Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables | Hacker News Reader

Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables

bbc.co.uk

49 pointsnice120 comments

It is barely alluded to in the article but the reason this is significant is that humans are the only animals that can make fire and cook their food. This may change the evolutionary timeline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

The finding about Neanderthals is not at all unexpected based on lines of research more than a decade old (at least). It has been known for some time that hominin species who predated Homo sapiens made fires and cooked food. This information is well incorporated in the current evolutionary timeline.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/invention-of-c...

Cooking was essential in the development of the ancestral line leading to Homo sapiens (for what it allowed in changes in body structure) but it is not a defining characteristic of the difference between species Homo sapiens and earlier species or contemporary species in the genus.

Many people mistakenly believe that the defining characteristic of humanity is the ability to use tools. More fundamentally it is technology, the ability to learn and to teach and to create new tools which makes humans special. And thus the ability to surpass genetic evolution via technological evolution.

The fundamental difference between humans and animals is the ability to export and maintain state across generations in a Turing-complete language. This allows knowledge to be built upon up to arbitrary levels of abstraction. Language is not just a communication tool, it's a meta-tool that defines the human being. We don't know if the Neanderthal had this ability, but if it did, it was obviously less adept at it.

I've never heard human learning expressed this way. Can you please write up more of your thoughts about this?

Brief State Machine anecdote: Any automated door that swings out has a FSM or circuit equivalent that blocks swinging out if someone is standing on the pressure pad of the outside portion. We used to have fun blocking in friends this way...

I'm not sure about the specifics of what iwwr is thinking, but basically I think he means that humans have the ability to create and pass on knowledge (state) from one generation to the next. Because each generation only has to build off of the knowledge of previous ones there is no set limit to how much humans as a whole can know.

Technically, this ability isn't unique to humans alone. Other species, such as dolphins and chimpanzees, are also able to create and pass on knowledge. For example, certain dolphins around Florida have developed a strategy of catching fish by first encircling areas of water by kicked up sand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArsoMcVi5MM&feature=playe... This is purely a learned behavior and has to be taught to offspring.

Dolphins or apes may have a recognizable culture, but they don't have a Turing-complete language. This is the main distinction.

And if it didn't, then they definitely didn't have to listen to their kids complaining about eating vegetables!

Chimps have done most of that with their termite sticks. A Japanese snow macaque named Imo invented a new piece of technology when she discovered, and taught others, how to wash sweet potatoes in salt water to get the sand off.

What humans do that is unique is use language to pass on complex pieces of information. Though there was an African grey parrot named Alex who was plenty capable... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6KvPN_Wt8I

This was see-and-do behavior, but a chimp won't be able to describe in language the act of washing a potato. A chimp who never watched another chimp do something can't then replicate that behavior.

Language is more than words. Much more.

Other than words, what are you using to express that sentiment?

Don't confuse a bare encoding of words with language.

Gesture, timing, posture, expression can change everything.

Pedant: "A double negative can mean the positive. But a double positive never means the negative"

Smartass: "Yeah, right"

I don't disagree with that, but I don't think it's relevant. We can encode purely in words the instructions for washing a potato. Monkeys can't.

We can also build lasers (some of us anyway), conceive of social security, vote, believe in money, trust the post office.

When determining what is fundamental to being human, these peripheral, incidental things don't get to the core of the matter.

I'm not sure that the ability to encode arbitrary information is peripheral in the same way that lasers and welfare are.

Sure, but you haven't hit bottom yet. Why can we encode arbitrary information? How does it help us? Where does the ability live? What is it connected to, and where did it come from?

People are missing the point of this article. It's not that they used fire, it's that Neanderthals used it to cook vegetables when previously we thought they just ate meat.

Homo Erectus (1.9MM - 0.1MM yeas ago) probably controlled fire (perhaps they can not make a new fire, but they probably can keep it burning). I am not sure if there is any evidence that they cooked with it, but when you have a fireplace for one million year ... more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Sociality )

And Homo Neanderthalensis probably can have invited you to a barbeque :) .

(Ancestral) Human history goes all the way back for over a million years. If the year of my birth was generated with a random number between 2 million B.C and 2010 AD there is only a one in two hundred thousandth chance of landing in the past ten years... You could've taken off the last 2010 years and you wouldn't have changed the range much.

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