About eight millions years ago, the scientific consensus goes, the lines that eventually led to humans and to the rest of the great apes diverged. This is probably clear only in retrospect. If an alien species stood surveying the Earth at the time, and for a few million years thereafter, our line would not have stood out as the one slated for more brains than we know what to do with.
We do know that average hominid brain size doubled within the last two million years whereas the average chimpanzee’s brain size remained unchanged. Human ancestors with skull-sizes in the modern range have been around for about a million years, give or take a few hundred thousand, and skulls as large as anything floating around today have been around for some 150,000 years, at least.
(Arthur Koestler theorized that the extremely rapid growth of the hominid brain contributed to humanity’s flaws in his grand summation, Janus. I urge everyone to read him though he may seem outdated.)
A rather more dubious scientific consensus holds that just 50kya (thousands of years ago) there was a great naissance in which culture, language and symbolic thought first erupted. Before this we were intelligent beasts. Afterwards we were primitive humans.
New archaeological finds, such as musical instruments, ochre pigment and art predating the 50kya cut-off are beginning to disturb this consensus. Common sense also dictates against it. What the —- were our ancestors doing and thinking during this 70ky, at the least, period? What were they doing and thinking during the millions of years before? Did symbolic thought take them over like a mind-virus? (This I actually find almost plausible. Memes and all that.)
We now know that chimpanzees murder, wage war and have inherited cultures. They do these things with the brain case our ancestors had more than two million years ago. Just this past summer a dog was reported to be able to bring a new toy from a stack by figuring out which ones already had names.
Dogs are also better than chimps, truly wild dogs (feral for thousands of years) and wolves at guessing human intentions. Gorillas and chimps can develop vocabularies of hundreds of words (remember, a working human vocabulary may contain as few as 800 words). Coco the Gorilla had an IQ score in the 80s and that was even though they deducted points for such obvious species specific things as preferring to be in the woods rather than a house when the thunderstorm hit.
Dolphins and birds (birds?!) have demonstrated their own versions of intelligence and culture. Many animals have proven to be capable of deception and subterfuge. Even more remarkable, some animals have shown that they are capable of empathy. Blue jays will look behind a curtain for something hidden, something that does not occur to human infants until they are a few years old.
What I am getting at is that intelligence and culture have been around for hundreds of millions of years and that our culture and intelligence is an outgrowth of this older stuff. I do not believe that it is possible to truly understand humanity unless one understands the antiquity of its origins. If you don’t accept evolution, you can not really understand human nature.
This was a riff. If you want me to fill it out with links and documented facts and stuff, I will do so with pleasure, so long as there is interest. As far as I know, all the material above is factually correct. Please advise me if not.
In Greece a popular if vulgar comedian was under a gag order about an even more popular singer called Dalaras, on pain of a one million drachma (roughly three thousand dollars, this is pre-Euro) fine every time he made fun of the singer. So at one show he said: “I have three million drachmas burning a hole in my pocket. Dalaras! Dalaras! Dalaras!”
In that spirit I say: Evolution! Evolution! Evolution!
One early morning, years ago, as I was inside preparing to unlock the doors and open up the store where I worked, I looked down and there was a group of small birds (I have no clue what kind they were) right outside the door. Unusual enough (for me) to see all those birds on the ground, but even more odd… 2 of them were having some sort of bird fight and the rest of them were gathered around them in a circle, for all the world as if they were egging on their favorites.
I yelled in a whisper for my co-worker to come look, but by the time she got there, they were spooked and flew off. I’ve never seen anything like that before, or since, but I know I saw it that day. I’d even had coffee!
I think there is a great deal yet to be understood both about humans and non humans, thankfully. Pretty exciting stuff.
Great story.
Apparently birds developed cognitive functionality in a different way than mammals. This story which I first saw in the NYT and which is still available at the IHT has some details:
Some examples of bird intelligence are truly remarkable:
This leaves us with the intriguing question: Since we know that birds are descended from dinosaurs, were the ancient terrible lizards smarter than we’ve been thinking?
Hard to say. After all, they’ve had a long time to evolve since then, and humans’ ancestors (little furballs) probably were not remarkably smart at that time.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
There is one dinosaur, the name of which I forget, of whom it is said that, because of the size of the brain and other factors, if they hadn’t been made extinct they would be ruling the world.
