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What Made Early Humans Smart
- mattowen_uk 5y agoI don't know about anyone else, but I want Ostrich feet now.
- lordnacho 5y agoHow come bones are able to heal, if basically every creature other than humans has not evolved human group assistance? Are there animals whose bones heal without needing this?
- mritchie712 5y agoIf an animal has a minor injury that impedes but not prevents performance, healing would work well without assistance.
- lordnacho 5y agoBut we all know someone who's had a total snap fracture. Animals can do this too, right? If given enough time.
- kirkules 5y agoThe reason the above answer addresses your concern is that a set major bone fracture is similar to a minor fracture in many ways, so if you can already heal minor fractures then you can heal set major ones in the same way
- mkoubaa 5y agoHealing broken bones is not something we evolved to do as groups. Until about a hundred or so years ago a broken leg was considered a fatal injury
- WalterBright 5y agoThat would imply doctors couldn't set a broken bone in the Revolutionary War? The Civil War? Of course they could! They could even do amputations.
- inglor_cz 5y agoA broken leg could be fatal if the broken bone shard cut the artery. That can happen even today. But plenty of people in premodern times survived leg fractures, though often at a cost of a lifelong limp.
- Loeffeldude 5y agoIt's not about the initial injury. How are you going to find food when you can't move properly? How are you going to avoid predators? If you are alone and not in a group that can help you with these things until you heal it's pretty much a death sentence.
- est 5y agoMy own hypothesis is walking not only freed our hands, but also freed our mind. The human are the rare if not only species relies heavily on remote projectiles for attack. Most other animals are melee main. (I happy to be proven wrong) Now the fun part. If you are melee main, you just out-run your food and bite them, simple. However, to master remote attacks, you must predict how the prey moves. You have prepare carefully, plan how your projectiles fly, or else you get nothing. This enforces us to mimic other animals, the better we think like the prey the better we catch our food or avoid big monsters. This is how primitive animal worship originates. Those who understands animals best are the most wise person in tribes. This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group. Projectiles gave us an artificial world with a beauty of its own. Parabola is studied extensively throughout history. A species's food source depending on ultilizing projectiles think differently than other animals. Bipedalism hominins are meh, but bipedalism hominins having stones in their hands are extremely dangerous. (Btw, are there any books or papers supporting my idea?)
- ant6n 5y agoEarly humans used running for hunting, see persistence hunting. Animals who hunt for food still need strategy. They hunt together, with few animals upwind pushing prey into a trap of waiting animals downwind. Predicting where prey will be while running is also very useful.
- deleted 5y ago
- twirligigue 5y agoIt's an interesting piece of natural history and discussion. It talks about some of the things that made smartness possible, including big brains and roaming around. However it doesn't seem to address the question of what actually made us smart. My answer would be: our genes, and later on our culture too, began to optimise for meme transmission and storage. This process snowballed and we went further down that route than any other species.
