Man
A man is a male adult human, and the earliest one we can name in writing may be a person called Kushim. Kushim would have lived somewhere between 3400 and 3000 BC in the Sumerian city of Uruk. The catch is that the name might not be a name at all. It may have been a title rather than a personal identity. The earliest confirmed names belong to Gal-Sal and his two slaves, En-pap X and Sukkalgir, from around 3100 BC. From a single inherited chromosome to a symbol borrowed from a Roman god, the category of man carries more contested meaning than the simple definition suggests. What decides that a fetus becomes male? Why do men live shorter lives than women in every country with reliable records? And how did one Old English word once mean every human being alive?
Old English carried two separate words where modern English keeps one. The form mann primarily meant person or human being, and it referred to men, women, and children alike. To single out an adult male, Old English used a different word entirely: wer. That older split only collapsed in Middle English, when mann took over the narrower meaning and pushed wer out of use. The English term traces back through Old English mann to the Proto-Indo-European root *man-, a root visible in Sanskrit and Avestan manu- and in the Slavic mǫž, meaning man or male. The displaced word wer did not vanish completely. It survives buried inside two compounds. One is werewolf, from Old English werwulf, literally man-wolf. The other is wergild, literally man-payment, a term whose very structure shows how a single root could price a human life.
The whole question of sex differentiation hinges on a single sperm cell carrying either an X or a Y chromosome. If a sperm carrying a Y fertilizes the female ovum, the offspring has a male karyotype, XY. On that Y chromosome sits the SRY gene, which triggers the development of the testes, and those testes in turn govern the rest of male sex differentiation. This is a one-directional dependency. Male differentiation proceeds in a testes-dependent way, while female differentiation is not gonad dependent. Testosterone does the building work that follows. It stimulates the development of the Wolffian ducts, the penis, and the closure of the labioscrotal folds into the scrotum. A second hormone, the anti-Mullerian hormone, works by subtraction, inhibiting the development of the Mullerian ducts. During puberty, testosterone teams up with gonadotropins from the pituitary gland to stimulate spermatogenesis. The result is a body that, on average, ends up taller than a woman's by about 10%.
Sexual dimorphism shows up in features that have nothing to do with reproduction at all. Humans differ by sex in body size, body structure, and body composition. Men tend to be taller and heavier, and adjusted for height, they carry greater lean and bone mass and lower fat mass than women. Some of these traits appear only at puberty, the secondary sex characteristics. In men these include broadened shoulders, increased body hair, and an enlarged larynx known as the Adam's apple. They also include a voice significantly deeper than that of a child or a woman. Even the hands tell a story. In women the index and ring fingers tend to be more similar in length, or the index finger runs slightly longer. In men the ring finger tends to be the longer of the two. Men also carry a larger waist relative to their hips, a measure captured in the waist-hip ratio. The reproductive system itself splits into the parts you can see and the parts you cannot, and the study of it has its own name: andrology.
Women live longer than men in every country, across all age groups, for which reliable records exist. The disparities behind that fact are surprisingly specific. A study of conflicts in 13 countries from 1955 to 2002 found that 81% of all violent war deaths were male. Armed conflict is not the only place where men become the immediate victims. Regions controlled by drug cartels see men dying at higher rates too, a pattern traced to social beliefs that tie masculinity to aggressive, confrontational behavior. The danger continues into ordinary working life. In the United States in 2020, ten times as many men died on the job as women. Economic collapse leaves its own mark. Sudden losses of social subsidies and food stamps have been linked to higher alcohol consumption and psychological stress among men, and then to a spike in male mortality. The strain is rooted in the difficulty of providing for a family, a task long regarded as the essence of masculinity. Medicine compounds the gap rather than closing it. A retrospective analysis of people infected with the common cold found that doctors underrate men's symptoms and are more willing to attribute illness to women. Doctors also give men less service, less advice, and less time per medical encounter.