Instead, we just have lizard people… 😉
I am not sure whether we are talking about the same one, that I remember from an article in Omni (does it still exist?) in the early eighties. A bipedal creature about six feet tall with a relatively large braincase struck the youthful me as about exactly the right creature to have evolved into a more refined version of what Captain Kirk fought in that famous episode.
Judging from Jurassic Park, which did have some gorgeous special effects, that creature may well have been a Velociraptor or one of its slighter relatives. It is truly one of the great what ifs in history.
What if the dinosaurs had not been so rudely interrupted by something over which they had no control? What if they had the next sixty million years to evolve without the kind of breakneck pressure we apparently were under?
Maybe they would have developed a deeper and more balanced intelligence than our combination of chimpanzee smarts, monkey greed, reptilian ruthlessness and mulish stubbornness with a dash of surpassing genius that characterizes us as a species.
Maybe they did develop intelligence and eventually a technological civilization, which then left or was kidnapped.
[Preposterous, you say? We are deaf and dumb orphans, in a particular place. Whether that place is downtown LA or the middle of the Sahara , we have no way of knowing. We could be completely alone in the universe or I could be from a nice planet in the general vicinity of Betelgeuse. You can not truly be sure. Hell, even I can not really be sure that I am not actually from that nice planet near Betelgeuse.
Ken MacLeod uses this idea in his latest trilogy which started with Kosmonaut Keep. (Many interesting ideas in there and generally in his work).
If a technological civilization had developed on this planet and had wanted to clean up after itself, would we be able to find any evidence 65 million years later?] The bit in brackets is to encourage wild speculation without, necessarily, endorsing its premise.
Definite interest here! I’ve seen dogs, or at least one dog, carry out seemingly altruistic acts, as a self appointed seeing eye dog to an older blind dog. He came up with this on his own, I’m the worlds worst trainer.
When the older dog (Tempest,short for Tempest in a Teapot) lost his sight the younger and larger dog ( Oberon, it’s a long story)would herd him around the pellet stove, keeping between Tempest and the fire.
And the evolution of culture is a fascinating field of study to me, although I’m not well educated about it-I have read a few books on the subject and look forward to learning more here if you’re so inclined.
I’ve heard is from the island of Corfu. A woman I know there had three cats which had developed this method for killing snakes which involved all three of them acting in concert.
One day one of the cats died and the other two could no longer kill snakes. Then the woman got a new kitten. Within a couple of months the oldtimers had taught the young one the trick and they were happily killing snakes again.
Just the notion of three cats doing anything coordinated blows my mind but cats teaching each other…
That’s an amazing story about your seeing eye dog.
Thanks for the encouragement. I’ll try…
They watch the emotional climate of the human ‘pack’ and react to it.
Think of it, there are many humans without empathy…
Thats what great about a site like this…I’m very interested in a subject like this but probably won’t do that much reading on my own about it. If you write it, I will read it..human history is a fascinating subject, how can it not be?
Human history is a fascinating subject and I love it but I think my greatest love is for pre-history. Enormously complicated stuff which is difficult to encapsulate in blog friendly format but worth it, I think.
Those tens of thousands of years huddled round the fire listening to the wolves and wind howl must have had an effect on the human psyche.
I wish you would touch on this a bit, when you have the time and inclination. Even if it is a pretty big and difficult topic, it’s still a pretty fascinating one (well, as long as one is not reading dry books on the subject)
Well, we may be the smartest on the block, but… brains isn’t everything.
“Sometimes, seniõr, the bull he doesn’t always lose!” (Ouch.)
Great entry!
in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, humans thought they were more intelligent than dolphins because they had wars and cities and stuff while all the dolphins ever did was muck about in the water having a good time.
The dolphins, of course, knew that they were more intelligent for exactly the same reasons.
This site has as reasonable a method of estimating it as any I’ve seen–and the numbers look mostly right to me (though the chimp is a little lower than I thought it would be). See if you agree:
Man 7.44
Dolphin 5.31
Chimpanzee 2.49
Rhesus Monkey 2.09
Elephant 1.87
Whale 1.76
Dog 1.17
Cat 1.00
Horse 0.86
Sheep 0.81
Mouse 0.50
Rat 0.40
Rabbit 0.40
I especially like that dogs beat out cats, just as I’ve always contended. <g>
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Where’s the pig? Something I remember Johnny Carson and Ed always arguing about..horses vs pigs with Carson saying pigs were a lot smarter but people just liked horses better so they pretended they were more intelligent than they were.
