has been evolving for more than two billion years, and we are one of its most remarkable products. It follows that we are the product of our past experience as a species. To a great extent, our bodies are adaptations to past environments and our minds are no different. …
Our study of bones and stones tells us how we were made: It is as simple as that. If you want to understand a complex mechanism, you find out how it is made and the principles that underlie its design. To understand ourselves, it is essential to understand how we were made and the principles that operated during our formation. That is, it is necessary to study and plot in detail the evolution of our bodies and behaviour.
Why do we need to understand ourselves? For one thing, such knowledge may help us develop a world society capable of peacefully sharing and preserving the earth. The underlying essential unity of modern humans, as well as our physical and cultural diversity, is the result of our shared evolutionary history. Furthermore, examining our Darwinian development in the context of ancestral environments may help us understand the roots of such perplexing behaviors as human status seeking, harmful aggression, and short-sighted exploitation of the environment.
You may think that many of these issues fall within the purview of psychologists, not paleoanthropologists. Up to a point, that is true, but without the historic and prehistoric evidence, the psychologists can never understand their subject. All biological research must be done under the rubric of evolution. This is the essential and revealing key that alone can deliver the understanding we need.
The logic is inescapable. To understand ourselves, we must understand the past. That is why the study of human evolution, seemingly so far from everyday problems, is really the most basic and fundamental science of all. It lies at the root of all human studies, from psychology to political science and from medicine to management.
(Campbell, Loy & Cruz-Uribe, 2006, “Humankind emerging”, p. 80).
I majored in management while studying for my BA. In an essay I wrote I discussed my concern with the lack of application of scientific methods and misunderstanding of scientific materials in management. One of my main points was that during all the courses I took never once was it discussed what a human is. Now considering that the subject of management is human behaviour in the workplace this seemed to me odd indeed: Something like an aeroplane engineer knowing nothing about the nature of planes and how they work. It seemed to me that a detailed understanding of human nature and behaviour could greatly inform researchers as to the quality of their theories, suggest potential problems and improvements, and generate a host of new and potentially useful ideas for further investigation.
Us humans evolved for most of our evolutionary history since our divergence from more archaic Homo species as hunters/scavengers and gatherers. This history has shaped us to be who we are today. Our environment may be greatly different than it once was, yet we may be not much changed biologically.
[...] I think it would help greatly if people better understood our shared human behaviour, so as to under… [...]