(a) What are the physical and cultural characteristics of Homo erectus? Discuss its phylogenetic status. (20 marks) (b) Elucidate…

(a) Homo erectus: characteristics and phylogenetic status

Physical: cranial capacity 650–1,250 cc (mean about 900), rising over time. The skull is long and low, with a receding forehead, thick vault bones, a heavy supraorbital torus, post-orbital constriction, a sagittal keel, an angular occipital torus, greatest breadth low down, a projecting face and no chin; teeth are smaller than in australopithecines. The postcranium is modern: the Nariokotome boy (KNM-WT 15000, about 1.5 Ma) shows tall, long-legged, narrow-hipped proportions, obligate striding bipedalism and reduced sexual dimorphism.

Cultural: Acheulian handaxes and cleavers show planning and symmetry; Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu has Acheulian tools from about 1.5 Ma. Controlled fire is secure from about 0.8 Ma (Gesher Benot Ya'aqov), while the Zhoukoudian evidence is disputed. Scavenging and hunting, a meat-rich diet, home bases and cooperation are inferred. H. erectus (African forms often called H. ergaster) was the first hominin to disperse out of Africa: Dmanisi (about 1.8 Ma), Sangiran and Trinil in Java (Dubois, 1891), and Zhoukoudian near Beijing.

Phylogenetic status: it probably evolved in Africa about 1.9 Ma from early Homo (H. habilis or H. rudolfensis). Splitters assign African forms to H. ergaster, ancestor of H. heidelbergensis and then H. sapiens, and treat Asian H. erectus as an extinct side branch (late survivors at Ngandong, Java). Lumpers keep one variable species, which Multiregionalism links to modern Asians; the Out-of-Africa model rejects that.

(b) Geertz's "thick description"

Gilbert Ryle contrasted a twitch with a wink and with a parody of a wink: the physical movement, "thin description", is identical, but the meaning differs. Clifford Geertz borrowed this in "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture", the opening essay of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). For Geertz, culture is "webs of significance" that humans spin and are suspended in; anthropology is therefore "not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning". The ethnographer records behaviour with its context, the codes that make it intelligible and the actors' own interpretations (the emic view), and reads it like a text.

Example: the Balinese cockfight ("Deep Play", 1972). Thin description records roosters, spurs and bets. Thick description shows that the fight dramatises village and kin rivalry and status: men identify with their birds, high-stakes "deep play" matches rivals of equal standing, and prestige matters more than money. The cockfight is "a story they tell themselves about themselves". Geertz and his wife were accepted by villagers only after fleeing a police raid on an illegal match.

Critics, Marxist and feminist, fault the approach for subjectivity and neglect of power.

(c) Early farming cultures and the Neolithic of the Near East

Background: the Natufians (about 15,000–11,500 BP, Levant) were sedentary or semi-sedentary foragers with stone houses, sickles, querns and cemeteries; the Younger Dryas cold, dry spell (about 12,900–11,700 BP) is linked to their turn to cultivation.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (about 11,500–10,500 BP): Jericho with its stone wall and tower, Netiv Hagdud, and the monumental T-pillar enclosures of Göbekli Tepe; cultivation of wild-type cereals. Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (about 10,500–8,700 BP): fully domesticated emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, lentil, pea and chickpea; goats and sheep, later cattle and pigs; rectangular plastered mud-brick houses at Jericho, Çayönü and 'Ain Ghazal; plastered skulls and statues; storage and grinding stones. Pottery Neolithic (from about 8,500 BP): pottery (Hassuna, Halaf), polished axes, weaving, and large settlements such as Çatalhöyük (from about 7100 BCE) with wall paintings and burials under floors.

Social change: sedentism, population growth, storage, craft specialisation, ritual centres and emerging inequality.