Emergence of stone-tool use behavior in a population of common macaques
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
In the past, people believed that no animals used tools. We now have countless examples of animals using tools in clever ways. So our ancestors were completely wrong, right?
Well, perhaps the truth is in the middle: perhaps biologists of yesteryear didn't observe animal tool usage because it was less common at the time.
Not a biologist though (simply a parrot and monkey lover).
But also, what makes you believe that our ancestors didn't notice? In ecosystems where they observed that, it might have been so routine and obvious to them that it was not something even worth noting. After all, historically, humans have treated animals similar to people for a very long time (e.g. putting them on trial for theft and murder). When you already have that mindset, a tool-using animal is very unremarkable.
This can't have been the first time these monkeys have experienced food shortage.
I know we had a bioengineering boom in the 50s, and probably a lot of animals have been eating well for the past few decades because of that... but I wonder if the behaviors of the monkeys with tools and crows dropping nuts is something that often happens with animals during the down period where crop yields aren't doing so well, and then they revert back to scrounging when they are.
I guess we had luck that the tools we developed during our own shortages in the past could be used to kill and enslave other animals. Let's hope the crows and monkeys aren't taking notes.
Humanity's greatest creation is therefore manufactured scarcity, through marketing, mortgages and competition.
Check out the housing and infrastructure in Nigeria.
About ~2B people globally are in that situation or worse.
House scarcity is a result of too little capitalism, not too much.
Zoning is not divine mandate. It comes from people.
We can’t fix zoning without going through capitalists at the top who work tongue their way into owning all that they do. They’ll fight it as a violation of their right to turn us all into serfs
I tire of the technical euphemism. It’s like Soylent Green; just people hallucinating BS about themselves all the way down
The UK doesn't use zoning, and still has expensive (and small) housing. When I lived there, there were a lot of relatively ordinary people going door-to-door collecting signatures petitioning against "affordable housing" because it will attract "the wrong kind of people to our neighbourhood".
Now I'm in Berlin, completely different system to the UK, lots of rentals and it has rent controls to keep the costs down… and yet homes are still expensive.
Then we started doing agriculture, and population densities started coming up. And because agriculture produces a surplus of food wrt the number of people involved, it's a positive feedback loop: more food surplus -> more people who can spend their time on something other than growing food, like say trading or inventing things -> higher productivity -> more food surplus -> ..., with higher and higher population densities on each iteration. The end result is the anthill cities that we consider the norm today.
Our monkey brain is still not adapted to such an environment, though, and wants to reduce the density to what it expects; hence NIMBYism, anti-immigration, zoning, race covenants etc - which all boil down to the same basic idea that if we drive out "them", then "us" will have all the (obviously abundant) resources of this land for ourselves. Of course, that's not how our modern economy actually works, but the monkey brain does not operate on a rational level.
That would be 10 million humans globally.
The invention of agriculture, and the gradual improvements until the 1750s (The Wealth of Nations essentially invented/formalised the foundation ideas now called capitalism in 1776), took us up to a 791 million.
Capitalism (mixed with ongoing feudalism) took us up to about 1.2-1.7 billion, then a mixture of capitalism and communism took us to about 5.4 billion.
The examples you're giving of food shortages are mostly in the past (certainly in developed nations with the highest house prices), specifically because of the heavy industrialisation that allows us to over-produce almost all years, which is why we've got large scale issues with obesity rather than hunger.
> The end result is the anthill cities that we consider the norm today.
No, "anthill" is a choice. Look outside your own city, and you see large swathes of countryside, with hardly anyone in it. Or look at a different city — I've visited the Bay Area, and that's mostly houses, with a few zones of towers; I've visited Manhattan, and that's concrete canyons; I've visited Athens, and that's a mix of densely-packed narrow lanes and broad avenues, surrounded by low-rise apartments; I live in Berlin, whose inner city is almost entirely low-rise, and whose outer zones are a mixture of detached houses, farms(!), and woodland; I used to live in Cambridge (the original one), where cows are frequently found grazing in the inner-city fields (and yet people still complain about it being 'over-crowded' rather than making a pun like 'over cow-ded'); I grew up in the South Hampshire conurbation[0], which is "the most populated part of South East England excluding London" and… well: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8550817,-1.0769807,3a,75y,10...
> Our monkey brain is still not adapted to such an environment, though, and wants to reduce the density to what it expects; hence NIMBYism, anti-immigration, zoning, race covenants etc - which all boil down to the same basic idea that if we drive out "them", then "us" will have all the (obviously abundant) resources of this land for ourselves. Of course, that's not how our modern economy actually works, but the monkey brain does not operate on a rational level.
