Aristotle and Descartes, for example, never saw a non-human primate, much less an ape. The primates were all wiped out of Europe by that time. Zoological Gardens were first established in the early s. And so around Darwin's time they started housing monkeys and apes in zoos.
Darwin met an orangutan, Jenny, in the London Zoo, and this was really quite formative for him. It gave him more courage to say that humans are also primates, because this animal, Jenny, was so similar to us. Q: You draw from Darwin, Piaget, lots of different sources. Was it once thought that raw intelligence distinguished us from the apes? We gave them a big battery of tests — a big IQ test if you will.
It covered understanding of space, causality, quantities, as well as social learning, communication, reading the intentions of others. We found that 2-year-old children — before they can read or do anything mathematical — look just like the apes on physical things, such as causality, quantities and space. But in the social domain, they are already way ahead. We are able to plug into the knowledge and skills of other people and to take their perspective, by collaborating, communication and learning from them in unique ways.
Q: Can you give one example of how the 2-year-old child looked so different from the 2-year-old chimp in those tests? We are so much more complicated than motor vehicles, even though we have roughly the same number of genes as an average car has parts.
More and more we are finding that genes do many things. Our genomes are unique to us, and provide the evolved framework on which humanness could emerge. In Christian cultures, we talk of the Fall, where humankind became sullied by shaking off the shackles of our creation. We almost never murder, we almost never rape, we create and teach all the time, and learn almost at the same rate.
The picture of how we came to be is only going to get more complicated as we continue to discover. I suspect that soon we will find more contemporary species of human who lived alongside us within the last , years, and that we will find more humans who bred with us in that time too. Just like all living things, we struggle for existence, but we also try to ease the struggles of others.
We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system.
Charles Robert Darwin wrote those words in He is my hero, for better or worse, and though he was so very right about some of the most important ideas that anyone ever had, like all scientists, he was wrong about others. At least, part of his incomparable legacy is that we now know this to be incorrect. Our genes and our bodies are not fundamentally different from those of our nearest cousins, ancestors or even our deep relatives.
As for lowly origins, that is a matter of judgment. Remember the alien naturalist come to Earth to study us. An interesting mix. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you are not. Surprisingly, however, a square inch of human skin on average possesses as much hair-producing follicles as other primates, or more — humans often just have thinner, shorter, lighter hairs.
Fun fact about hair: Even though we don't seem to have much, it apparently helps us detect parasites , according to one study.
Humans may be called "naked apes," but most of us wear clothing, a fact that makes us unique in the animal kingdom, save for the clothing we make for other animals. The development of clothing has even influenced the evolution of other species — the body louse, unlike all other kinds, clings to clothing, not hair.
Without a doubt, the human trait that sets us apart the most from the animal kingdom is our extraordinary brain. Humans don't have the largest brains in the world — those belong to sperm whales. We don't even have the largest brains relative to body size — many birds have brains that make up more than 8 percent of their body weight, compared to only 2.
Yet the human brain, weighing only about 3 pounds when fully grown, give us the ability to reason and think on our feet beyond the capabilities of the rest of the animal kingdom, and provided the works of Mozart, Einstein and many other geniuses.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, humans are not the only animals to possess opposable thumbs — most primates do. Unlike the rest of the great apes, we don't have opposable big toes on our feet.
What makes humans unique is how we can bring our thumbs all the way across the hand to our ring and little fingers. We can also flex the ring and little fingers toward the base of our thumb. This gives humans a powerful grip and exceptional dexterity to hold and manipulate tools with.
This is getting off the topic, but what if we all had six fingers?
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