us looking at us

taken from: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127937070

What Makes Humans Different

This is Lucy, an Australopithecus. She's more apelike than modern humans, but getting there. Despite Lucy's proximity to humans, she's clearly not human. Australopithicus went extinct.

On the way to us, something changed, and it was something more than just physical.

Shubin points to a cabinet across the room. Inside is a re-creation of a prehistoric human burial site. There's the skeleton of a woman who has been placed in the grave, surrounded by her jewelry.

"It's hard to look at this as a fossil anymore," says Shubin. "You look at this as a person who lived, and people loved this person enough to do this. And that's what changed."

Shubin says it's not a bone or a muscle or a gene that made us human. It was something else.

"The physiology and genetics made this possible. That's the template that made all this happen," he says. "But when was that spark, when was that moment? We don't know."

That moment that gave us the evolutionary edge that led to what we are today — the species that buries its dead, builds museums, explores outer space. Shubin says it's the culture we built with our bones and muscles and brains that makes our species unique.

When did we start looking at each other as something sentimental, of significance, deserving of remembrance? We've been burying our dead for a very long time and recording our dead since maybe we've learned to count. It's only recently that we've begun to consider the numbers of war and to put a significance to casualties to war...This is actually a cool way for me to put in perspective one of my job duties (to moderate for this website: http://countingcasualties.org/). I'm part of maybe the next spin on our dead species - the debate among academics, the media, politicians, and all other humans on how to identify and estimate civilian casualties. It's pretty crazy that this has just become a topic to consider, but I guess we haven't had a war following Vietman that has shed so much civilian blood - nor the tools to be more accurate with measuring casualties (war kills in many ways, besides direct violence - displaced persons, environmental stresses, effects on health, etc.) So when the day comes that our species stops caring about civilian casualties, that's the day when we really aren't human anymore.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)