Sudden Disruption

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Sunday, February 09, 2020

The Emergence of Man

First posted 08-03-12, updated every now and then.

As a boy, I was impressed with "2001 A Space Odyssey".  The idea that a spark from space vaulted man beyond the other primates seemed plausible. And it got me thinking.

How different ARE we from the other primates?  And when did this difference occur?

These questions led me to, "The Naked Ape", by Desmond Morris. He defined a few differences, but far more similarities.  So I kept looking.

Over the years I've kept track of the various discoveries looking for the significant differences between us and our cousins.  It's time to document them.

For background, let's step back about a billion years:

Billion-year-old fossils may be early fungus
Scientists Find 'Oldest Human Ancestor'

Scientists Found a 520-Million-Year-Old Miracle: a Fossil With Brains and Guts Intact

And a half a billion years later:

Tiny Chinese Archicebus fossil is the oldest primate yet found


Walking and Running

When I was a child, walking erect was the gold standard of humanity.  And it's true, we're better on two feet chasing down game than all others, but only by degrees.

Rare 10 million-year-old fossil unearths new view of human evolution

Little Foot - 3.67 Million Years Old

Bonobos showed that walking erect is no big deal:

Walking Upright

But that's not running.  About three million years ago a significant change occurred.  Humans became marathon runners and developed some new hunting scripts largely stolen from wolves, which begs the question, who ultimately domesticated whom?

Family Tree of Dogs and Wolves Is Found to Split Earlier Than Thought

First Steps

Diet

Food has also been an area of study to define differentiation, but which species jumped what line, and when?

Human ancestors changed diet 3.5 million years ago


Thumbs

A well developed thumb is closely associated with human advancement:



Tools

Another thing that set us apart was thought to be tool use, but this test also fell as chimps and other species have now demonstrated.




02-03-21 AN EVOLUTIONARY TIMELINE OF HOMO SAPIENS
  
The spear which was developed about 500,000 years ago is also a clear example of tool use.  So far we've seen no other species accomplish this trick, though a weapon may become a possible learned behavior for some other primates as other tools have been.  Is it just a matter of time?

01-31-18 385,000 Year Old Sharp stones found in India signal surprisingly early toolmaking advances



Australian researchers say they’ve found the world’s oldest hatchet

Monkey or Man?

11-04-16 49,000 Year Old Human Settlement in Australia


Bones

All primates have bone, but their shape association with tools (and sometimes DNA) can tell a more detailed story:




Trade

Clear evidence of trade between distant (and separate) tribes would definitely set man apart from other primates:

Evolve or die: Why our human ancestors learned to be social more than 320,000 years ago

10-12-21 Dog DNA reveals ancient trade network connecting the Arctic to the outside world 

Culture

In response, the transfer of culture became the new human benchmark, but the ability to transfer new knowledge from one generation to another has also been demonstrated by chimps...

And WHALES

Then there was self-awareness, which was disproved in spite of Darwin's original mirror observations:

Mirror Test

Fish Passes the Mirror Test

And a nice test of abstract thinking is meta-cognition:

Chimps: Ability to 'Think About Thinking' Not Limited to Humans

And have episodic memory:

Chimpanzees and orangutans remember distant past events

How about 500,000 year-old art?  But which species made it? :

Art on the half-shell

176,000 year old ritual?

Bruniquel Cave

Blombos Cave has 73,000 year old art?


Language?

Next to evolve was language.  The chimp Washoe laid that one to rest in the 1960s.  And then there's Koko the gorilla who recognizes 1000 signs vocabulary and 2000 spoken words.  She has an IQ of about 80. Also bonobos have gesture language plus now respond to spoken language with keyboard feedback. It may be simple, but it's language. And even more languages are being discovered:

Prairie dogs' language decoded by scientists


 Fire?

The most literally obvious and vivid tool of man has been fire.  The control of fire allowed our gut to decrease in length by about a yard as we began to cook our food and digestion improved.  Human resistance to air pollution also emerged over the last million years, an indication that we lived with fire during that time.

Control of fire wasn't just tool use, it was the most exquisite form of tool use.  The trick was getting close enough to use the flame but not get burned, and then of course, not letting the fire go out.  How many thousands of our ancestors played with fire before we learn to pass on these two tricks?  And was this the brain and thumbs at work?  Fire was the turning point. The most concise summary of why I found in a New Yorker article, "The Case Against Civilization" (which I disagree with overall):

"The earliest, oldest strata of the caves (in Africa) contain whole skeletons of carnivores and many chewed-up bone fragments of the things they were eating, including us. Then comes the layer from when we discovered fire, and ownership of the caves switches: the human skeletons are whole, and the carnivores are bone fragments. Fire is the difference between eating lunch and being lunch."

We know of no other primate who developed the independent use of fire, (though some Bonobos have now been trained to do so with a lighter, and even use water to put it out).  Man's sustained use of fire is estimated to have begun sometime between 1.5 million and 400,000 years ago:

Who Mastered Fire?

