Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [31]
The fossil record suggests that anatomically modern humans, or homo sapiens sapiens, emerged in Africa only about one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. This represents about seven thousand biological generations, and shows that we are a very young species. The word sapiens means âwiseâ in Latin. Whether this label truly corresponds to humans remains to be determined.
I found it fruitful thinking of humans as a species. It seemed clear that our great strength is being able to adapt to a wide variety of environments and circumstances. The descendants of the small band of humans that left Africa spread out across the world and populated it. From the Arctic to the deserts of Australia and the rain forests of the Amazon, they learned to exploit the plants and animals in each new environment they entered. Humans have long perpetrated ecological depredation. Species that were easy to hunt tended to disappear shortly after humans arrived in a given area. The fossil record indicates this clearly in places such Madagascar, New Zealand, and Australia. Like lions and wolves, humans are social predators. And we are an invasive species. Our outstanding capacity of adaptation makes us the most dangerous of all macroscopic predators currently stalking the earth.
Archaeologists have compared human campsites to those of Neanderthals living at the same time in the same region. Our ancestors made sophisticated traps and carved fine tools, not only out of stone and wood but also out of bone and antler. They carved bones into needles, which enabled them to sew clothes. Neanderthals probably lacked the capacity to make warm clothes. Our species cohabited the earth with Neanderthals for more than one hundred thousand years, and even traded with them in some cases. But there were four major glaciations during this period, and the Neanderthals did not survive. Paleontologists now think that their mysterious disappearance twenty thousand years ago is best explained by their incapacity to adapt to a changing environment.
Homo sapiens sapiens has a vertiginous trajectory. The Cro-Magnon artists who painted Lascaux, the prehistoric cave in southwest France, lived less than a thousand generations ago. They were humans just like usâbut they had neither electricity nor sophisticated technology. Now humans have developed indoor plumbing, washing machines, spacecraft, computers, and an understanding of the intricate workings of biology.
Who are we? We have skulls and backbones, just like other vertebrate animals. Everything indicates that we are animals. Yet we do many things that animals cannot, such as write books, debate the meaning of words, turn trees into paper, study invertebrates with microscopes, equip jaguars with radio collars and track them, ride bicycles, fly planes, pilot submarines, travel to the moon and back, make wine from grapes, smoke tobacco, manipulate DNA molecules, build nuclear reactors, and study the extinction of other species. We can also step back from the world and witness it as a spectacle separate from ourselves, which we call ânature.â
We are rooted in biology, and we can also think about it. Words and concepts are our specialty. We are the symbolic species par excellence. We can treat words as symbols for things that are not in our immediate vicinity. Our linguistic and symbolic capacities enable us to devise new relationships between unrelated concepts. Through language, we can exchange information, make plans, scheme, and strategize. Mastering language and symbols has led us to the top of the food chain. Lions and wolves have fangs and claws; we have cunning concepts that we can put to practice.
Language also allows us to pass on vast amounts of knowledge and experience to our children. The sophisticated technologies we have developed in recent decades grew out of the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors. Language has blasted us onto a steep learning curve.
These developments have been made possible by our brains. We have big