Anthropology treats masculinity itself as a kind of social standing, ranked alongside wealth, race, and social class. In Western culture, greater masculinity usually brings greater social status. The language preserves this hierarchy. English words like virtue and virile descend from the Indo-European root vir, meaning man. Masculinity is the set of personality traits associated with boys and men, and though it is socially constructed, some research indicates certain masculine behaviors are biologically influenced. How much is biology and how much is society remains under debate. The category does not map neatly onto biological sex, since both males and females can show masculine traits. Crossing the line carries a penalty. Men generally face more social stigma for embodying feminine traits than women face for masculine ones, and that stigma can manifest as homophobia. The threshold into manhood has its own markers. Across cultures past and present, getting married has been the most common and definitive line between boyhood and manhood. In the late 20th century the so-called triple Ps still served as signs of having arrived: protecting, providing, and procreating.
Conscription draws an unusually sharp line between the sexes, and only ten countries currently include women in their programs. Military service is among the jobs that, even now, remain available only to men. Traditional male work tended to be more strenuous, more prestigious, or more dangerous, though modern men increasingly take untraditional paths, including staying home to raise children. Education has flipped within living memory. Men once received more schooling than women through single-sex education, but in many developed nations men now lag behind. The global literacy figures still favor men slightly: in 2020-90% of the world's men were literate compared to 87% of women. Yet sub-Saharan Africa trailed sharply, with only 72% of men there literate. The legal picture is mixed. Men hold more legal and cultural rights than women in most societies, and misogyny is far more prevalent than misandry. But exceptions exist. One in six males experiences childhood sexual abuse, men typically receive less support afterward, and the rape of males is stigmatized. Men make up half the victims in heterosexual domestic violence, which is similarly stigmatized. These tensions have produced organized responses, from the fathers' rights movement to the broader men's movement, which spans pro-feminist groups and the anti-feminist manosphere.
The Mars symbol, written as a circle with an arrow, is the common shorthand for the male sex. It is identical to the planetary symbol of Mars, and Carl Linnaeus first put it to use denoting sex in 1751. A popular reading sees it as a stylized shield and spear belonging to the Roman god Mars. According to Stearn, that derivation is fanciful. The historical evidence instead favors the conclusion of the French classical scholar Claude de Saumaise. By that account the symbol comes from a contraction written as theta-rho, drawn from a Greek epithet for Mars, thouros. From Kushim's contested name in Uruk to a glyph traced back to a Greek word, the marks we use for man have always been arguments about meaning as much as labels for a fact.
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Common questions
What is the definition of a man?
A man is a male adult human. Before adulthood, a male child or adolescent is referred to as a boy.
What chromosomes determine that a human is male?
A man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromosome from the father, producing a male karyotype, XY. The SRY gene on the Y chromosome triggers the development of the testes, which govern the rest of male sex differentiation.
Who is the earliest known recorded name of a man?
The earliest known recorded name of a man may be Kushim, who would have lived between 3400 and 3000 BC in the Sumerian city of Uruk, though the name may have been a title. The earliest confirmed names are Gal-Sal and his two slaves, En-pap X and Sukkalgir, from around 3100 BC.
Why do men live shorter lives than women?
Women live longer than men in all countries and across all age groups for which reliable records exist. Men face higher mortality from armed conflict, where a study of 13 countries from 1955 to 2002 found 81% of violent war deaths were male, as well as from dangerous occupations, with ten times as many men as women dying on the job in the United States in 2020.
What are the secondary sex characteristics of men?
Secondary sex characteristics specific to men include broadened shoulders, increased body hair, an enlarged larynx known as the Adam's apple, and a voice significantly deeper than that of a child or a woman. On average men are taller than women by about 10% and carry greater lean and bone mass and lower fat mass.
Where does the word man come from?
The English term man derives from Old English mann, which traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *man-. Old English mann originally meant person or human being, while the word wer denoted an adult male and survives today only in the compounds werewolf and wergild.
What is the origin of the Mars symbol for men?
The Mars symbol that represents the male sex was first used to denote sex by Carl Linnaeus in 1751 and is identical to the planetary symbol of Mars. According to Stearn, the shield-and-spear reading is fanciful, and the evidence favors Claude de Saumaise's view that it derives from theta-rho, a contraction of the Greek epithet thouros.