Are Humans Primates?

Let’s forget about what geneticists tell us for a moment, and focus solely on how they look, and behave.
Here are four ‘primate’ skulls, the top right one is obviously human.
To me, it looks as if the human skull is clearly the odd one out, the most different of the four.

Now, that could be just my bias, thinking humans are special, just because I’m human, but as far as I can tell, honestly it looks as thou we’re the odd one out.
Do humans even have such a cognitive bias thou, that we want to be special, to stand out, or maybe Scientists are just telling us that we do, because they themselves have a bias.
For whatever reasons, they don’t want to feel special, they want us to fit in, and everything to be natural, and normal.
You could say humans have a tendency to want to feel like we’re special, like we’re different from animals, but maybe that’s not a natural tendency or bias, maybe that’s just how Europeans are, or were, used to be like centuries ago, when we took Christianity more seriously.
Many cultures such as native Americans or Australian aborigines were more than happy to think of man as not differing at all essentially from animals.
Humans individually, and collectively, might have as much or as many biases to want to fit in, as stand apart, it may depend on the individual/culture.

Now look at our behavior.
Now we could go detail by detail, but just intuitively for now, is human behavior not by far and away the strangest of all primate behavior, in many ways, of all animal behavior for that matter?
I mean sure, other animals build things, but they do so by instinct, largely.
Spiders don’t improve their webs, or build anything else, they build the same webs they’ve always been building for thousands or even millions of years, and it takes thousands or even millions of years to meaningfully modify them, where as humans can alter their constructions in the blink of an eye.
Same with the social insects, ants, bees, termites, or birds with their nests, or beavers with their dams.
The more intelligent or sophisticated species may even have a few small examples of culture, or minor modifications to their behaviors/structures that’re then taught to or aped by other members of their species, but they pale in comparison to ours.

It would be interesting if we could set up an experiment where we ask other ‘primates’ what they think about us, if they think we’re the odd ones out.
Perhaps we could train them to select which item is the odd one out of 4 items, show them 4 animal species, 4 plant species, 4 shapes, 4 articles of clothing and so on.
Train them to select the odd one out, and after they’ve gotten the knack for it, show them a picture of four primate skulls, one of them human, and see if they think we’re the oddball, I bet they would.

Now most of what I’m going on is intuition, but it would be interesting to compare each trait mathematically.
Like start with cranial capacity, or proportional cranial capacity, and see which species of primate has the most peculiar cranial capacity.
From there you could go brow ridges, which primate has the strangest brow ridges of the four, teeth and so on.
It would be an interesting study.
Humans have puny eye brow ridges compared to the other three, we have proportionately larger craniums, their brow ridges are nearly on the top of their sloping heads, and so on, their canines are enormous by contrast, their jaws protrude, ours are flat, etcetera.
Can you point to one of the other three skulls and say, this is a thing peculiar to it, and not the other three, other than the size of the bottom left one, and primate skulls vary in size, many are that size.
It’s difficult isn’t it?
It really looks as thou the human skull doesn’t belong.

How different does something have to be, in order to be separately classified?
The boundaries between one species, or family, or genus, are somewhat subjective.
Mainstream scientists try to make them as consistent and as based on the objective world and not our biases as possible, or at least they’re telling us that’s what they’re doing, but even then, so much of it will forever be arbitrary and subjective, based on human cognitive limitations, and cultural, linguistic, social and institutional conventions.
What if Mainstream Science has just sold us all a story.
A compelling story, perhaps the most compelling of all the stories about the origin of life, species, and in particular our species ever told, with a lot of data that could certainly be interpreted as substantiating it, but nonetheless it is still just that, a story.
There might be a more compelling tale to tell yet untold, the likes of which both mainstream science, religion and philosophy can hardly imagine now.

I mean a few centuries ago, this naturalist Linnaeus came along, before genetics, and just lumped man in with the other apes, because for the naturalist, yea, we have to fit in somewhere, everything else does, and yea, there’s a lot of similarities between us and them, relatively, but there’s some major differences, too.
I mean to me the other three skulls are all basically the same, there’s hardly any difference between them, where as we’re not arguably basically the same.
And then there’s so many other things, the fact that we walk upright, that we’re comparatively naked, and so on, so much sets us apart.
Are we primates, or do are we deserving of our own order, and can we be entirely certain of our origins?

