Prof Agustín Fuentes - What makes us human?

Professor Agustín Fuentes, the Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "What makes us human? The construction of the human niche and the capacity for belief". It is the second lecture in the series 'Why We Believe: evolution, making meaning, and the development of human natures'.
The first unequivocal members of the human line emerge from the cluster of human-like lineages about 2 million years ago. We call them the genus Homo. Rapidly they set off on a course that altered their bodies, minds, and the planet. One that is still underway. Over the past two million years the human lineage developed a suite of distinctive characteristics that are central to contemporary human capacities and lifeways. This lecture, drawing on the evidence from bones, stones, biologies and ecologies, illustrates the emergence of humanity’s niche, our natures, via distinctive patterns of eating, caring, moving and creatively manipulating the world around us.

[@polarbianarchy3333]

This is why I used your text at community college 😊🤳
Excellent

[@user-ej7dg2re6o]

*Can Humans be Tamed?*
We need to develop ourselves as human beings beyond our animate level of existence, and it is possible with a certain kind of education.
Developing ourselves as human beings means learning and balancing ourselves with the integral laws of nature operating on our lives. If we learn how to positively connect among each other in human society, with altruistic attitudes replacing our current egoistic attitudes, we then develop ourselves beyond the animate level of existence and become human beings in the fullest sense of the term.
First, we need to provide for our animate lives, giving our physical bodies the food, sex and family that they require, then after taking care of those essentials, we can begin our human development. We then need to learn who and what we are, where we are from, why we exist, how we can develop ourselves, how we can control our human development, what our attitude to our surrounding society should be, what society’s attitude should be toward us, and how we can develop together harmoniously, i.e. us in relation to society, and society in relation to us.
We need to supply ourselves with this development that will make us human beings. Unfortunately, I see nobody understanding what it means to develop a human being, and we thus fail to realize such a process. One of the outcomes of our lack of development into human beings is our inability to understand the younger generation. We become increasingly detached from them, and do not know what will happen with them or how to guide them in a beneficial direction. We thus let life unfold as it does, into a proliferation of problems and crises.
Very simply, we need to learn what nature wants from us, and to develop in order to balance with nature’s demands toward us. If we meet those demands, we can then build a harmonious and peaceful world, one that is in balance with nature.

[@magaliroy-fequiere792]

So no mother, then, just caretakers??