Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens milestone
reuters.com
reuters.com
In the case of burials, this old misconception places a ridiculously high bar on proof that other species revere their dead. Case in point being that of Homo Naledi, admittedly a Homo but not a human by a long shot that clearly practiced burials in inaccessible cave structures. [0]
[0] https://humangenesis.org/2016/05/18/did-homo-naledi-bury-its...
If actual achievements speak louder than words, then "varying degrees" is a huge gap between human and other species. Yes, we know that numerous animals exhibit intelligence and emotions, but that does not change the fact that humans are very different when it comes to the understanding of time and everything that goes with it. Also, there is no other animal out there who domesticated fire or developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.
But the main point I was trying to make was really this: > To the extent we have any unique such traits currently that radically sets us apart from other species then it has been a long and gradual process over eons
I.e. there is no need to find a specific point where all that makes us human came into place. It all happened gradually, albeit with some leaps and bounds for different traits, at different times for different things, and we carry the legacy of all those millions of years with us, not just the last 200 KY. And we share substantial amounts of traits with other species.
The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”?
I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.
We can see the Great Wall of China from space.
And we can also see beaver dams from space.
(Note the Great Wall was built for a mundane reason - the Han people couldn't defeat the Mongols on horseback, but they could keep building walls until the horses could no longer enter. Byzantium/Constantinople also adopted that strategy, which worked for over 1,000 years until the Ottomans built the world's largest cannon and blasted holes in it.)
If you weren't impressed when you read the above sentence, imagine how algae feel when they read your sentence about the Great Wall of China.
The assumption might be that it takes time to develop, but those species never move beyond simplistic uses of language and tools despite their ancient ancestry.
Whatever your thoughts are on the evolution and biology of life, something is happening in the prefrontal cortex of humans that is fundamentally different.
One is the development of modified tools and fire. Yes I know that’s two things, but they’re both very ancient and probably were enabled by the adaptation that gave us language. It’s possible there were several adaptations there but I suspect they all came from one fundamental advance in cognition. This drove a series of major evolutionary changes that adapted us to a tool and fire using mode of living.
The second I think was prefrontal synthesis, at around the time this child was buried. This enabled us to form complex linguistic concepts (take this Apple and give it to the girl on the other side of the wall) and create tools with multiple features composed together, such as needles with an eye hole.
Pretty much everything else derived from these innovations, or at least the cognitive capabilities that enabled them.
So yes of course we have abilities other animals don’t have, but we also have a lot in common. Showing reverence and tenderness for the dead is definitely something we share with many other mammals, but complex funerary rituals with associated burial objects are more a human thing.
I think language was the big differentiator here. Being able to contextualise, to tell stories .. and imagine worlds before and after one's own, must have accelerated the brain's development exponentially.
There was a bit going around a number of years ago (not sure where it stands in current scientific thought)... https://www.wired.com/2004/03/docs-drop-jaws-over-gene-mutat...
The theory is that there is a mutation which caused the jaw muscle of the line of hominids that gave rise to humans. If you look at chimpanzees, gorillas, and other hominids you'll find a skull with a crest with the anchor point for the muscle that enables a very powerful jaw. However, that muscle also constricts the size of the cranium which likewise constricts the size of the brain.
The theory goes that by weakening this muscle it allowed for other mutations to increases the size of the cranium and at the same time necessitated the use of fire and tools to help overcome the "we can't kill it by biting it."
That mutation traces back to about 2.4 Mya. Earliest hints of control of fire was about 2.0 Mya. The Oldowan tools date to 2.6 - 1.7 Mya.
Prefrontal Synthesis is a lot more recent and generates a lot of material evidence (in comparison) so I think it's easier to see that there was a common cause behind the subsequent developments in material culture, which fall under the umbrella of Behavioural Modernity.
Both these things can be true.
There are traits that distinctly separate us .. which have also developed gradually over a long period of time.
