Human Evolution and the Role of Culture

The Hunt

Hunting promoted and facilitated the emergence of some key features of human nature:

• The development of intellectual activities such as observation skills and intelligence.
• The technical process: hunting had to be refined, and weapons and tools diversified.
• Social cooperation and language: fostering relationships and communication between individuals.

The Discovery of Fire

In the social sphere, fire provided safety and security, allowing settlement in shelters that became the first homes. It aided hunting and defense against animals. At the physiological level, fire was a fundamental shift in power.

The Long Learning

A feature that characterizes human beings is slow physical development. This has beneficial consequences regarding conduct and standards, as socio-cultural values become fixed in our brains almost as if they were a second nature, making humans beings always open to new learning.

The Emergence of Social Behavior

The need to protect fire, prepare tools, gather to sleep, hunt, or move led hominids to get used to camping in protected settlements or shelters. In these places, basic social characteristics developed:

• Guidelines for cooperation and assistance among group members.
• Diversification.
• The emergence of different roles.

The human being is born in a state of biological immaturity. This, coupled with the long learning process, allows us to state that there is no fixed and finished human nature. Instead, humans construct their own nature in relation to the social forms and culture in which they are born, learn, and live.

The Emergence of Language

The decisive step in the humanization process was the emergence of language, as this allowed for thinking, planning, and reasoning, and actions acquired an increasingly high degree of complexity.

Culture

In a broad sense, culture is assimilated to knowledge.

Culture consists of all activities, knowledge, procedures, values, and ideas that are produced and transmitted by social learning.

Functions of Culture

If we compare humans with other animal species, we realize our many biological disadvantages: we are not the strongest or the fastest, we cannot fly or swim underwater for too long, we have no skin to protect us from cold and rain. But compared to other animal species, we have a key advantage: culture.

It has allowed the species to overcome its shortcomings as an animal, defend itself in a hostile environment, thus preventing extinction and adapting to and modifying both the natural and social environment.

Cultural Elements

We start learning from the moment we are born, a process that lasts a lifetime. What we learn, consciously and unconsciously, is culture – the knowledge and patterns of the society in which we were born. This culture is composed of content that can be of two types:

• Material culture: Physical cultural elements, artificially produced by humans.
• Non-material culture: Elements related to ways of thinking, ideas, feelings, knowledge, etc.

Culture and Society

Culture and society are not the same. Culture is a set of beliefs, values, activities, and behavior patterns that a group of individuals share and transmit. A society is a system of interrelationships between individuals.

All people within a society share a common bond: their social relations are based on a common culture. Just as an individual cannot be purely natural without cultural elements, neither can a society exist without culture.

Without culture or society, humans as we know them could not exist, nor would we be self-aware.