- inafewwords 5y agoI agree with the article. I think it is first a removal of limiting factors that prevent each step of IQ laddering. For example the hands and throwing rocks theory of the other commenter in here, Elephants are pretty smart and use their trunks like hands and hold tools. They are smart, long term memory and problem solving skills. They even can throw with their trunks and can use it as water guns. But they don't speak. They hit an intelligence limiting factor. My hypothesis for human exponential growth in intelligence is to look at sexual selection criteria. Humans aren't exactly ornamental. No blue feather, etc. We blush, tan, grow tall, sexual dimorphism and thats about it. We have hair and skin but it doesn't vary much in local context as low travel makes the local variety hit a median value. Tl;dr I think we sexually selected for people in a way that caused us to grow "value comparison" intelligence to an extreme degree I think it was when humans started wearing clothes for protection and using it as ornamentals for differentiation for attraction and wearing jewelry did we start seeing a boost in self awareness. We can compare ourselves to others and add or subtract value when evaluating mates. Animal bones become jewelry. Tools become jewelry. Basically accumulation of wealth becomes an extension of this jewelry instinct. Then we continue to compare our own value to others. Poor people are simple and ornamented rich people are sophisticated. That is just a psychological pattern we've inherited. Even a hunter gathering lifestyle can bring about this growth in self-value evaluation system as our ancestors collected furs and rock and bone tools. Then defensive tools and precious metals and gems showing the ability to hoard and protect the nest. Settling allowed this foundation to built upon. Spurning higher densities of literacy to keep account of individual values. An old musing I read from the internet comes to mind that carrying around one of those large key rings with literally a mass amounts of keys makes people more interested knowing about you. It is implied access to many protected valuable items. Why would intelligence be required to accumulate random values? It isn't. Self decoration became self evaluation and was our biggest unlock in IQ laddering. Humans also have a weird hoarding instinct when their value suddenly drops. "My parents lived through the Great Depression" is often said of old people who hoard. Its this evaluation of value dropping that necessitates an attempt to raise value through objects. Its weirdly reptilian brained but its foundation also opens up higher brain functions of value assessment. Trading markets are value based systems. Our growth in evaluating numeric values leads to literacy. Counting even primitive systems are an achievement. It is a foundational IQ test, "Sure it can mimic speech and understand its reflection.. Can the bird do math?". Also needed is an awareness of other's value systems. Counting built on that foundational toolkit of self value assessment woken up by sexual selection value increase instincts. Talking could be a pre-literacy value comparison once we were genetically adept at making value judgements. The value of woof is a depiction of the animal that woofs. Of the word fish is the depiction of the swimming animal that flips the water. Language is known as the greatest leap we have. And it's a value comparison concept at its root Memetic ideas, culture, jokes and discussion are ways to assess each other's value systems. What ideas do others value. Do they laugh or cheer at my depiction of events catching a deer? Are they in awe of the new technique I learned to catch fish? Trading ideas instead of just pelts or food. Also it incentivizes boasting, knowledge transfer, and evaluating others. Depictions of sci-fi AI always results in it self-evaluating its own worth. It's Pinochio wanting to be a real boy seeing that his value is that of a toy. Growing a Jimmeney Cricket from this self awareness of himself and others. That itself doesn't make him human, but in his journey he unlocks his path as an intelligent individual in the world rather than just a puppet of its surroundings. The Cricket then is his ability to weigh the value outcome of his decisions. When he lies his nose grows, showing that his individual value is falsely stated and is self aware of it. Adolescents are huge bullies. They act according to their base instincts. They attack the each other mocking how low value others are. Clothes, intelligence, experience. Its an old trick of value depreciation but its innate response on both attackers and targets. Those that are targeted then self-coerce either succesfully or unsuccessfully of raising in value. "Just value yourself" talking points by themselves really are insidious since that does not address the underlying cause of the low-value evaluation. External confirmation of self value is as foundational in humans as language. Self worth and self validation needs external validation since we got tied to it through language development. Mentorships such as big brother big sister programs use this as a tool to grow kids. We can then look at research of diseases to assess which parts of ourselves increases or decreases intelligence or at least perceived intelligence. Motor skills do not affect intelligence. When the brain is maldeveloped so it cannot control the limbic system, the person is not always impaired intelligently. Diseases that cause language construction impairment makes it hard to read social cues and can have a harsh limiting factor in intelligence but still abundantly intelligent compared to other species, yet mechanics of mute or deafness does not decrease intelligence. Bypassing some language construction is value assessment. Memory and math can make a person unattainably intelligent. Some handicaps in language construction and fine motor skills yet full retention of value assessment still can produce rainman type of intelligence. It becomes the language. I suspect that protohumans pre-converaation language would have harnessed this week type of intelligent subsection. Assessing surroundings, food, water etc. There likely are other points in the medical history that i an unaware of that can help understand the growth of our intelligence. Edit:typos all over. Ranted on a mobile but hard to go back and edit without the cursor jumping around from fat fingers and old cracked phone screen
- schpaencoder 5y agoMushroms made us smart
- zikduruqe 5y agoStoned Ape Theory... I have read that before.
- nobrains 5y agoWhat a racist top illustration. 1) If you avg. the colors of all humans it is not the light shade that is shown 2) Seems to imply lighter skin shade = smarter (The article, however, is great)
- VoodooJuJu 5y agoIt's comments like this that make me wonder if we can truly call ourselves smart.
