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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> featuring a lifelike facial expression

Notice that, although it was a completely alien culture in a very far away time, before agriculture and writing, we still know what a lifelike facial expression looks like.

Many things vary from culture to culture. Facial expressions, at least many of them, are consistent across humanity. If someone stubs their toe or tastes something delicious, you'll know without words.

Look up 'human universals' in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and in other fields. Donald Brown (see below) gives some opinionated background here, including a literature review (of Brown's own writings, and more):

https://literary-universals.uconn.edu/2017/06/25/human-unive...

The seminal book is Human Universals by Donald Brown:

https://archive.org/details/humanuniversals0000brow/

(I don't know how fully accepted it is; there seems to be at least some disupte over Brown's theories.)

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How many of these universals are shared with other mammals (especially apes)?

I don't think any other species has the set of facial muscles humans do. Cats seem inscrutable because they have very few; dogs seem more understandable because they can move their eyebrows.

I think the non-human animal with the most facial expressions is the chimpanzee, but even then it is much less expressive than a human in this regard.

Various mammals have (non-facial) macroexpression somewhat similar to humans, such as excitement, curiosity and fear. Many non-mammals such as birds, fish, and some reptiles can express fear to some extent.

I think we share a very similar disgust response to other primates primarily and some other mammals as well including dogs.

Fear and anger on the face of a human and a wolf are very similar. Include body language in general and the similarities expand. If a mammal drops its head, widens its eyes and its ears pull back (yes humans do that too), its time to look for escape, or a weapon.

I don't think cat faces are all that much less expressive than dog faces. They have a wide variety of facial expressions, including surprise, irritation/anger, happiness, playfulness, anxiety/fear, disgust, and so on - and that's not including at cat body language, especially tail movements.

Our cat has perfected the guilt-tripping innocent stare. She stands beside her food bowl looking almost blank. This somehow communicates a combination of infinite sadness and disappointment, blended with child-like hopefulness.

It's very effective.

I suspect the most effective for pets is a perfect blank slate onto which the owner can project whatever they want.

have you ever owned and been inseparable from a pet? you absolutely can interpret their moods and you can find papers on it if you like, they do have expressions and body language. It may not be the same as humans necessarily but it is there if you care to research it.

Once you know cats (or probably any other advanced animal) you can read their emotions like a book. Lots of people don't know how to read cats though.

> Cats seem inscrutable because they have very few; dogs seem more understandable because they can move their eyebrows.

What's wild is that we're apparently directly responsible for the eyebrow thing in dogs. As in we literally bred the feature into them.

- https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1820653116

- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dogs-eyeb...

- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/dogs-eyebrows-evo...

As someone who spends a lot of time closely with dogs, and recently raised a little of 6 spaniels - dogs "talk" via their facial expressions and can make sounds beyond just barks.

My pet theory is that women bonded with dogs first through an ability to have a mutual understanding with non-verbal communication, and we most likely observed them and could "talk" to them in their own ways - something that has been lost as we turned dogs from inter-species partners to enslaved commodities.

We're slowly starting to rediscover it.

Why women specifically? Or did you mean humans?

Probably extrapolating from the debunked pseudoscience of "women were gatherers, men were hunters", which fuels 90% of present evopsych nonsense.

For those unaware: prehistorical "hunter-gatherer" societies likely did not have strong divisions of labor and there is no evidence to suggest such a universal division across gender lines. Quite the opposite, actually. Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much and women in turn aren't inherently better at child rearing (which historically was a group activity shared by the entire tribe).

That isn’t debunked, how ridiculous. It’s true not all men were hunters, but that doesn’t mean that there was an equal share of women among the hunters. They travelled as a group and everyone gathered, but men went out to get the kill.

This is attested in the Neolithic records, I suppose?

Anyone making sweeping statements that applies to all of hunter gatherer society is almost certainly wrong about at least a few cultures. We’re talking 1-3 million years worth of human society and cultural evolution.

Anthropological studies of (some of the few remaining) contemporary hunter-gatherer societies don't show the presumed division of labor (or several other presumptions either, like pervasive hinger, or the amount of time spent on food collection) written up by 19th century European naturalists.

To be clear: most of the original claims about historical, prehistorical and then-contemporary indigeneous societies that have survived into the Western cultural canon were written by people who were used to extrapolating from their own cultural and social norms to others and judging everything on a scale that favored them and their social hierarchies. This also bled over into other natural sciences, which is for example why Darwin's theory of evolution was so disruptive.

Another example is how a lot of national mythologies were invented largely out of thin air in the 17th through 19th centuries, e.g. the Scottish clan system with its strict lineages and tartans. Most of the mythology around kilts is pure fabrication.

Even in economics this can be found with the common wisdom that money/currency was preceded by bartering, which we now know to be an oversimplification to the point of being wrong with in-group gift economies apparently having been far more common and bartering being part of diplomacy between separate groups rather than something you'd do with your neighbor.

Arguably this tendency even persisted to the point where the myth of an "alpha wolf" arose based on observations of wolves in captivity that was quickly dispelled after actually looking at wolves able to roam in their natural environment.

If you want to present the Victorian Age as the pinnacle of human development, of course you'll see the "uncivilised" natives as beneath you in every way and after hunting their prey animals for game and destroying their natural resources claim that starvation is just part of their natural experience rather than something you inflicted on them by taking away their livelihoods. Luckily most fields of study have moved away from this antiquated approach but sadly there's a growing call among certain people to "return to tradition" and dismiss this as "woke" nonsense.

> Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much

Even if women and men are equal in their hunting skill, it would still make evolutionary sense for women not to participate in the hunts. Hunting large mammals is dangerous, and men are more disposable than women. If a tribe loses most of its men, it can still survive since a single man can impregnate multiple women. Whereas if a tribe loses most of its women it is far more likely to die out.

That sounds weird. Do you think male humans don't communicate non-verbally?

As other commenters said, cats are far from inscrutable. But a lot of their expressiveness comes from their tail and ears, two modalities that humans happen to lack.

Some universals are certainly shared with other creatures, and it's not even restricted to mammals. From one article:

Take, for example, social facilitation or the notion that organisms tend to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of observers. Although disagreement about its innate origins exists (Do-Yeong and Junsu 2010), social facilitation has had supportive evidence in humans in a natural setting (Michaels et al. 1982), cockroaches (Zajonc et al. 1969), and macaques (Dindo et al. 2009).

(I don't know about facial expressions, though the fact that I don't know means little - I've just read a bit about it.)

There are other universals among non-human species, not shared with us, such as 100+ discovered for chimpanzees.

Source: Reza Ziai, "Cross-Cultural Universality". In Todd K Shackelford, Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford, eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer (2021)

Showing teeth, universally means aggression. In humans, it's for showing you are happy, or excited.

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