Chapter 8 - The Human Animal

Abstract

This chapter discuss the place of the human animal within a biological—specifically, comparative and evolutionary—context. It also introduces methods of studying the human animal and some of the methodological difficulties that make this self-reflection so controversial. According to the most commonly used taxonomy, within the order of primates, humans are the only extant members of the family Hominidae. Human's are also in the same group as the great apes. Most archaeologists and physical anthropologists believe that the “human family tree” consists of many species, which branched off from an ancestral lineage that separated from the other apes. Human species seems to take to an extreme those mammalian features already exaggerated in primates. Human life history is not one of a rapidly breeding species. It is the low mortality rate that has vaulted human's into that small category of highly successful “weedy” species that have populated most of the globe.