- stonlyb 5y agoThe comment you're replying to at least attempts to use actual logic statements.
- slver 5y agoIt doesn't seem that logical statements matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27722154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27722154 What matters is just grabbing some pitchforks and cancelling someone.
- glial 5y agoWho is the comment trying to cancel?
- can_count 5y agoDownvoting on Hacker News literally silences the posters. Not only are their comments hidden, they can't post more comments for some time (say in response to what people are replying to them). Downvotes are supposed to be a tool for filtering out spam, off-topic comments, links to malware and scams. They're used to cancel people for having an opinion that differs from the group. In this case apparently the group disagrees what the function of melanin is.
- bequanna 5y ago
- gumby 5y agoI’m intrigued by this semi-throwaway* remark: > Human feet are a nightmare for bipedal locomotion ... The ostrich had a quarter of a billion years to master bipedal locomotion. What you get is a foot that an engineer would argue is a much more optimal... The human door can perform many operations an ostrich foot cannot. There’s a “just so” factor to that of course: ostrich has iterated to optimize for a specific set of operations (mainly linear running as far as I can tell, with turning manifested by the hip). And indeed that would probably be better for humans…if that’s all they wanted to do with their feet. The just so property is that of course we do those things with our feet because we still can, and in a little while (say a million years or so, maybe half that) we could happily abandon, say, the ability to climb a hanging rope in exchange for less foot pain. But maybe not? The ability to dance, do ballet, make certain combat maneuvers etc may be desirable and selective pressure may not apply to the foot in the same way it did to the Dino-ostrich. * by which I mean there’s surely a lot more thought behind this quotation but it was appropriately chosen for a general-audience-article as a gloss on a complex thought
- brudgers 5y agoThe premise that humans are smarter is appealing. The rationalization is big brains. But my iPhone fits in my pocket and is more capable than a room filling ENIAC. SQL's "ORDER BY" is more efficient than writing sorting code myself. Everywhere we look at computation, less is more sophisticated than more. "Humans are the smartest" makes us feel good. That is a reason to question its accuracy.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoI don't understand you. Humans are objectively the smartest animals, and the iPhone and SQL are proof of that.
- brudgers 5y agoIf computation exists independent of humans, then the iPhone and SQL are evidence that small is more sophisticated. If computation is not independent of humans, then there is no basis for a claim to objectivity. SQL and iPhones are simply all we know because we are limited to human experience. Experience which we know is at times fallible…we might be phlogiston wrong again. What perhaps doesn’t register is at best it makes no difference if humans are smartest. It doesn’t make us smarter. At worst, belief that we are smartest makes us dumber.
- DougWebb 5y agoYour iPhone is far more complex than an ENIAC; the only difference is that its transistors are much smaller. To make an iPhone using ENIAC-sized transistors you'd probably fill a building, or city block, or even more. Neurons, on the other hand, are pretty much the same size in all animals. So brain size, neuron count, and neuron interconnectivity, all correlate with mental complexity.
- brudgers 5y agoCircuit boards are pretty much the same thickness for devices of vastly different computational capability. Similarly chips of similar dimensions can vary greatly in power. But more tellingly, circuit boards with fewer chips are often more sophisticated than bigger boards with more chips. There is no guarantee that number of neurons is a meaningful way of estimating computational power…a ziplock full of neurons doesn’t show much intelligence.
- WalterBright 5y ago> I don’t think he could have done that alone. There's a dire wolf skeleton in the La Brea Tar Pits Museum that shows a healed broken leg. The assumption is the other wolves must have cared for it.
- sunstone 5y agoTribes.
- sunstone 5y agoOk, actually fire.
- yencabulator 5y agoThis part makes no sense: """But if you’re a biped, you can’t just put a baby on your back. The baby’s going to slide right off. Baby chimpanzees and baboons cling to the fronts or wide backs of their mothers. Being upright means we have to physically carry our kids.""" So, hanging "from the ceiling" under the knuckle-walking mom's belly is somehow easier for the baby?