Good question! I’d guess them to be somewhere around dogs, so smarter than horses but not by a huge margin.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
A week-end in the country brought us to a small pig farm. The farmer invited us into the barn and we walked around looking at some very well cared for pigs. Everytime the farmer spoke, all the pigs stopped and looked at him. When I remarked on this, the farmer said, “They know. I come in here with my son and we point out the ones to be castrated or to be harvested and they know.” I looked at all those fearful, watchful eyes and had to leave the barn to be sick.
It’s quite alarming to find out that animals are ‘conscious’ of their fate.
It is quite alarming to think of animals as ‘conscious’ of their fate.
Once long ago my parents and I were eating at a small taverna in the middle of nowhere when a car pulled up and a big guy with a machete got out. Suddenly the sow started squealing. She knew what we did not, that the guy was the slaughterer and this was her day to die. One of the most horrible meals I’ve ever had and not because the food was bad. It took her a long time to die and she wanted the world to know how much she objected.
How awful. I already don’t eat pork because I do consider pigs to be too sympathetic. Your story just confirms my sense. (I eat other meat only when it is free range and killed humanely.)
Alan
Maverick Leftist
I’m eating chicken now and then and some fish. Eventually I don’t want to eat any animal products.
It’s hard to give up salmon, living in BC, Canada.
I wouldn’t give up salmon if I were you. A diet containing vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and salmon is healthier than a vegetarian diet; and if the chicken is skinless white meat, that’s good for you too. But perhaps you feel a moral problem with eating even those?
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Salmon is one of the power foods listed in our newspaper.
Broccoli, salmon, walnuts, tofu is all I can remember of the list. Tried reading it out loud to my family, but I was drowned out by their yawns.
Salmon also has the good oils.
First Nations here called themselves the Salmon People. Alas right now, the mighty Fraser River is almost depleted of salmon that used to run by the millions and millions only one hundred years ago.
I love salmon however after I had stumbled onto a site from corpwatch about farmed salmon…well suffice to say try not to eat farmed salmon but only wild salmon. If you want to make yourself sick go to this site about why you should not eat farmed salmon http://www.farmedanddangerous.org/.
or Victoria will serve ‘farmed salmon.’
It has become a left/right issue.
I always check to see if it is wild salmon
before buying.
definitely should be avoided, you guys are 100 percent right! It might interest you if you’re a little on the poor side like I am, to know that canned salmon is always wild. It’s not exactly gourmet, but I like the taste a lot (though when money is really tight, I get canned mackerel instead), and I think the health benefits are similar.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
I would have been interested in that list. Was it perhaps “Superfoods”? Because so far, everything you’ve listed is on the list of foods in my favourite book on the subject, Superfoods Rx (I’m feeling too lazy to go get a link, but just do a search and it will come up). Others, off the top of my head, include blueberries, spinach, skinless turkey or chicken breasts, beans, and oranges.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
where are the inflatable dolls on the list???
uh-oh…wrong blog…. ; )
LMAO
Interesting site and fairly expectable rankings. The method however ignores the sheer size of the brain, its organizational structure, the life-span of the creature and whether it is a social animal or not. It also leaves out pigs (as others have noted) which are very intelligent animals. For my money pigs may well be the most intelligent non-primate land-dwelling animal, though I figure elephants are also very bright.
Aquatic mammals also have differences in how folded their brains are which probably would bump them up a bit. As you say, Chimps are probably higher than given here.
Birds are also more intelligent than usually given credit for. Look at my comment upthread.
Also most domesticated animals are stupider than their wild counterparts. No need to invest in brains when the shepherd is there to think for you.
I would be surprised if pigs were more intelligent than elephants. And how do you square your elevation of the pig with your mention of domesticated animals having “downsized” in intelligence? I have heard that before, particularly about dogs compared with wolves; but I wonder if it’s not just a different kind of intelligence. After all, they (or dogs, anyway) still have to know how to keep their owners happy with them–so they would likely have better skills in terms of communicating with humans.
