What Made Early Humans Smart
nautil.us
nautil.us
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?)
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.
That being said I believe the freeing of the hands was probably crucial to brain development. The trade-off of sending so much energy to the brain became worth it once you had the physical means to build tools and such.
This is still an active area of research
https://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-limits-a...
Throwing is a very valuable hunting skill, since unlike melee it does not place the hunter at direct risk of injury by the prey.
Birds (Eagles) are much better at targeting animals, and they are the projectile. And our sight compares really badly to other hunting animals.
My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river)
> 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.
Social structure is not unique to humans. Other animals have it and have complex ones too (like birds who mate for life!). Some animals are self-aware and might be even conscious.
Foragers are the vast majority of human history and they're just as capable of weighing long-term risks as you or I. It would also be incorrect to say that all agriculture originated around river valleys. Mexico and New Guinea are both counterexamples.
Throwing accurately might seem complex, but chimps have been recorded throwing rocks at targets and once the basics are down being slightly better at throwing probably doesn’t add much difficulty.
So, while I don’t have exact measurements on hand ~50ms is good enough for an internet comment.
In the end that kind of precision is extremely easy for nervous systems as the lag just gets built in. Which is how hummingbird hearts can do 21 beats per second with different timings between each of the 4 chambers at sub 1ms precision.
I think most runners, walkers, hikers, and travelers would say they do quite a lot of thinking while they’re moving.
Even bending down and pretending to pick up something from the ground will often work.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774752/
https://www.wired.com/2013/09/tools-and-language/
The structure of steps in a process necessitated structured grammar and thought. US philosopher Daniel Dennett is a proponent of language-as-debugging. Our rational faculty was an emergent property of evaluating statements. Errors provoke laughter as a debugging response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor#Detection_of...
Notable comedian George Carlin demonstrated a real genius for debugging language. His piece about the progression from "shell-shock" to PTSD is a good example.
Think about the internal focus you have when doing something carefully and how you talk yourself through it, from carpentry to skiing.
Using the same verbalizations, when showing someone else the same thing, evolves to language.
> 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
But plenty of people in premodern times survived leg fractures, though often at a cost of a lifelong limp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"""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?
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.
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.
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
They make vocal calls and signals but they haven't evolved a general-purpose language. Presumably they could have. But they haven't.
Whereas humans did. Language is a huge meme transmission booster and we evolved other boosters such as large sclera so you tell roughly where someone is looking.
I don't know why elephants haven't gone that way. Perhaps because their adaptive niche and lifestyle isn't so dependent on memes to start with. Whereas our ancestors were relatively helpless, physically speaking, and thus utterly dependent on their memes both for survival as well as for social position. Which placed strong survival and sexual selection pressures for improved meme transmission and storage.
People who behaved or even dressed differently were looked down upon by their tribes or social groups and thus were less likely or simply unable to access food and mates. So, you're right, there is a connection between social hierarchy and intelligence. But fundamentally it's to do with memes (see David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, Chapters 15-16).
An interesting FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) subculture consciously eschews such markers, and even advocates deliberately signaling the opposite. I'm beginning to wonder if developed world, middle-to-upper class long-term mate selection criteria are adding increasingly subtle, sophisticated cues on top of the more conventional ornamentally-oriented signals, and that is acting as another selection pressure for intelligence. For all the Instagram dreck that floats out there, I see an astonishing number of Zoomers and Millenials who, compared to previous generations, are far more financially sophisticated and aware of cognitive biases used to sell to them, and are assiduously avoiding adopting conventional success markers.
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)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27722154
What matters is just grabbing some pitchforks and cancelling someone.
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.
Ugh. These people actively look for “racism” in everything and scream for attention/approval from the woke mob when they think they’ve found it.
> Any positive depiction
That's not 'someone'.
1. Amount of environmental sunlight (latitude).
2. Amount of circumstantial exposure to sunlight (lifestyle).
If the assumption is that early humans have lived more outdoors than sitting in caves all day like the modern human does in practice, then yes they'll have darker skin overall.
Is it racist to just state basic facts, or should we brainwash everything to be uniform and average across time and space?
We do not really know how dark or light early hominids were.
There are dietary sources of Vitamin D and it's produced via Sun exposure. Folate levels are reduced by sunlight exposure. And there are dietary sources. So the two are in conflict vis sun exposure.
Because of the mild climate you can grow grains in northern Europe. That diet is low in Vitamin D and high in folatess. As a result Northern Europeans rapidly lost the ability to produce melanin over the last 5000 years.
On the other hand there are no black skinned native Americans because the founding population had already lost some of the genes needed.