Phenomenon of Mankind: What Separates Human from Other Living Species

Question "What is a human?" only contains four words. However, within those four words, is a concept so central to how we define our experience on this planet. It is at the heart of some of the oldest philosophical, anthropological, and religious debates in recorded history. What is it exactly that makes the phenomenon of mankind different from all other living organisms? What is it exactly that makes us ‘human’ and why does that somehow feel so conceptually removed from the label Homo sapiens?Of course we can describe a human in terms of the biological and anatomical realities which developments in science have granted us, such as statistics regarding our genetic similarity to non-human primates. There are concrete physical measures that can easily be deployed to make a case for what we are, though this investigation would argue that this is a somewhat reductionist approach to defining the human being.

Theories around constructs such as consciousness and sentience, while fascinating, also have their limitations. There is only so much we can infer simply by viewing an animal from the outside, we can never get inside the head of a chimpanzee so how can we say with any degree of certainty that it does not have a sense of self, or understand the notion of free will?In order to answer this question one needs to identify which characteristics are not only universal to the human race, but also largely specific to it. A concept which has gained in popularity over the past few years is that of cumulative culture evolution (CCE). If we describe culture as ‘variation acquired and maintained by social learning’ (Boyd & Richardson, 1996, p. 77), then cumulative culture refers to the ability to replicate and improve on innovations made by previous members of the species (not to be confused with cultural variation which is very common in the animal kingdom). It is a theory which has been around since the 1990’s, and while it has been contestedand debated, there is still very little evidence that suggests cumulative culture is present in even our closest genetic relatives (Marshall-Pescini & Whittern, 2008). Studies done with chimpanzees showed that in experimental conditions indicated that the non-human primates ‘displayed a striking lack of acquisition of an optimal and cumulatively built technique’ (Marshall-Pescini & Whittern, 2008, p. 454).

When compared to non-human animals ‘human cultures do accumulate changes over many generations, resulting in culturally transmitted behaviours that no single human individual could invent on their own’ (Mesoudi & Thornton, 2018 p. 2). This investigation would argue that this is the quality of our species which has largely set us aside form the rest. We have gained the ability to tailor our environments to our own needs and’ develop subtle, powerful, technologies and to assemble complex institutions which permit us to live in larger and more complex societies than other mammal species’ (Boyd & Richardson, 1996, p. 78).