What Are Some Amazing Facts About Anthropology?

About six million years ago, the ancestors of humans and ancestors of chimpanzees crossed each other regularly (they were the same species, of course). Just think about it.

Contrary to the posters you see, the ancestors of humans were fully erect long before they developed brains larger than those of chimpanzees.

Empathy is computationally costly, and the physical limits of our brains create an upper limit on the number of people with whom we can interact, follow up and, in general, growl. This is called a monkey sphere and it has been estimated at around one hundred and fifty, but it could potentially be two or three times as large, depending on how it is defined. Beyond this point, our ability to treat others as human beings, instead of as objects, begins to diminish.

Human beings and the human world are very, very large and very, very slow. Our tendency to use anthropomorphic measuring units obscures this. The natural unit of length, the Planck length, is approximately 1.6 x 10 ^ -35 meters, or approximately 3 x 10 ^ 35 times smaller than the average person. The natural unit of time, the Planck time, is approximately 5.4 x 10 ^ -44 seconds. Describing it in this way makes it appear that it is a matter of physics, but it is not. Planck time and Planck length are what they have to be. These numbers really describe us and the whole world that we catch. These numbers are physical constants only in the sense that we ourselves are physical beings.

We are used to describing humans as mostly weak and unremarkable, except for our brains, but humans are actually quite physical adepts to many things. For example, for bipedal without tail, we are extraordinarily good runners. For primates, we are excellent swimmers. According to the standards of mammals, our sense of smell is poor, but like mammals, it's still pretty good. Our brains are the coolest, but there are also many interesting aspects about humans.

Humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years without any government or written record, and only minimal economic specialization. As a result, we live in societies that are really too complicated for us to understand and that, as a result, are counterintuitive in many ways.

Sub-Saharan Africa contains most of the genetic diversity in the human race. Outside of Africa, we are all quite pure. This is one of the great problems with the traditional division of the human species into races.

Although human races do not exist at this time, further back in our evolutionary history they did. The extinct human races include at least the Neanderthals and those who are called Hobbits. There may be more than we do not know now. It turns out that all modern humans have descended relatively recently from the only surviving human race.

The Neanderthals were redheads.

Illegitimacy is often underestimated. Around the world, around 10% of people do not descend from the man they believe is their father. In places with weaker taboos, this may be closer to a third.

Anthropology is full of frauds and accusations of fraud. These are doubts about the accuracy of some of the most famous anthropological case studies, such as Margaret Mead's coming of age in Samoa (see the Mead-Freeman controversy). Consequently, all ethnographies (reports on cultures) must be taken with a grain of salt, something that non-anthropologists do not really seem to take into account.

Although they have made progress, anthropologists have never been able to develop a purely behavioral (ethological) explanation of human society. Behaviorism and the idea of conditioning, which works relatively well in individual cases, do not expand very well.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-are-some-mind-blowin_b_1934099