what does it mean to say humans are primates?

Answer 1

A primate is a taxon. A taxon is a group of species used in classification. To be a primate means we stand upright and have bilateral symmetry. There are also a few other less important characteristics of primates you can easily find with a quick search on the internet. Other primates include apes and monkeys. All primates share a common ancestor (a common species ancestor, not an individual). We are not descended from monkeys, but rather monkeys and us both came from the same species.

Answer 2

If you go far enough back, there was no classification system for living things. This made it difficult sometimes to distinguish one animal from another, or to tell if distant groups of animals were related, much less to talk about something you'd found on an animal to someone who'd never seen one before. So biologists developed what is called the 'taxonomic system'.

The idea was to group all animals into major categories and then divide those categories into smaller and smaller groups on the basis of characteristics that anyone who knew what to look for could identify. Originally these divisions were somewhat arbitrary, but nowadays they're based on fossil and genetic evidence so that most of the things that are grouped together probably are related to one another.

The full taxonomic classification for a human being is: kingdom animalia, phylum chordata, class mammalia, order primates, family hominidae, subfamily homininae, tribe hominini, subtribe hominina, genus homo, species sapiens, subspecies sapiens. So humans are not only primates (the order), but also mammals (the class), animals, chordates, hominids, and so on. Each of these different designations has a pretty precise definition.

What makes primates different from other mammals are the following:
- five fingers with fingernails
- opposing thumbs
- collarbone
- generalized teeth functions (three kinds, at least)
- forward-facing eyes, eye socket characteristics
- color vision
- posterior lobe in brain
- always two mammaries
- sexual dimorphism (males and females are different)
- comparatively long lifespans
(I like that last one, myself)

It bears mention that not every primate has perfect examples of all these things (like most taxonomic classifications, actually), but every one has almost all of them. Nor are any of those necessarily unique to mammals - there are a number of animals with a thumb, for example. So you can't really go by just one characteristic!

And that's JUST the primate classification. If you go through all those other ones, you'll see quite a list of things that describe people pretty well and make them distinct from everything else. I'll leave that to other questions or your own investigation...

Hope that helps! Peace.

Answer 3

A primate (L. prima, first) is any member of the biological order Primates, the group that contains all the species commonly related to the lemurs, monkeys, and apes, with the latter category including humans.[1] The English singular primate is a back-formation from the Latin name Primates, which itself was the plural of the Latin primas ("one of the first, excellent, noble"). Primates are found all over the world. Non-human primates occur mostly in Central and South America, Africa, and southern Asia. A few species exist as far north in the Americas as southern Mexico, and as far north in Asia as northern Japan.

The Primates order is divided informally into three main groupings: prosimians, monkeys of the New World, and monkeys and apes of the Old World. The prosimians are species whose bodies most closely resemble that of the early proto-primates. The most well known of the prosimians, the lemurs, are located on the island of Madagascar and to a lesser extent on the Comoros Islands, isolated from the rest of the world. The New World monkeys include the familiar capuchin, howler, and squirrel monkeys. They live exclusively in the Americas. Discounting humans, the rest of the simians, the Old World monkeys and the apes, inhabit Africa and southern and central Asia, although fossil evidence shows many species existed in Europe as well.

Answer 4

It means that we are stupid, self serving, hairless apes.