I think the article is acknowledging a common behaviour between humans and a distance relative to humans; if anything it's backing up your assertion that development has occurred over a long and gradual process.
There are a number of traits that make humans a unique animal, it's not a misconception.
Humans:
- Are aware of the existence of good and evil and have the capacity for moral reasoning
- Have language
- Are aware of the existence of the distant future, and can plan for it beyond the instinctual cycle of a single season like a hibernating squirrel
- Are aware of their own mortality and vulnerability
- Have art
There might be more but that's a good start. We are animals, of course, nothing "separates us from the animals," in a clean way, but boy we're weird animals.
> Immediately downvoted
WTF HN, is this not polite, curious discourse? Why do I even try here? Never mind, I hate this website. Bye
It would be great if the people who are downvoting you would tackle any of your bullet points.
We are certainly descended from animals, but we are also wildly unique from anything else we've ever seen in the biological world, past or present, mostly due to our cognitive capacities for art, science, morality, math, language, you name it.
Our capacity for language (and its core property of digital infinity) alone, as pointed out by Chomsky, doesn't seem to have an analogue anywhere in the biological world down to perhaps the level of DNA.
That's a great puzzle and mystery, we shouldn't run away from it but rather we should embrace it with humility and awe.
That's not what this debate is really about. The proponents of "humans are different" are actually thinking "humans are superior". They can make a case for that, but only in terms that confer advantages and entitlement to humans.
Take this example:
> Are aware of the existence of good and evil and have the capacity for moral reasoning
and apply it to an encounter in the forest between a human and a venomous snake.
Imagine one kills the other without provocation.
Which animal was good, and which one was evil?
Let's try that exercise again three more times. I'll give you more information for each case:
1. The human was your pregnant wife.
2. The human was the mass murderer, Adolf X.
3. The snake was hungry and scared, and had a family to care for.
Are you referring to the voices in your head?
Have you noticed there are more than one voice, and sometimes they point you in different directions?
Assuming you don't speak French, Greek or Estonian, and have never read a translation of any writing by a French, Greek, or Estonian human being, how do you know whether French, Greek and Estonian people also have multiple voices in their heads like you do?
How can you know that non-human animals don't also have voices in their heads?
If non-human animals also have multiple voices in their heads suggesting different actions to them, and they make choices from those voices, how can you define them as "amoral"?
No. I guess you refer to debating moral dilemma in your head, but that's only one aspect of morality.
Not all people share the same moral code, but we do expect all human cultures to have a moral code, and we expect humans to act on it's basis, despite their natural instincts and the rather arbitrary moral rules specific to their culture.
Meanwhile we expect animal to behave according to their natural instincts.
When humans break our exceptions, we judge them, since we know humans can and often are better than that. When animals break our exceptions, if ever, we are surprised, as this is rare and unnatural.
I am trying to understand what you are saying in your last para:
> When humans break our exceptions, we judge them, since we know humans can and often are better than that. When animals break our exceptions, if ever, we are surprised, as this is rare and unnatural.
What do you mean by "unnatural"? Can you give examples for
(a) humans
(b) poodles
(c) jackals
Some people believe that their moral code is given to them by god, some try to base their moral code on logic, some people integrate the code held in their society and don't think about it very much.
> What do you mean by "unnatural"? Can you give examples for
humans - I'm not sure what do you mean by that. It is natural for humans to have their behavior influenced by moral causes. It is unnatural for humans to have no moral code, I guess, or to consistently behave in a way that is not influenced by any moral code.
poodles - I guess it will be unnatural for a poodle to refuse a treat in reward for something that another poodle did, on the basis that the treat should be given to the other poodle.
jackals - It will probably be unnatural for a jackal to hunt an healthy creature instead of a sick one, just because the sick one is a parent who tends to young ones, even if he could do so with a little bit more effort.
I'd add that I think that scientists in the digging-up-stuff business are far too ready to assign motive and behavior rather than simply describing the physical results.
To be fair, it's part of the marketing they have to do to keep that bit of grant money flowing.
