The Hominization Process: Evolution to Modern Humans
The Hominization Process
Hominization is the evolutionary process that led from animal species to the first humans, defined by their ability to guide their activity through language. The human being is the result of heredity, evolution, necessity, and chance. The stability that inheritance parameters provided in various species became less meaningful when studying fossils. Scientists introduced a new factor to explain the world: chance.
The species present in our world must be based on inheritance and random parameters. There are two fundamental mechanisms: intrinsic and extrinsic. The intrinsic mechanism explains how genetic mutations alter genes, resulting in individuals with different characteristics from their progenitors. The extrinsic mechanism explains how factors such as climate or ecology determine the success or failure of this mutation. These are part of natural selection. This biological evolutionary process acts on the basic units of heredity, increasing or decreasing the frequency of genetic variants, whose main source are mutations – “mistakes.”
Stages of Humanization
Other terms of evolution mark the second stage, characterized by the crucial turning point of language. Hominids become something very like modern humans. This requires a change in circumstances that would open the way to this new behavior: the use of language, the chance to live sheltered from the aggressive animal world, and the resulting cooperation. The discovery and use of fire influenced this achievement, protecting them from carnivores and allowing some substances to be used for food.
In these two stages, the progress of specific behavior led to changes in the environment, which, in turn, affected the conduct of individuals. The use of fire and the development of communication promote the evolution of our species, whose development in the last 100,000 years is higher by many orders of magnitude. Natural selection and organic evolution are at the basis of culture, but once fully developed, the capacity for culture allows a large number of variants to appear and disappear completely independently of changes in genotypes. There is also cultural competence, which was essential to the development of our hominid species.
The Social Human
By allowing themselves to emancipate from their animal environment, humans progressively installed themselves as social beings. The somatic configuration of the species was fully determined phylogenetically; the environment does not select but protects even the less apt. In the process of humanization, the progressive development of cooperative activity has affected a greater interdependence between group members for physiological survival. Therefore, the human world is essentially social; man cannot develop as such if not with other men.
Language and Tool Use
The management and production of tools weave an increasingly dense web among the members of the group, producing a change in the pace of social activity. Cooperating to progress in the production of tools was possible from the time oral communication rose to the level of articulated language, allowing not only the transmission of what was done but, above all, its internalization: thought. Training and education would become increasingly important.