ARCH 131 : Arch 131 Studyguide.docx

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Archaeology
• Course: ARCH 131
• Professor: Birute Galdikas

Document Summary

The differences between reptiles and mammals illuminate something about human beings, something about primates and the sweep of human evolution: The differences between reptiles & mammals: warm-blooded, mammals maintain a constant body temperature, this means that they are adapted to survive in more cold environments. These three characteristics have been seen before, when we discussed what characterizes the primate order: Primates probably produce less offspring than other mammals. A wild female orangutan may have only four offspring in her entire life and live to be 50 or 60, that"s reproductive economy. If you think about this: primates are the hyper mammals (super mammals) Because we took these trends that foreshadowed were foreshadowed when the earliest mammals evolved from reptiles and we took them to the greatest extreme. Humans are who they are because they are primates and primates are who they are because they took these mammalian trends that differentiated them from the reptiles and carried them to extremes.