• Question: how was humanity created

    Asked by Adam Phillips to Jared on 9 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Jared Parnell

      Jared Parnell answered on 9 Mar 2015:


      Humanity is considered a quality in ethics, a quality defined by the way in which we look after each other. This is the act of altruism. Freud once said “Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”. Showing that language and thoughtfulness are important to who we are as humans.

      That is a difficult question to answer though. It is believed that humans began to exhibit certain important behaviours about 50,000 years ago (behavioural modernity), but our species has looked a lot like it does now since much longer ago, perhaps 200,000 years! And before 200,000 years ago, we have slowly evolved from monkeys.

      Although I suspect you mean humanity as a species? I don’t believe that anyone could say that humans began at any one specific point. We are the process of evolution, and this process occurs over very long periods and the changes are often very gradual. It is even argued that humans are now evolving culturally, socially, and technologically as well as physically. It will be interesting to see what humans would look like in another 200,000 years!

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