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Were small-brained early humans intelligent? Row erupts over scientists’ claim
- mellosouls 3y agoDiscussion here a month ago on one of the contested papers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36344397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36344397
- sidlls 3y agoIs this article journalistic dramatization or do we have actual PIs in a field saying nonsense like "be careful what you wish for?" Was that taken out of context somehow? Maybe it's just the difference between physics and this field, but I'd never dare to respond to "your evidence is insufficient, and there seem to be problems with your methodology" with a statement like, "oh yeah? I'll show you evidence, be careful what you wish for." As if the ask is somehow unreasonable or unprecendented.
- thevagrant 3y agoI agree, it does seem like an arrogant response. The kind that comes from one who drinks the kool-aid. Possibly they have more evidence and findings to be published?
- kergonath 3y agoIt’s also very childish. As if not talking about something would make it not happening.
- Mistletoe 3y agoWhen I read that he said that and that he had a Netflix show about this my spidey senses were raised.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y ago"Be careful what you wish for" is a bizarre response. The reviewers asked for more evidence. The authors say they will provide more evidence. Great, that's exactly what the reviewers want. "Be careful what you wish for" implies that getting more evidence would somehow be a bad thing.
- ImAnAmateur 3y agoAt first I was really wowed by this. But when I learned that another inteligent human species was around (I can't recall if that was specifically Homo Sapiens or another.) it suddenly felt far too believable that this could have been done by someone else. The find is real and they have great footage of it, but for their presentation to ignore evidence against them and/or alternate explanations is disappointing.
- rolph 3y agoalternate explanations, such as these were domesticated pets, cherished by thier owners and given full respects after death.
- lumost 3y agoA good hypothesis to test, however why wouldn’t we observe human burials in the same (massive) cave system? It would seem odd to develop a ritualistic burial for pets and skip the burial for humans. Reaching the burial spot is extremely difficult for human bodies.
- rolph 3y agowe currently separate pets from humans, we know they are different than us, but respect the undefinable qualia. difficult to reach isnt impossible. i think we would need to see evidence of parallel existence of feral, and domestic populations.
- dopu 3y agoThe relevant peer-reviewed preprint, from eLife [0]. It is worth reading the peer reviews (spoiler: they're brutal) [1]. [0]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106 https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106 [1]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106/reviews#tab-content https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106/reviews#t...
- pmckenna 3y agoAppreciate the note to check peer reviews, it certainly does cast these findings in a new light.
- contravariant 3y ago> An analysis also needs to start by testing a null hypothesis, not deciding on the conclusion and setting out to "prove" it. > I do not think that in its present form, the evidence presented in this study is as robust as it should be. > the manuscript in its current condition is deemed incomplete and inadequate, and should not be viewed as finalized scholarship. I mean they sound polite, but if you strip back the polite language and understatements they're pretty much calling the authors quacks.
- koheripbal 3y agoWhich is fair. Scratch marks around the cave were said to be attempts at art. The fact that the bones were in a cave made them conclude that they were "burying" their dead rather than the more plausible conclusion that they died in the cave as a result of some water or gas flooding. The original paper is just garbage
- zeroCalories 3y agoTried reading the paper and it was surprisingly hard to understand, probably because I don't know anything about the field. That said, I think the critiques make sense. Still, both the peer review and the response in the articles seem so extreme, I wonder if there is something else going on here. Is there some political or ideological divide in this field?
- 3y ago
- SCAQTony 3y agoI think parrots, crows and Octopus have demonstrated a small brain can still create and execute intelligent ideas. YMMV
- pierat 3y agoTo be fair, I've seen large brained mammals exhibit (homo walmartus) completely inane and stupid behavior. I have a feeling many others here have also witnessed those actions in their natural environment.
- kristopolous 3y agoIt honestly astonishes me that some people still think "more brain = more smart" or a similar reductionist belief. It's so Victorian - like believing human flight will happen by furtively flapping ones arms connected to giant canvas wings.
- scythe 3y agoI mean, that would be possible, if our shoulder muscles were about ten times as strong as they are, and we built strong enough wings (about ten meters long!). But what's the analogous component for the shoulder muscles in operating a brain?
- kristopolous 3y agoThe point was that systems are multi-faceted, complicated, nuanced, and work by mechanisms and principles that are not obvious. Experts have a really hard time nailing down a working definition of intelligence to begin with, even when given thousands of pages to describe it - the idea that such an elusive thing is simply, directly correlated to the size of an object, is frankly, fairly unbelievable. It used to be used all the time. For instance, to defend the idea that women and asians weren't as intelligent as anglo saxons because they were smaller in stature. There's plenty of other ludicrous nonsense claims that were made based on this supposed principle. We all agree that the conclusions are nonsense but somehow we hold on to the premise.
- nemo44x 3y ago> The Rising Cave research is not just the work of one or two scientists but is backed by dozens of researchers. “Their scientific opinions should not be outweighed by two or three or four reviewers. That is not the way it works,” Berger said. Actually yes it is the way it works. If a single person has a worthy conflicting opinion or evidence or skepticism it very well can bring the whole thing down. Science is not a democratic exercise. It’s the search for truth and any claim to truth that can’t stand up to scrutiny isn’t worth a dime even if 99% of scientists want it to be true.
- elif 3y agoHuman understanding of consciousness/intelligence is so full of bias due to all of our scientific knowledge being derived from human consciousness. We have set an impossible bar for animal and AI intelligence not on objective ontological premises, but largely on human primacy hubris. Hubris which considers the concentration and usurpation of resources more intelligent than the communal or even universal or natural distribution. Hubris which considers survival at all costs more intelligent than self sacrifice for the collective. Hubris which says, yeah, chimps can effortlessly remember way longer sequences than humans, but is that useful memory? Afterall they haven't tricked themselves into spending most of their waking hours staring at a blinking box.