Funnily enough I was on this very same Wikipedia page yesterday (amongst many others) reading up on the evolution of modern man… from 1.8 million years ago to the present day theories of the diversification of Homo sapiens ‘Out of Africa’, but humans are indeed classed as a primate.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomi … dern_human

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Africa …a long and arduous read, but well worth the effort. I was interested in the diversification over time aspect, but the historical governance aspects were interesting none-the-less.

Can we be classified as anything but Primates? or even animals? we are mammals purportedly derived from primates, so does that mean that derivative compels us to be classified as primates for all eternity? even though (to put it mildly) we have come a long way since then.

On human taxonomy and its current issues:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy

Thanks for the links Mags.

I’m not sure about macro-evolution, but if it does exist, happens for the reasons mainstream scientists say it does, and the comparatively primitive tends to give way to the relatively advanced, then humans probably evolved from something somewhere between mouse and man, rather than between monkey and man, or from something equal parts mouse, man and monkey.

Most sheeple sure do act like primates.

But a true human is more like Mewtwo in attitude and behavoir.

Here’s a baboon skull -

Here’s a Chimp skull -

And now here’s a human skull -

We’re told humans and chimps have more in common with one another than humans and baboons or baboons and chimps, genetically, but morphologically, just going off how they look for now, baboons and chimps look like variations on the same theme, where as humans, totally different theme.

Maybe there’s something not right here, and humans have been arbitrarily lumped in with primates, and I say that as an atheist, who’s just skeptical of everything, including mainline science.

Looks should not matter if we are temporarily ignoring what geneticists tell us. Its all about the meat in between the ears. If other primates thought we were the odd one out it would affirm how we already feel. Geneticists do not just lump taxa together, it is based on morphological change over time. Obvious changes over time are foramen magnum positioning, cranial capacity, brow ridges, teeth, foot shape… but so many other hominid and australopithecines have similar morphology.Your comparisons are pathetic. Are you really comparing modern chimps and modern baboons with a modern homo sapiens skull morphology? Is that all your basing your wild rejection of genetics off of? Do you have even the slightest grasp of complex cladistics within hominids and other primates?

Let’s go back in time to Linnaeus.
Now I know taxonomy has come along way since then, but this thread is a thought experiment.
Linnaeus didn’t know anything about genes or evolution, it probably never occurred to him that humans and (other) primates might share a common ancestor.
He lumped humans in with apes, monkeys and so on because human anatomy is more like ape/monkey anatomy than any other group of animals.

But still, that of itself doesn’t justify it, and while perhaps I haven’t delved into this subject in sufficient depth, it seems to me, human anatomy differs markedly from the anatomy of apes/monkeys.
I think it’s safe to say that at the very least, human anatomy, and behavior for that matter, is one of, if not the most peculiar of all species classified as primates, and that itself is, or would have been, grounds for throwing humans out of the category of primates, and giving them their own category, arguably.

Promoting the separation of modern hominids from other primates would imply the creation of a new conception suborder, family, genus, species and subspecies. This is would be a near impossible endeavor with possibly racist implications.

I don’t know if humans evolved from apes, or something ape like, I haven’t done sufficient research on the subject to say, either way, but what I won’t do is just take mainstream sciences word for it.

However, regardless of how supposedly similar humans are to other apes like chimps genetically, clearly anatomically and behaviorally, they’re very different, they’re by far and away the most different of all apes and monkeys.
The category primate is very broad, not only does it encompass humans, apes and monkeys, but it also encompasses things like lorises and lemurs, so perhaps humans aren’t different enough to warrant being in their own order, and they seem to have more in common with these animals than any others.
I mean humans are very different from apes and monkeys, but lorises and lemurs are also very different from apes and monkeys.

However, I do think they should be in their own family or superfamily, because humans are more different from chimps than chimps are from gorillas and orangutans and so on, hell they’re more different than gibbons (lesser apes) or even monkeys are from apes.
This family or superfamily I shall call…
I don’t know, maybe I’ll just call it human, or…
Homofamilia, or homofamilias, the human family.
There’s only one extant species belonging to the homofamilias, and that’s humans.
As for habilis, erectus and so on, I haven’t done enough research to conclude anything about them.

So there you have it, humans are still primates, but they no longer belong to the family apes, at least according to me, and whoever I can convince.