That, I agree with. Though I am also saying you (and, to be fair, I) also have monkey brains thinking monkey thoughts — we didn't evolve to know a world beyond what we could easily reach on our legs, and for many of us the countryside a few tens miles away may as well be on the moon.
When I said "anthills", I didn't mean any particular city design, but the overall population density. Those example that you gave are still incredibly dense by monkey brain standards, even with all the interspersed farms etc.
And you can, of course, spread out even more, a la American suburbia. But that doesn't work out in a sense that our economy is still built around the notion of dense hubs, and can only be efficient in their presence, so it just ends up with people commuting back and forth. Thus our economy - which is what makes that many people sustainable in the first place - requires density.
> When I said "anthills", I didn't mean any particular city design, but the overall population density. Those example that you gave are still incredibly dense by monkey brain standards, even with all the interspersed farms etc.
Well, I misunderstood your metaphor, but I think we agree on this — at least, mostly. I'd still say that the bucolic countryside in the google street view link I gave you is not dense, even to our monkey brains.
And on further reflection, I'm not sure if that "monkey" part of our mind responds to people directly, or to places we think people might be lurking (houses as caves and windows as their entrances, because what is seen by the part of our mind pre-trained by genetics is not necessarily the same as what we learn from experience).
> Thus our economy - which is what makes that many people sustainable in the first place - requires density.
Bit yes, bit no. It benefits from density, but it's also globally distributed. I'm not sure what we would choose, cities or countryside, in some hypothetical world where most humans could predict and follow their own long-term preferences over their entire lives. Cities have always been attractive, even in ancient times, because cities hold so many wonders for our monkey brains; and yet, many were (and others still are) just plain bad places to be, for various different reasons in different cases.
Monkey brains, as you say.
“Based on the preceding calculations, a family of five would require an estimated 200 ha of habitat from which to gather animal and plant food. This estimate is based on an ideal ecosystem, one containing those wild plants and animals that are most suitable for human consumption. Researchers report that, in fact, modern-day hunter-gatherers need much more than 40 ha per person. For instance, Clark and Haswell (1970) estimate that at least 150 ha of favorable habitat per person is needed to secure an adequate food supply. In a moderately favorable habitat, these scientists estimate that 250 ha per person would be required. These estimates are four to six times greater than those in the model presented earlier. In marginal environments, such as the cold northwestern Canadian region, each person needs about 14,000 ha to harvest about 912,500 kcal of food energy per year (Clark and Haswell, 1970).” [David Pimentel and Marcia H. Pimentel, ‘Food, Energy, and Society’, third edition, (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), p. 45-46.]
Just based on that alone I'd say that even the place you linked to is still too crowded from the "monkey brain" perspective. In hunter-gatherer societies, the only places that matched the density of our rural environments are extremely productive areas such as Pacific Northwest (temperate rainforest + elk + salmon). But even then the entire population of Coast Salish prior to European arrival is currently estimated to be under 15,000 people, living in several dozen longhouse villages spread across what's basically most of Western Washington and much of British Columbia today.
A more precise statement is that NIMBYs support public municipal regulations that preserve and/or increase the value of their private assets, i.e. homes.
The problem is capitalism and greed. Entirely.
No.
While capitalism does create incentives for manufactured scarcity, houses aren't that. The only things the "top brass" can do would be reducing the standards in building codes so that anyone can build anywhere, but that would lead to shanty towns[0] without good connections or services, which isn't likely to attract the job opportunities that make cities desirable and expensive in turn.
If you want to make houses cheap, figure out how to make infrastructure cheap: the roads, the sewage system, the power lines… all the boring stuff.
[0] they might be nice looking, for example this holiday home which is large enough to live in, whose material cost is just 5% of the cost of a "proper" house sale price (the latter includes land, but still): https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ but that doesn't solve the actual issues, and it's still saving money on the list price only to raise long-term costs on heating and fire safety.
In that one there doesn’t seem to be any clear difference in took use occurrence or skill between genders, though their were differences in what they used tools on, and the size/weight of the tools.
Is this a species where young males get kicked out of the tribe (especially when food scarcity) while young females do not ?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20150...
There’s a theory that dogs domesticated us almost as much as we them. It centers on why the whites of our eyes are so big.
It would be interesting to see an uplift saga with baboons or macaques that relied not on Doctor Moreau style medical interventions but on selection and domesticated animals.
But then I’m also a weirdo who thinks birds use tools. I maintain that structure building counts as a tool. Particularly the ones who weave baskets.
We also know crows and wolves can mutualistically hunt. Crows narc and then collect the leavings.
Maybe crows didn’t used to be as smart as they are either…