Were Early Humans Cooking Their Food a Million Years Ago?

Still, isn't the difference between us and other primates simply a matter of DEGREE in thinking and manipulating our environment?  Scripts and tools are certainly learned and used effectively by other species.  But our fore-brains allowed for abstraction, delayed gratification and far more complex simulations as demonstrated by the wide range of different human behaviors.  So is our main difference from other primates the complexity of behaviors created by individualism and hyper-specialization?

Or maybe not:

Neanderthals Light it Up

Canned Food?


Burial?

11-13-23 300,000 Year Ago the Oldest Known Burial Site in The World

05-06-21 A child's 78,000-year-old grave



Or woman?


Out of Africa

Whatever makes us different was probably well established by 60,000 (or 100,000?) years ago, as that's when humans became successful enough to spread from Africa to the rest of the world in our anatomically modern form.  Was it a combination of language, hunting methods, tools, spears, and fire?  Or was it some kind of proto-agriculture for which we've yet to find evidence?

Blombos Cave contained scratches on ocher objects from 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Left 100,000 Years Ago?

Or Stayed 60,000 Years Ago?

01-25-18 The modern human brain may only be 40,000 years old

06-16-20 Earliest known bow-and-arrow hunting outside Africa 48,000 years ago

Music, Art and Property?

Border Cave takes some level of symbolic culture and the ownership of property back to 44,000 years.  The Venus of Fels Cave in Germany is clearly art from 35,000 years ago.

Border Cave

Could "owning things" be that line between us and chimps?  This is one of the ideas put forth in Sex at Dawn.  Maybe Christopher Ryan is on to something.  Will this mystery lead us back to ourselves?  In any case, ten to fifty thousand years ago was an exciting time for man.


  
World's Oldest Portrait - Symbolic Abstraction 26,000 Years Ago


Not all hunter-gatherers moved around.  How could they have carried all these pots?


Agriculture?

The key to real civilization seems to be the domestication of plants and animals - agriculture.  It's often described in terms of specialization and our ability to withhold gratification until the resource matures (wheat, cows or eggs into chickens).

10-01-21  People were raising cassowaries 18,000 years ago

This may be the key to domestication 14,000 years ago:

We Didn't Domesticate Dogs.  They Domesticated Us.

How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals.

14,000-Year-Old Bread

Another line blurred:

Baboons Kidnap and Raise Feral Dogs as Pets

Even the line of first settlements are moving backward and becoming blurred.  In school I was taught civilization started about 5,000 years ago.  Then it was 7,000 years.  Then 10,000.  And now:

Shelter?

Except for digging holes, and a few other minor exceptions, no other species builds shelter:

Oldest house in Britain discovered to be 11,500 years old
Stone Building in Russia



12,000 Year-Old Gobekli Tepe


Gobekli Tepe Update 04-04-15

(Wiki says Gobekli Tepe is only dated to 9559 projecting to 11,000 years old) That's still some impressive stone work which must have taken a few thousand years to develop.  20,000 years seems like a more safe number for now.  We just need to find more sites and map progress, but we're definitely blurring back into our ancestors.  When exactly did we become "human"?

As a side note, dogs have been with us for about 14,000 years according to bone evidence.

And here is an even broader overview taking evolution into our culture - a lot of good ideas here:
This next post strays a bit far from the origins of man, but contains so many useful observation about humanity:

State of the Species - Charles C. Mann

Maybe the missing mechanism is EPIgenitics working with genetics. It's an example of how evolution can go well beyond sexual preference:

Scientists claim that homosexuality is not genetic — but it arises in the womb

Here is a fun idea about how the n-grams of our cultural evolution is reflected in our language:

Evolution of the most common English words and phrases over the centuries  12-12-12

World's Oldest Wooden Water Wells Discovered From About 5000 Years Ago  12-24-12

Is a long childhood the key difference?  Maybe:

Why Are We the Last Apes Standing?

Believe it or not, this was published long after I published this post (which like primates is still evolving). Mark Changizi seems to agree that we differ only by degree ("quantitatively so, not qualitatively"). Interesting post.  I need to get his books on my list:

Bursting the Bubble of Human Intelligence  04-09-13

It seems this puzzle is filling in literally day by day.  Stay tuned for more updates.

It appears we must guard against cultural imperialism in our acquisition of knowledge. And does human behavior vary to try all possible combinations in the same way a species replicates to fill the physical range of it's environment?


The Wheel

02-19-16 The wheel is certainly a definitive test of humanity.  Well, at least so far:

Oldest Wheel - 5200 Years Old

5500 Year Old Sumer - city with writing and a stratified society (rulers and priests, working class and peasants).

5500 Year Old Caral and Norte Chico - civilization in modern-day Peru without stratified society.

12-27-18 Seven Million Years of Human Evolution


09-09-20 When did we become fully human?

And the beat goes on...



Recursion?


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