How humans differ from other animals

G-FMBF5NWNX5

 

In my last post, I described the evolution of hominids from apes to modern humans.  By evolutionary standards, these adaptations were rapid and eventually produced the new species, Homo sapiens, with many similarities to apes and all other animals.  Everything we think of as uniquely human is also found in other higher order animals.  Prototypical examples of reasoning, verbal communication and toolmaking can be found in other species to a lesser degree.  

People commonly believe that cats and dogs, for example, can’t think and don’t reason like humans.  However, anyone who has closely observed animals can plainly see that is not correct.  Their brains work in the same fashion as ours - taking in and evaluating sensory data, recognizing patterns and matching them against their memories of similar patterns and past consequences.  Humans have the same 5 or 6 senses, the only difference being the size and sophistication of our brains.  The physical and capability differences between humans and other animals are simply a matter of degree, not kind.  

What then makes us unique?  Since we are without a doubt the crown of creation on Earth at this time, there must be something unique that enables us to dominate all life on the planet.  Physically, all the hominids were fundamentally different from other animals by combining bipedal locomotion, forearms with grasping hands, social organization and an omnivorous diet.  This winning combination resulted in the two additional distinctions between hominids, especially modern humans, and the rest of the animal kingdom:  toolmaking and language.  Even the great apes don't come close, Only hominids are bipedal, and all of them are extinct (that we know of) except H. sapiens.

Apes and some birds use sticks to prise grubs from deadwood.  Otters use stones to crack open shellfish.  Great apes often throw sticks and stones as primitive weapons.  Many animals build nests, dig dens and otherwise create fairly sophisticated artificial environments for shelter and subsistence; consider the lowly beaver and his dams.  

Hominids, however, took toolmaking to a whole new level.  The earliest stone tools found so far are stone hand choppers, several million years old.  At about 1.8 million years ago, I believe, some of the hominids began fashioning wooden spears by cutting off and sharpening a branch of the right tree.  The same with semi-sophisticated wooden clubs.  Stone cuts wood quite nicely. The beginning of culture.

Before this watershed event, hominids probably competed in Africa with baboons and other omnivorous, terrestrial apes, feeding on whatever they could gather or kill at the edge of the savannah, but retreating to their trees or cliffs at night.  Baboons have vicious teeth and in their groups can defend themselves quite well.  It’s fair to assume the earliest hominids that ran on two legs, about 4 million years ago, also primarily used their teeth and thrown rocks, against enemies and small game.  

After hominids began making and using the first portable, reusable weapons, their whole world changed.  They created them to catch and kill big game that was everywhere around them.  Foraging for carrion also became more practical because an organized band of adult hominids, armed with spears, could fend off other scavengers and even some apex predators - strength in numbers.  Their evolutionary strategy involved a trade-off:  tooth and nail in exchange for bipedalism and grasping forearms wielding weapons.  

After the widespread use of wooden spears and clubs, about 1.8 million years ago, evolution kicked in and hominid dentition and faces began to change – optimized for vision, diminished nose in favor of ears, mouth parts optimized for eating a varied diet, less need for fighting. Hominids became the only animals that carried their tools, food and water with them, probably in simple rucksacks made of animal skins.  It seems significant that at about this time, H. erectus broke out of Africa, expanding their range across the lower latitudes of Asia.  When you chase migrating herds for a living, those herds will eventually take you far away from your homeland in east Africa.

To put this into perspective, imagine a small band of hominids chasing down the weakest member of a herd of ungulates, cornering it and dispatching it with multiple spear thrusts.  Because they are bipedal, they are superb long distance runners, chasing prey the same as packs of wild canines do. Next they butcher it with their handy stone choppers, which they carry with them on hunting excursions.  Dismembering a large animal with your bare hands and teeth is not possible.  They had become dependent on the use of tools.  The earliest tools may have been made at the site of a kill, but not all kills happen conveniently close to the right kind of rocks.

Because the hominids were social animals, they left their children, and some adults, behind at their encampments, while the other adults chased their prey for many miles across the savannah.  Being bipedal with grasping forearms, it’s fair to imagine the hunters dismembering their prey into right-sized pieces, packing them into simple rucksacks made from animal skins, and toting the meat, tools and weapons across the plains back to their waiting families.

These circumstances favored the evolution of larger brains, especially those parts involved in complex thinking and language.  Conducting organized hunting expeditions and gathering preferred plant foods is more efficient to the extent verbal instructions can be memorized and shared among individuals.  As the hominid toolkit gradually became more sophisticated, the techniques for making the tools were more readily passed down from one generation to the next through the use of language.  The “monkey see, monkey do” approach works well enough, but augmenting the learning experience with language greatly expands its efficiency and scope.  

By the time hominids began making fire with friction tools; about 1 million years ago, language was part and parcel of human life, I believe.  The use of verbal communication by animals is instinctive.  True, animals learn the finer points from their parents or social group, but the innate capability for verbal communication and drive to use it is deeply ingrained in the genes.  One can observe this in human children under the age of 3.  They clearly exhibit an intense, drive to talk and learn the words they hear other humans speak.  Baby talk is their way of saying, “I can do it too”.

This unique combination of toolmaking and language arts produced a complex cultural component of human life.  By culture, we mean the accumulated information, aside from instinct, that is passed on to each new generation.  Other animals do this too, e.g., mother cats teaching their kits how to hunt prey, but without language and big brains, there is only so much information that can be conveyed.  With language and big brains, Paleolithic hominids were able to accumulate and pass on a growing store of knowledge about how to find and process food, how to build shelters and how to defend the band against predators, including other hominids.

At time passed, growth in the cultural component of human life accelerated.  By 130,000 years before present, hominids were decorating and burying their dead.  By 40,000 years before present, anatomically modern humans were creating representative art on cave walls.  Although no one is sure, its stands to reason singing was adopted much earlier, as a means of expressing shared emotions such as a successful hunt or death of a prominent member of the band.

At the present, our Homo sapiens species is completely adapted to advanced toolmaking and complex language arts.  We could not survive as an apex predator without them.  The instinctive desire to acquire a vocabulary and communicate with other members of our social groups is very strong, as anyone who has raised young children can attest.

Now that Homo sapiens can think and communicate with other humans across long distances and time spans, our minds have grown to an immensely expanded scope compared to even the smartest dog, orca or chimp.  All higher order animals think, but always about very mundane subjects, immediate needs and memories.  At this point, only people create representative art, have religious tendencies and wonder about the wider universe.  Humankind’s expanded form of mind has arrived and has taken on a life of its own for, during the lifespan of the person it is part of.  Collectively, through communication media, our culture lives on, transcending the individual mind.  Every human generation has to relearn much of this accumulated knowledge.

What is meant by mind?  It is not the same as the brain, which is the organ that contains and sustains the mind.  Instead, the living brain creates a form of cyberspace, a separate entity, within which lies a rich set of accumulated information content, i.e., memories, patterns, habits, etc.  Also operating within this space are our instincts, which are directly connected to the brain, not separate.  Add to this an individual's freedom to listen to her/his conscience then choose to act or not, and you have a complete model of the mind and its consciousness.  All Psychology begins with such a model, and this is the one I favor.  I concede that ultimately our minds are both a direct function of our brains and separate entities free to make their own decisions.  For as JP Sartre put it, we are condemned to freedom, constantly choosing what to think about and how to behave.

I’ll have more to say in later posts about the phenomenology of the mind (as in GWF Hegel’s Phanominologie des Geistes), especially compulsive behavior, after I study the subject more thoroughly.