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A human can come up with a system to help them record hidden pine seed locations or random numbers fairly easily though - marks in the ground or paper and penci
by chimprich 9y ago
A human can come up with a system to help them record hidden pine seed locations or random numbers fairly easily though - marks in the ground or paper and pencil, for example. You'd have a huge challenge getting even the cleverest non-human animal to even use such a system, let alone invent one.
Human level of intelligence is clearly far greater unless you impose some very arbitrary restrictions on human abilities so they can be beaten by some very specific animal abilities.
- EliRivers 9y agoA human can come up with a system to help them record hidden pine seed locations or random numbers fairly easily though - marks in the ground or paper and pencil, for example. I would suggest that the evidence indicates otherwise. Written language seems to have taken humans tens of thousands of years to work out, so coming up with that system is clearly not fairly easy. Keeping track of 50000 locations over a 15 mile radius such that they can be found again six months later in winter under a foot of snow using marks in the ground made with a stick, without a written language? That seems... difficult.
- chimprich 9y agoI suspect early humans would have been able to make marks on trees to record routes or food caches for millennia before coming up with the more abstract idea of an alphabet. This would have been good enough for this task. The earliest cave paintings known are something like 40,000 years old; surely anyone capable of that could come up with a food marking strategy.