There clearly are distinct characteristics of what it means to be human, as opposed to not just other animals, but other hominin species as well. For instance, the mutation in prefrontal cortex development that allowed us to acquire a complete recursive language (a Turing-complete communication system), along with all of its benefits for large-scale coordination and strategy. This mutation is likely 70k year old and has caused a cascade of civilizational advances, from complex culture, to myths, to arts, etc.
There is also a new misconception (with no real roots except egalitarianism taken too far) that everything is the same as everything else "to varying degrees." That isn't very interesting though. I live in the US. To "some varying degree" I live on the east coast; but that degree is nil because I live far west of the mississippi. Human language, use of tools, artistry etc. are so massively remote from the animal cases that it's worth labelling it a "distinction" and not a "difference."
This is a strange way of saying that it has roots in ancient philosophy. Every major ideology I can think of has forms of anti-anthropocentrism spanning from classical animal rights to silicon valley's post-humanist techno-utopian ideology.
What do you mean by the term "massively remote"?
For a scholar to make that claim, he or she would have to have studied the bulk of other languages. Since there are more than 70,000 species of vertebrates alone, none of whose language has been deciphered by humans, and we know that other types of animals e.g. honeybees rely on language to function, it is difficult to imagine any scholar qualified to make the claim.
Moreover, 99% of humans wouldn't even understand the statement, even after you'd explained what you mean by "generative" and "recursive". So I'm not sure what your statement is, other than yet another example of a human giving himself or herself a justification for the belief that humans are superior to animals, achieved through the mental gymnastic of a truism wrapped up in an academic paper.
For a commenter to make that claim, he or she would have to study the bulk of humanity and assess their ability to grasp the concepts.
Moreover, humans have no need whatsoever to understand what generative or recursive language is in order to master the use of language with those properties. This is simply the characteristics of their natural language instinct.
Now if you believe that somehow you have better knowledge about linguistics than everybody in the field, you might try to read what base they provide for their claims, and than maybe try disprove it. Without doing even basic research about the field, claims of astrophysicists can sound way more far fetched.
My takeaway is that this isn’t looking so much for the dividing line between our species and others in terms of traits but more about determining when cultural evolution began to eclipse biological as the primary force driving our species development.
But the lousy coffee and cake (one slice per person!) thing will never disappear.
> "This would likely have been a group act, perhaps by members of the child's family. All of these behaviors are, of course, very similar to those observed in our own species today, so we can relate to this act even though the burial dates to 78,000 years ago," said study co-author Nicole Boivin, an archaeologist and director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.
You have to be careful drawing inferences. Human sacrifice victims were also many times buried with great care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Llullaillaco
Given the prevalence of childhood mortality in ancient and pre-historic times, an elaborate burial of a child has a pretty good chance of being part of some ritual sacrifice.
Is this true? Elephants walk very far, as a group, to mourn years later the loss of a member from their family, by returning to where it died. Why would we think humans are so special in this regard?
Though there is ongoing debate regarding the reliability of the dating method, some scholars believe the earliest human burial dates back 100,000 years. Human skeletal remains stained with red ochre were discovered in the Skhul cave at Qafzeh, Israel. A variety of grave goods were present at the site, including the mandible of a wild boar in the arms of one of the skeletons
Humans probably learned it from elephants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Death_ritua...
> Mongolian culture is famous, along with Tibetans, for "sky burial," which leaves the body of the deceased on a high unprotected place to be exposed to the elements and devoured by wildlife. It's part of a Vajrayana Buddhist outlook about the needlessness of "respecting" the body after death.
Personally, I'd prefer if this was what would happen to my body than any Western ritual. Alas, in the West we have laws which, in practice, impose religious precepts long after the states are secular on paper.
[1]: https://www.bustle.com/articles/97030-5-interesting-death-an...
Yes, and there are still tribes that eat the flesh of the dead - this was a major cause of what we identified later on as prion-related diseases: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/wh...