- What is the origin of the human being?
- Scientific explanations of the origin of humanity
- Religious explanations of the origin of the human being
We explain to you what is the origin of the human being according to science and what human species existed. Also, religious explanations.
What is the origin of the human being?
One of the great mysteries that humanity has tried to solve since the beginning of his days has been the origin of the human being, that is, the answer to the questions: Where do we come from? How and when did the first human being emerge? How did the very history of our species begin?
Of course, humanity has not always had the same tools to find answers to such complex and important questions, so it has tried through explanations of different kinds.
Thus, initially, it only had explanations of a mythological or religious type, which were part of a magical or mystical vision of the universe. Among them, anthropogony is theory that the human being is an essential part of the creative work of some almighty divinity or some group of deities.
However, according to the society human body became more complex and capable of knowing, interpreting and even manipulating the world around it, new forms of thought and eventually the science and the empirical testing model brought new explanations.
The most accepted and corroborated of all of them, at present, explains that our species comes from the same evolutionary process capable of explaining the origin of all living beings, that is, the scientific theory of human evolution.
Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that contradicts the traditional postulates of the creationism and anthropogony, a good part of society insists on clinging to the idea that the human being was created by God.
Some sectors are more fanatical in their defense of traditional positions, while others have a more pragmatic view of the matter, which allows the fusion of religious faith with scientific explanation, interpreting the hand of God as the natural force that created the life and led her towards the appearance of the human.
Scientific explanations of the origin of humanity
The origin of humanity is inseparable, in scientific terms, from the origin of other species, since it responds, as in their cases, to the complex process of evolution and speciation, as explained by modern evolutionary synthesis (or neo-Darwinism).
The latter is the result of the now obsolete scientific theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (the call Lamarckism), and of the main deductions and observations on the matter made by the English naturalist Charles Darwin, published in his books The origin of species Y The origin of the man , as well as the later works of numerous scholars of the biology, the genetics and the findings of the paleontology modern.
According to the most probable explanation that science has been able to deduce, our species, Homo sapiens, it is the only survivor of a set of similar human species, which together make up the genus Homo: Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, to name a few.
These species were different from each other physically and genetically, although they all shared fundamental traits that identified them as human: the ability to walk upright and handle tools, a tribal social structure and a certain variable tendency towards the language and imagination.
However, all of them came from a common animal ancestor, a primate belonging to the hominoids, a group that flourished approximately 25 million years ago. Chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest genetic animal relatives, also come from the same animal.
Our ancestor within this group of animals was the Australopithecus ramidus, emerged in the jungles of what today is Africa, about 5 to 7 million years ago, a species much more similar to a chimpanzee than to a modern human, but that already presented a certain degree of separation in its physical constitution, as well as evidence of a certain degree of bipedality, that is, from the tendency to stand on its hind legs.
We do not know exactly what reasons led these 1.20 meter tall arboreal primates to descend to the ground and begin to walk upright, as their descendant species did, Australopithecus anamensis and Australopithecus afarensis, whose height already reached five feet.
Maybe the competence for the food and the habitat It became fierce, or perhaps the change towards the current African grasslands and savannas forced them to move from one tree to another far away and, therefore, to walk long distances between grasses and grasses that could hide predators and dangers. Faced with this panorama, our ancestors were forced to stand up in order to see over the grass.
Evolution, then, did its job. When walking on its hind limbs, the front legs were free and could be used to carry food or even tools with which to defend itself, such as sticks and bones. Thus it was possible to differentiate the hands and feet, and the appearance of opposable thumbs, a characteristic feature of the human species.
In this way, 2.4 - 1.5 million years ago the first properly human species appeared: Homo habilis, whose appearance was still clearly simian, but they were endowed with a more voluminous brain, suitable for the various new uses that their free hands allowed them.
Then, around 1.8 million years ago, the most successful of the ancestral human species emerged, which was able to build lithic tools, master fire and leave the African continent to spread throughout the world: the Homo erectus.
This last species existed until approximately 300,000 years ago, isolated in its diverse geographic habitats, in which it probably gave rise to new human species, such as the Homo neardenthalensis (the "Neanderthal man") and Homo denisovensis (the "Denisovan hominid"), some of the most recent of which we have a record.
But it is difficult today to determine the exact genetic history of these and other human species, which, moreover, are likely to intermingle to some degree and compete for available resources.
In fact, during the 20th century, it was thought that the Has sapiens It had arisen in different places on the planet, thus being a descendant of these different species, depending on their race. This is what is known as polygenism, and it is now an outdated theory.
We know for a fact that the species Homo sapiens It emerged about 200,000 years ago in East Africa. At some point in its history (about 60,000 years ago) it began a process of migration towards the rest of the world, in which he must inevitably meet his other human relatives.
This led to a certain degree of mixing, as evidenced by the presence of a certain degree of Neanderthal DNA in today's citizens of Europe. On the other hand, surely there was open competition for the territory and resources.
We do not know the exact reasons that led the other human species to extinction. It is not unreasonable to think that they lost the competition for the control of resources against us, or that perhaps their disappearance responds to a slow process of extermination on our part. In any case, after their disappearance, humanity was made up solely of the Homo sapiens, thus beginning what we call today prehistory.
Religious explanations of the origin of the human being
Each culture chose the materials that it valued the most in the “manufacture” of the human.For their part, religious explanations of the origin of humanity are extremely different from each other, depending on the tradition cultural and mystical specific to which they belong. Even in the same civilization, different myths of creation of the human being, depending on the ethnic group, the cult or the religious aspect, as it often happened in multicultural empires.
However, all of them had in common the idea that the human being is the direct or indirect fruit of the magical or supernatural arts of an omnipotent being, that is, that it was created by a God or by a group of them.
Many of these creation myths have traits in common and similar explanations for certain phenomena, such as the death, aging or reproduction. Some elements were even transmitted between one tradition and another, or even appeared spontaneously in cultures they had little or no contact. They are usually very diverse and reflect the immediate universe of the cultures that produced them.
For example, in the old Mesoamerica Maya, according to the Popol Vuh, it was said that the human being had been created by the gods from corn, after two unsuccessful attempts with wood and clay.
On the other hand, in Ancient Greece, similarly, there were five ages or races of human beings, created spontaneously from the Earth: the golden race, the silver race, the bronze race, the race of iron and, finally, the clay race, the only one that survived the judgment of the gods.
Something similar told the Norse Scandinavian tradition, according to which the first human beings had been man Askr, ("Ash tree") and the woman Embla ("Elm"), born thanks to the gods of the trunks of said trees; or, according to other versions, born of the legendary cosmic tree Yggdrasil, a perennial ash tree. Each culture chose the materials it considered most precious to describe the human "fabrication" by the deities.
In addition, certain values or certain conceptions of life were imprinted on the creation myth and transmitted with it through the generations. For example, the Judeo-Christian tradition sees in labor, painful childbirth and death the punishment that God inflicted on the human species due to the mistakes made by Adam and Eve, the first human beings, in the Garden of Eden, place in where they led a harmonious and eternal life.
Adam had been created from clay, by the way, while Eve from one of his ribs. But humanity, according to this myth, is heir to the errors (sins) of its ancestors: a vision that Christianity took at its convenience, telling that the messiah Jesus Christ came to cleanse everyone of sins.