The story of the human body evolution health and disease sparknotes

The story of the human body evolution health and disease sparknotes free#

Tuttle synthesizes a vast research literature in primate evolution and behavior to explain how apes and humans evolved in relation to one another, and why humans became a bipedal, tool-making, culture-inventing species distinct from other hominoids. He contends that vestiges of this more ecologically sound way of life exist today-in some tribal societies, in the central teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the core principles of the worldwide environmental movement-offering redemptive possibilities for ourselves and for the planet. Sale asserts that Homo erectus, the variation of the hominid species that preceded Homo sapiens and survived for nearly two million years, did not attempt to dominate the environment.

The story of the human body evolution health and disease sparknotes free#

By the end of that era, humansвЂ™ idea that they were the superior species on the planet, free to exploit other species toward their own ends, was well established.ДЄfter Eden is a sobering tale, but not one without hope. Tracing the migration of populations and the development of hunting thousands of years forward in time, he shows that hunting became increasingly adversarial in relation to the environment as people fought over scarce prey during EuropeвЂ™s glacial period between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. Sale contends that a new, recognizably modern human culture based on the hunting of large animals developed in Africa some 70,000 years ago in response to a fierce plunge in worldwide temperature triggered by an enormous volcanic explosion in Asia. Integrating research in paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology, he points to the beginning of big-game hunting as the origin of Homo sapiensвЂ™ estrangement from the natural world. In After Eden, Kirkpatrick Sale answers these questions in a radically new way.

How did humankind come to rule nature to such an extent? To regard the planetвЂ™s resources and creatures as ours for the taking? To find ourselves on a seemingly relentless path toward ecocide? When did the human species turn against the planet that we depend on for survival? Human industry and consumption of resources have altered the climate, polluted the water and soil, destroyed ecosystems, and rendered many species extinct, vastly increasing the likelihood of an ecological catastrophe. The Accidental Species combines GeeвЂ™s firsthand experience on the editorial side of many incredible paleontological findings with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution-the key is not whatвЂ™s missing, but how weвЂ™re linked.ДЄfter Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world-they are not, indeed, unique to our species. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation.