Humans are, in biological terms, living organisms that belong to the animal kingdom. Specifically:

• You can classify humans as animals (multicellular, eukaryotic, reproduce sexually, consume organic matter, and metabolize energy) and as mammals (warm-blooded vertebrates with hair and, in females, mammary glands). This places humans within the broader taxonomic group Animalia and the class Mammalia, and within the order Primates and the species Homo sapiens.

Key clarifications:

• Scientific usage: In biology, the standard classification places humans firmly among animals, closer to other primates, with distinctive traits like highly developed cognition, language, culture, and technology.

• Societal and philosophical perspectives: Some people distinguish “humans” as a unique category based on self-awareness, ethics, or moral agency, or argue against certain animal-kingdom categorizations on metaphysical grounds. These views are interpretive, not biological classifications.

If you’d like, I can tailor a concise comparison of how different disciplines (biology, philosophy, theology, and everyday language) talk about “what humans are” and why definitions differ.