Why people are called people: a serious answer to a "childish" question

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:43

Why are people called people? Childish question. But many parents know how difficult it is sometimes to answer the "simple" children's "why?".

Encyclopedias note that there are no other thinking living beings, endowed with speech and capable of working not only in social production, but also in the manufacture of tools, on Earth. To such a definition, one can add that our planet is precisely the place of compact human habitation.

When asked why people are called people, scientists answer that this biological species, having some anatomical differences, is in the same order as other primates that inhabit the planet. True, he is the only one living today who is related to hominids - a special family.

Our distant ancestor created a developed material and non-material culture, including not only the use, but also the manufacture of labor tools. And this is another answer to the questionabout why people are called people. In addition, the uniqueness of the Homo sapiens species is also in the fact that its representatives are able to speak articulately and think abstractly.

The search for an answer to the question of why people are called people is not only done by biologists and anthropologists who are interested in the origin, evolution and history of racial diversity. The non-biological essence and nature of man occupies philosophers and religious scholars.

People are a heterogeneous collection. It is made up of individuals belonging to different cultures and forms of organization of society, which is studied by sociology and other humanities.

Man is the only species on the planet endowed with the ability to speak and understand speech. Others, for example, representatives of birds, birds, having a close acquaintance with people and their speech, can only reproduce it without understanding, that is, they have only onomatopoeic abilities. To create in the mind and pronounce words, you need to have another signaling system that is unique to humans. Of course, biologists have tried to teach representatives of other species (dolphins, lower primates) a system of signs resembling sign language, but this has yielded little results.

Besides everything else, people are complex creatures. Their behavior is determined both by biological factors: physiological needs and instincts; and many non-biological ones - cultural characteristics, traditions, prohibitions and values, as well aslaws of various state systems, personal views, worldview and religious beliefs. The degree of influence of these numerous factors also varies depending on the personality of the individual and the particular community. Relationships between people, their behavior and problems are studied by psychology.

Complex human communities are distinguished from simple groups of other biological species by the collective acquisition and transmission of typical conditioned behavior among the social collective. Newly acquired knowledge and experience is passed on from one generation to another.

Biologists are aware of cases of exchange of new knowledge among animals, but the system of their transmission is very primitive, and they are often lost at the level of the generation to which they were learned. Scientists have recorded that wolves that encounter traps are able to warn their brethren the next time they encounter them, but they never pass this experience on to cubs.

Probably, the human ability to create and develop cultural directions that did not exist before made it possible for people to take a leading place in the hierarchy of species and dominate the Earth, assimilating the most important qualities and skills from the centuries-old experience of their ancestors. Thus, we can conclude that in many respects it was the presence of culture that allowed people to be called people.