Anthropology Discussion

As you know, any member of the genus Homo is generally referred to by anthropologists as a kind of human. Therefore, Homo erectus were humans. Still, they were clearly significantly different from us, from what we think of as “human” in the world today.

This is not just a matter of their level of technology, which is something that varies greatly among modern humans from place to place and historical era to historical era. Take a modern human baby from the stone age and raise it in a technologically advanced 21st century society, and the baby would grow up to be just like the rest of us. We can learn technology. But Homo erectus is a different story. Their bodies and most notably their brains were well outside the range of variation of modern humans. We can easily doubt, for example, that they used anything like human language, although we do not know for certain.

For this discussion, I want you to imagine that somehow we discover, alive in the world today, a group of Homo erectus that have been isolated from the line that led to modern humans for 1.5 million years. Imagine that, whatever evolution they had undergone over the last 1.5 million years had not substantially changed their species, and they are still Homo erectus basically like the Homo erectus that we find fossils of from 1.5 million years ago.

In your post, address the following:

• How do you think people in the world today would think about and treat these Homo erectus? How should they treat them? Consider things such as (but not necessarily limited to) the following:
  • Would people actually consider them human? Is this correct? Why?
  • Would people treat them more like we treat animals? Is this correct? Why?
  • Would people argue that the Homo erectus deserved all the rights and protections of any other human? Why?
  • Do they deserve all these rights and protections? Some? Which ones? Why?
  • Would the answers to these questions depend on exactly what abilities it turns out they had (e.g., whether they could use language or not)? How so?

There are no correct answers to these questions, of course. Just be thoughtful with your answers and explain your thinking.