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The word "man" is still used in its generic meaning in literary English. The verb to man (i.e. "to furnish [a fortress or a ship] with a company of men") dates to early Middle English. The word has been applied generally as a suffix in modern combinations like "fireman", "policeman", and "mailman".
A Malayali man with medium skin tone, of medium build, and with facial hair. A man is an adult male human. [a] [2] [3] Before adulthood, a male human is referred to as a boy (a male child or adolescent). Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromosome from the father.
During the American colonial period a freeman was a person who was not a slave. The term originated in 12th-century Europe. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a man had to be a member of the Church to be a freeman; in neighboring Plymouth Colony a man did not need to be a member of the Church, but he had to be elected to this privilege by the General Court.
Human is a loanword of Middle English from Old French humain, ultimately from Latin hūmānus, the adjectival form of homō ('man' – in the sense of humanity). [9] The native English term man can refer to the species generally (a synonym for humanity) as well as to human males. It may also refer to individuals of either sex.
Burke's definition of man states: "Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection".
Study of the history of masculinity emerged during the 1980s, aided by the fields of women's and (later) gender history. Before women's history was examined, there was a "strict gendering of the public/private divide"; regarding masculinity, this meant little study of how men related to the household, domesticity and family life. [114]
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers . They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
The word history comes from the Ancient Greek term ἵστωρ (histōr), meaning ' learned, wise man '. It gave rise to the Ancient Greek word ἱστορία (historiā), which had a wide meaning associated with inquiry in general and giving testimony. The term was later adopted into Classical Latin as historia.