I definitely agree about birds. I saw a documentary that showed how ravens could figure out how to get food suspended from a rope tied to a swingset (they pulled up a bit of the rope with their beak, held it down with their foot, then went for more and so on). And parrots aren’t just mimickers; they can learn to use their words to actually communicate much like great apes can learn to use sign language.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
smarter but handicapped as all the non-primates are by a lack of hands. I think it also makes a difference what kind of domestic animal you are. I think the statement applies seriously to the herbivores (herd animals, pretty stupid to begin with) but not necessarily as much to the omni- and carnivores.
I agree that dog intelligence and wolf intelligence are about equal but different, except that this applies only to smart dogs. There are so many dumb dogs out there. And there are smart ones like mine (psst, go look at my pet diary) and there are genius dogs, like the one in the main entry.
I also thought the study comparing domestic feral dogs with completely feral dogs (think dingos), wolves and chimps in how well they could guess what the human was indicating was hugely interesting. Domestic but not human-familiar dogs outperformed everyone else, as you might expect from a species that has been trying to win our good graces for thousands of years.
Yeah, when I found that IHT reprint I had actually been looking for a recent article about bird language skills. Something about some parrots, perhaps African Grays being able to learn proper syntax? I’m sure I’ll find it eventually.
riding my bike near an urban woods by a canal.
I saw their movements from a good distance, dismounted and just stood there. The dogs noticed me and very slowly made a circle around a litter of puppies. None of the dogs came forward, barked, or made any aggressive moves. That would have been the behaviour of domestic dogs. I left them at peace but I often wondered what happened to the pack when the land was cleared for a water filtration plant.
yes, please write more.
My Dexter dog once helped me bust up kindling, just to show me that he could.
I had come in late from work, and grabbed double length sticks off the porch. Kneeling if front of the stove, I started to break them in half. Dex wanted to be properly greeted, so was shoving his head under my arm. I said “Dex, it’s really cold, and you cant help me do this, you have no thumbs.” He looked me in the eye, picked up a piece so wood, bit it in half, spit 2 pieces out, defiantly looked me in the eye again, broke another piece, and proceeded to shove his head up under my arm. I then good dogged him with love and amazement.
This story about animal laughter, which of course must be taken with a grain of salt considering the date, quotes a scientist:
and this story about Prairie dog language, are intriguing.
So animals laugh, talk, empathize, play, murder and love. As we might expect. Traits such as these do not appear fully formed overnight. The very structure of our brain should tell us that this is so. And yet people persist in thinking of humans as being completely divorced from their animal past, if they even accept that there is such a thing.
The interesting divergence in human history is the so-called step up when humans “graduated” from hunter-gather, to horticulturalist, to finally agriculturalist. The changes occurring from one economic set to the next marks some of the greatest changes from early humans to “modern” humans.
Whenever humans became dependent on static farming, humans developed some of the less attractive traits: widescale warfare (in foraging societies, “war” was more or less a show of prominence, not so much a land grab), the development of strictly stratified social hierachy (those who had and those who didn’t fell further and further apart), introduction of diseases and drought and land destruction (hell, if you’re in one place long enough, you’re bound to screw it up!) and many others. That’s not to say that there weren’t positives: surpluses of food are nice (though having to pay for that surplus really sucks!).
Nice diary…thanks for bringing this up!
and I mean that in all senses of the word.
One thing that many don’t realize is that while agriculture gave human societies the extra surplus with which they began to build civilization, on a individual basis it was a disaster.
The vast majority of humankind traded the relatively egalitarian and relaxed life of the hunter-gatherer for the far more stressful, short and stratified life of the farmer or, as farmers became known as, peasants. Tied to his land, the farmer is far easier to enslave than the hunter-gatherer and much more used to the heavy and sustained work required.
Hunter-gatherer societies obviously do not produce the surpluses that agricultural one do but they do produce enough to support artists and their equivalents of priests, doctors and lawyers, often, naturally, rolled into one. On the other hand they are remarkably free of infectious diseases, depression, loneliness and alienation.
Am I suggesting that we all run back to the caves? No. For one thing, we wouldn’t fit and for another it’s too late. There is no nature left out there for us to live on.
Automation in manufacturing, today, and services, tomorrow, means that human beings will soon have to come closer to the way they lived as hunter-gatherers. There will simply not be that much non-family work to spread around.
When machines and computers do all the work and make all the money, what are we going to be doing?