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...
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."
What do you mean by the term "massively remote"?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But the lousy coffee and cake (one slice per person!) thing will never disappear.
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.
> "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...
