Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Early humans first migrated out of Africa into Asia probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago. They entered Europe somewhat later, between 1.5 million and 1 million years. Species of modern humans populated many parts of the world much later. For instance, people first came to Australia probably within the past 60,000 years and to the Americas within the past 15,000 years or so.
Dawn : The Origins of Language and the Modern Human Mind
Dr. Briana Pobiner is a Prehistoric Archaeologist whose research centers on the evolution of human diet (with a focus on meat-eating), but has included topics as diverse as cannibalism in the Cook Islands and chimpanzee carnivory. Her research has helped us understand that at the onset of human carnivory over 2.5 million years ago some of the meat our ancestors ate was scavenged from large carnivores, but by 1.5 million years ago they were getting access to some of the prime, juicy parts of large animal carcasses. She uses techniques similar to modern day forensics for her detective work on early human diets.
So, when did our ancestors begin making music? If we take singing, then controlling pitch is important. Scientists have studied the fossilized skulls and jaws of early apes, to see if they were able to vocalize and control pitch. About a million years ago, the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans had the vocal anatomy to "sing" like us, but it's impossible to know if they did.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of his discussion of another controversial topic, the evolution of the human psyche. The transition from African ape to behaviorally modern human involved a good number of psychological and social adjustments and some were surely genetically based (the most obvious is the capacity for language). Along with other writers of recent popular books on human evolution, Wade is fond of evolutionary psychology, the attempt to discern the Darwinian reasons for the evolution of human behaviors and cognitive processes. But in an odd move, he attempts to outdo evolutionary psychologists at their own game. Evolutionary psychology concentrates on the origins of so-called human universals, traits like cooperation or laughter that are shared across all peoples and that therefore plausibly constitute a true human nature. But because Wade concentrates on the last 50,000 years, he frequently finds himself concocting adaptive tales about behaviors or psychological features that arose in the very recent past and that, in some cases, characterize only one or a few groups of human beings. Despite his earlier reliance on hard genetic data, these stories are almost entirely speculative. And they pile up fast.
Apart from genre fiction, human identification with or as plants relegates characters to the textual margins in the modern literary canon, but that has not always been the case. Whether as gatherers and gardeners, farmers and gleaners, nomads and Natives, folks who raise and prepare plants to provide basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, and medicine largely have done so at the edges of the canon. Yet how humans relate to plants appears to be guided by particular themes and locations in their literary representation.
HUM/UWS 1a Tragedy: Love and Death in the Creative Imagination [ hum uws ] Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.How do you turn catastrophe into art - and why? This first-year seminar in the humanities addresses such elemental questions, especially those centering on love and death. How does literature catch hold of catastrophic experiences and make them intelligible or even beautiful? Should misery even be beautiful? By exploring the tragic tradition in literature across many eras, cultures, genres, and languages, this course looks for basic patterns. Usually offered every year.John Burt and Stephen Dowden
HUM/UWS 2a Crime and Punishment: Justice and Criminality from Plato to Serial [ hum uws ] Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows. Formerly offered as COML/HOI 103a.Examines concepts of criminality, justice, and punishment in Western humanist traditions. We will trace conversations about jurisprudence in literature, philosophy, political theory, and legal studies. Topics include democracy and the origins of justice, narrating criminality, and the aesthetic force mobilized by criminal trials. This course also involves observing local courtroom proceedings and doing research in historical archives about significant criminal prosecutions. Usually offered every year.Eugene Sheppard and David Sherman
ECS/ENG 110a Thinking about Infinity [ hum ] Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Usually offered every third year.William Flesch
ENG 78b Modernism, Atheism, God [ hum ] Explores European and U.S. literature after Nietzsche's proclamation, at the end of the 19th century, that God is dead. How does this writing imagine human life and the role of literature in God's absence? How does it imagine afterlives of God, and permutations of the sacred, in a post-religious world? How, or why, to have faith in the possibility of faith in a secular age? What does "the secular" actually mean, and how does it persuade itself that it's different than "religion"? Approaches international modernism as a political and theological debate about materialism and spirituality, finitude and transcendence, reason and salvation. Readings by Kafka, Joyce, Rilke, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Pynchon, and others. Usually offered every second year.David Sherman
ENG 131a Comedy: Literature, Film, and Theory [ hum ] Explores comedy as an enigma at the heart of social belonging, psychological coherence, and philosophical speculation. Investigates the strangeness of human laughter. Compares comic literary and film genres in different historical periods as a way to ask: what is the nature of comic pleasure? How does comedy organize desire and make sense of suffering? How are communities regulated by comedy, and how is comedy involved in social freedom? How are basic philosophical questions about minds and bodies illuminated by comedy? Texts by Chaplin, Shakespeare, Monty Python, Swift, Marx Brothers, Aristophanes, Wilde, and others. Usually offered every third year.David Sherman
HISP 120b Don Quixote [ hum ] Taught in English.Don Quixote is: a) a compendium of prior literary genres; b) the first modern novel; c) a funny book; d) a deep meditation on the human condition; e) the best novel ever written; f) all of the above. Usually offered every second year.James Mandrell
NEJS 112a The Book of Genesis [ hum ] Prerequisite: HBRW 122a or b, NEJS 10a, or permission of the instructor.An in-depth study of the Hebrew text of Genesis, with particular attention to the meaning, documentary sources, and Near Eastern background of the accounts of creation and origins of human civilization in chapters one to eleven, and of the patriarchal narratives, especially those about Abraham. Usually offered every third year.Tzvi Abusch
The implosion of metaphor (and more than metaphor), of trope and world, the extraordinary tentacular closeness of processes of semiosis and fleshliness [of the idea of the world made flesh], sets me up at the level of both affect and cognitive apparatus for being suspicious of the division between the human and everybody else. And the division between mind and body within the human. (268)
That hidden, other voice of language captivated Johanna Nichols and has dominated her life for the past 35 years. Nichols is a linguist—a scientist who studies language and languages. She’s trekked to the far reaches of the former Soviet Union—to Chechnya, Ingushetia and Makhachkala—to describe and preserve native languages. These days, however, she spends her time in a quiet, sixth-floor office with a panoramic view of the U. C. Berkeley campus. Though she often gazes out the window, Nichols is not looking at the towering eucalyptus trees, the rolling green lawns, or the students hurrying by. She is preoccupied with faraway places and ancient times. Voices from hundreds of languages are clamoring for her attention. What can languages today, she wonders, tell us about a great wave of exploration and migration that began 50,000 years ago and eventually circled the Pacific Ocean? What do they reveal about the earliest seafaring people and about who first discovered and populated the New World? Does the babel of modern tongues hide a linguistic clock that can date the birth of human language itself? 2ff7e9595c
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