- osigurdson 3y agoThe problem is, self sacrifice for the "collective" is usually self sacrifice for some dude who has all of the power.
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y agoFarming and settling were big mistakes. Should have killed the first person who planted stuff.
- kergonath 3y agoI don’t think it is a really useful take. Nobody is going to pass on a food source, particularly when there is such pressure as for hunters-gatherers. Also, it was not some brutal change from nomadic hunters to sedentary farmers. Each step was itself a small evolution (like “it’s funny, the seeds we threw away last year gave some useful plants” to “let’s throw away seeds on purpose” to “these seeds are more likely to be useful if we put them in specific locations”, etc). So there was not really a “first person who planted stuff”. You need to compare the situation across centuries or millennia to really see the large changes, and humans without a writing system and some kind of stable authority to keep records are not really equipped for that. Now, it’s impossible to voluntarily stop using a system without which most of humanity would starve. You’re again up against self preservation and each time humans will choose a solution that prevents them from dying. So yeah, you can disapprove but it’s all academical as it was more or less bound to happen.
- slackfan 3y agoIt sure aint no corvid court
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIt is not easy to do this research, or research on animal intelligence, without pissing on the Third Rail of Race and Intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
- DropInIn 3y agoWell at some point in our evolution we had to be less intelligent, or were arguing every primate and in fact every species is equal to humans, no? And if so.... well our food system is evil beyond measure....
- jb1991 3y agoWhy is it so hard to believe that early humans possess these qualities? After all, nonhuman animals like elephants possess many of the qualities we assume to be unique to human spirituality, like making long journeys to remember and mourn their dead even years after the fact. Or anyone who has witnessed the astounding behavior that dogs are capable of would certainly consider them intelligent in many of the same ways. So why can’t a primitive human also demonstrate these qualities?
- Ozzie_osman 3y agoMy take on this is that the uproar is less about the conclusion and more about the way the conclusion was reached.
- rramadass 3y agoRight!
- kaycebasques 3y agoThe evidence does indeed seem quite flimsy for such grand conclusions: > It was unclear how their remains got deep into the cave system, however. There were no signs that predatorsbrought them into the chamber or that underground streams swept them there. So Berger’s team concluded that the bones had been deliberately placed
- baja_blast 3y agoI watched the documentary on Netflix the narrow passageway that the bodies were found require climbing up an incline before reaching the chute. Also one of the children had a tool placed in it's hand. The idea that small brains can not be intelligent is wrong, how the brain is connected and shaped determines intelligence to a higher degree. Neanderthals had larger brain masses than modern humans but were less intelligent. And look at Bird brains have more than twice the neurons per unit mass as mammals making parrots/crows have the same number of neurons of as primates despite being much smaller and highly concentrated in the forebrain which is why they are able to make compound tools despite not having hands and more complex communication and social structures.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago"Large brains mean intelligence" is one of those ideas from the Eugenics-and-phrenology era of science that we just can't seem to get rid of. So if their brains are, you know, only eleventy times the size of a crows, how could they possibly have mastered the supreme technology of "broken sharp rocks" or "sometimes you can keep a fire going from embers and use it to burn shit"? Our best geniuses with IQs of 140+ can barely manage those tricks. The assumption should be, going forward, that if you deem them closely enough related to our own species that you're putting them in the same genus, they were probably at least as intelligent as the bottom quintile of H. sapiens, with exceptional individuals up above that. Anything else is just bizarre prejudice.
- kazinator 3y agoTwo-year-olds qualify as early small-brained-humans; many can talk and count. The relationship between brain size and intelligence it tenuous. The human brain is not the largest. The smallest (known) woman in the world, Jyoti Amge, isn't noted for any intellectual disability. Her head is obviously tiny compared to the average adult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyoti_Amge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyoti_Amge
- rich_sasha 3y agoI started watching this documentary. First 5 minutes is mind-blowing, stating that they found deliberate burials in these inaccessible caves. Thereafter, it's just speculation. "We can imagine h. naledi has fire since other early humans did". They start a small fire in the cave to show what it may have looked like. Plenty of animations of what the scientists imagine may have happened there. Speculation how most societies have some kind of religious or spiritual leader so h. naledi, perhaps, definitely had one too. The dark spots which were definitely maybe fire were also there. Even for popular science it felt very flakey.
- throwawaycities 3y agoThe documentary felt a bit staged & had that modern anti-mainstream academia vibe (i.e. our findings are so revolutionary they rewrite history and so we wish they weren’t so revolutionary because we will not be taken serious and will become the enemy of mainstream science). That said, unless the site is somehow staged or wildly misinterpreted, I think there is more evidence of potential use of fire than: "We can imagine h. naledi has fire since other early humans did". Even without finding evidence of fire in the cave, assuming the body was intentionally placed (big assumption) light would have been required to access that part of the cave. The only alternatives I can think of are the species had more sensitive optics than modern human enabling them to see in a dark cave, or much more likely the body wasn’t placed there as part of a burial ritual but died down there. Part of the problem is, if the evidence pointed to the later, they give off the vibe they would have created another spectacular narrative like this was evidence of an early legal system where someone was tried of a crime and sentenced to confinement in the cave, the “tool” and scratches in the cave wall being the first evidence of an attempted jail escape, demonstrating early hominids desire to be “free” just like modern humans.
- rozab 3y agoLight could have been provided by phosphorescent organisms in the caves
- louky 3y agodetermining if "dark spots" are actually a hearth is a known process, nobody ran the chemical composition before publishing? dark spots indeed.
- bigbacaloa 3y agoIt is a good rule of thumb to have serious doubts about any science reported in mia stream media. Serious scientists don't promote their research in the media that way.