Demonstrate understanding of trends in human evolution
This standard asks you to explain how humans and our ancestors evolved over time, looking at the physical changes (like how we learned to walk upright), brain development, and the tools and behaviours that helped us survive. You need to connect evidence from different areas—bones, tools, migration patterns—to show how and why humans changed from earlier species.
You describe bipedal adaptations and cultural features like tools and shelter, and you attempt all three questions with relevant facts and definitions.
You explain how key features like hand changes and abstract thought provided survival advantages, and you link some ideas together (like climate change to bipedalism or tools to brain growth), but you don't fully integrate all the pieces across the whole question.
You discuss the skeletal details of bipedalism with clear advantages and disadvantages, explain the entire feedback loop between hands, tools, nutrition and brains, connect geography and adaptation to dispersal patterns, and weave together anatomical, behavioural and cultural evidence to show a coherent story of how and why humans evolved.
Standards typically taken alongside or after this one. Same subject, grouped by level.