Who

Who are you looking for?

And what makes you think this is the page to make your find?

human footprint in the sand

People's curiosity is boundless.

Sometimes, we wonder about people.

Y'ever wonder about people?  Do you even know what people are? Where people come from?

Well, for the unlearned masses, we give you this gift of knowlege about human people, aka: homo sapiens.

Homo sapiens ("wise man"), or modern man, is one of the five extant species of hominids. More commonly known as "man," "human" or "human being", it is the only current representative of the genus Homo, other species, fifteen in the current state of knowledge of paleoanthropology, being extinguished.

Among current hominids, it differs from a physiological point of view by its almost exclusive bipedalism his larger brain and body hair less developed.

From the viewpoint of ethology, Homo sapiens is distinguished by the complexity of social relationships, the use of a spoken language developed transmitted through learning, tool making, wearing clothes, mastering fire, the domestication of many plant and animal species, and the ability of the cognitive system to abstraction, introspection and spirituality.

More generally, it is different from any other animal species by the abundance and sophistication of its technical and artistic achievements, the importance of learning and the cultural contribution to the development of the individual, but also by scale transformations that operates on ecosystems.

The science that studies the man in all its aspects is anthropology. One who studies evolutionary history is paleoanthropology.

Name  

Scientific name  
The full binomial name of the human species: Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758.

Homo is the genus name (from the Latin nominative, with initial capital letters and italics).
sapiens is a Latin adjective (italic lowercase) meaning "intelligent, wise, sensible, careful," adjective derived from sapio meaning "have taste, flavor, judgment," which designates the species.

Linnaeus identifies the name of the naturalist who named and described the species.

1758 is the year of publication of the diagnosis or validation.

Until 2003, the species Homo sapiens was divided into two distinct groups, considered as two subspecies, one of which was the current human species, and the other, a species extinct cousin, that of man Neanderthal. As with any subspecies of the animal kingdom, terminology consequence was to create trinomial names by adding an adjective, always latin (italics) after specific pairs. Thus the human species was called Homo sapiens sapiens, and his cousin was called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

Since 2003, the majority of scientists consider two separate species: Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis.

However, took place in Europe, according to a 2010 study by the Neanderthal genome project, a very partial interbreeding between sapiens and neanderthalensis, there 50,000 to 100,000 years in the Middle East, allowing the latter to participate 1 to 4% to the genome of current Europeans.

Common Name  

The word "homo" is an evolution of Latin hominem, where the homo accusative refers above all to the species Homo sapiens as a whole.

The word "human" in a second sense, also means the adult male (vir in Latin, hence "manly", distinct from homo), more prosaically described as male individual. The term "woman" for its part refers to the adult female.

The words "boy" and "girl" mean respectively male and female to their child or pubescent stage. They also refer to the individual adults when the focus is on the descent.

We also use the term "humanity" in the singular and with a capital letter, to speak of the human species as a whole, or to designate all of the human population. Similarly, the capital (Male) is sometimes used to distinguish the species Homo sapiens of the human male (man).

Although man is an integral part of the animal kingdom, the associated vocabulary, man, human or human being, is often used in marked contrast with the vocabulary used to describe animals. They say so, pejoratively, human beings behave like animals when their behavior is deemed socially or morally unacceptable. Indeed, for centuries, the dominant idea in men was that they were not animals. This misconception is still prevalent today.

Origins  

Human evolution:
Simple changes in the human lineage (approximate date in years)
Research in paleoanthropology, and genetics studies consisting of comparisons of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome between different human populations actuelles6 lead to the idea that the original human population was in Africa, there are approximately 200,000 year old. This estimate is very rough and is called into question by recent archaeological findings .

The first representatives of the genus Homo appeared there would be about 2.4 million years.

One of the elements that characterize the evolutionary process that accompanied the emergence of Homo sapiens would neoteny, that is to say, an inherited modification of the phenotype consisting of a persistent juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Some features of physiology and current human ethology would be directly related to the neoteny.