This is a fascinating topic, it would be sad to see it spiralling into ad hominem attacks.
As for the human traits or ethos:
- Religious. This is an incredibly pervasive trait present in every single human culture on Earth. Some scientists even argue that us humans have developed religious instincts due to the very morphology of our brains. While it is true that atheism / agnosticism has been growing recently in the developed world, I do think that this is more due to the fact that the developed world has ended the persecution of unbelievers and thus, atheists can be more open about their beliefs, rather it than a numerical growth. Kinda the same that happened with the LGTB community, so to speak.
- Collectivists / communnal. Us humans are some of the most complex social animals in existance. Our entire civilization revolves around mutually shared burden and the formation of wide, specialized groups. While we do indeed lack of a hive-mind, we are incredibly social when compared to other mammalians and primates, which prefers far more reduced packs. Recent trends towards individualism are more of an anomalous consequence of living under the reign of what is probably the most individualistic civilization that ever existed (the United States) rather than a long-term tendency in our evolution, me thinks.
- Pacifist. Don't listen to what the misantropes says. While human history is indeed plagued with violence and conflict, our wars and high number of victims are more of a consequence of our technical prowess rather than an unusually agressive behaviour. Violence has been declining since a long time in our civilization, and most other primates and mammalians have a far more agressive intra-species violence record than humans. The fact that we feel disgust against violence on an instinctive level really talks volumes about our true nature. We feel far more comfortable cooperating rather than killing each other.
- Adaptative. We have not only been able to adapt to almost every climate imaginable, but on top on that we can eat almost everything that we can crush with our teeth, save from the very energetically un-efficient digestion of pasture, and the extremely specialized digestion of carrion. We condiment our foods with substances that would kill or maim other lesser animals (sugar, pepper) just for the lulz, and we can recover from injuries that would kill other mammals (broken legs, for example). Humans are really hard to kill.
- Resilient. Little known fact: Humans are outsanding at sustaining huge efforts for long periods of time thanks to our past as persecution predators. Caesar's legions were able to outrun and tire down Gallic calvaries. Tribes in Africa hunts down lions by forcing them to sprint and stop until they get tired. Some primitive Siberian clans hunts without using weapons at all, just by tracking prey until it collapses, exhausted. Humans, when healthy and propery trained, never, ever get tired of walking. We are the goddamn terminators of our planet.
