******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times Op-Ed, Sept. 15 2015
Who Apes Whom?
By FRANS de WAAL
ATLANTA — WHEN I learned last week about the discovery of an early human
relative deep in a cave in South Africa, I had many questions.
Obviously, they had dug up a fellow primate, but of what kind?
The fabulous find, named Homo naledi, has rightly been celebrated for
both the number of fossils and their completeness. It has
australopithecine-like hips and an ape-size brain, yet its feet and
teeth are typical of the genus Homo.
The mixed features of these prehistoric remains upset the received human
origin story, according to which bipedalism ushered in technology,
dietary change and high intelligence. Part of the new species’ physique
lags behind this scenario, while another part is ahead. It is aptly
called a mosaic species.
We like the new better than the old, though, and treat every fossil as
if it must fit somewhere on a timeline leading to the crown of creation.
Chris Stringer, a prominent British paleoanthropologist who was not
involved in the study, told BBC News: “What we are seeing is more and
more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting
with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types
of humanlike creatures originating in parallel in different parts of
Africa.”
This represents a shockingly teleological view, as if natural selection
is seeking certain outcomes, which it is not. It doesn’t do so any more
than a river seeks to reach the ocean.
News reports spoke of a “new ancestor,” even a “new human species,”
assuming a ladder heading our way, whereas what we are actually facing
when we investigate our ancestry is a tangle of branches. There is no
good reason to put Homo naledi on the branch that produced us. Nor does
this make the discovery any less interesting.
Every species in our lineage tells us something about ourselves, because
the hominoids (humans, apes and everything in between) are genetically
extremely tight. We have had far less time to diverge than the members
of many other animal families, like the equids (horses, zebras, donkeys)
or canids (wolves, dogs, jackals). If it hadn’t been for the human ego,
taxonomists would long ago have squeezed all hominoids into a single genus.
The standard story is that our ancestors first left the apes behind to
become australopithecines, which grew more sophisticated and brainier to
become us. But what if these stages were genetically mixed up? Some
scientists have claimed early hybridization between human and ape DNA.
Did our ancestors, after having split off, keep returning to the apes in
the same way that today’s grizzlies and polar bears still interbreed
occasionally?
Instead of looking forward to a glorious future, our lineage may have
remained addicted to the hairy embrace of its progenitors. Other
scientists, however, keep sex out of it and speak of incomplete lineage
separation. Either way, our heritages are closely intertwined.
The problem is that we keep assuming that there is a point at which we
became human. This is about as unlikely as there being a precise
wavelength at which the color spectrum turns from orange into red. The
typical proposition of how this happened is that of a mental
breakthrough — a miraculous spark — that made us radically different.
But if we have learned anything from more than 50 years of research on
chimpanzees and other intelligent animals, it is that the wall between
human and animal cognition is like a Swiss cheese.
Apart from our language capacity, no uniqueness claim has survived
unmodified for more than a decade since it was made. You name it — tool
use, tool making, culture, food sharing, theory of mind, planning,
empathy, inferential reasoning — it has all been observed in wild
primates or, better yet, many of these capacities have been demonstrated
in carefully controlled experiments.
We know, for example, that apes plan ahead. They carry tools over long
distances to places where they use them, sometimes up to five different
sticks and twigs to raid a bee nest or probe for underground ants. In
the lab, they fabricate tools in anticipation of future use. Animals
think without words, as do we most of the time.
Undeterred by Homo naledi’s relatively small brain, however, the
research team sought to stress its humanity by pointing at the bodies in
the cave. But if taking this tack implies that only humans mourn their
dead, the distinction with apes is being drawn far too sharply.
Apes appear to be deeply affected by the loss of others to the point of
going totally silent, seeking comfort from bystanders and going into a
funk during which they don’t eat for days. They may not inter their
dead, but they do seem to understand death’s irreversibility. After
having stared for a long time at a lifeless companion — sometimes
grooming or trying to revive him or her — apes move on.
Since they never stay in one place for long, they have no reason to
cover or bury a corpse. Were they to live in a cave or settlement,
however, they might notice that carrion attracts scavengers, some of
which are formidable predators, like hyenas. It would absolutely not
exceed the ape’s mental capacity to solve this problem by either
covering odorous corpses or moving them out of the way.
The suggestion by some scholars that this requires belief in an
afterlife is pure speculation. We simply don’t know if Homo naledi
buried corpses with care and concern or unceremoniously dumped them into
a faraway cave to get rid of them.
It is an odd coincidence that “naledi” is an anagram of “denial.” We are
trying way too hard to deny that we are modified apes. The discovery of
these fossils is a major paleontological breakthrough. Why not seize
this moment to overcome our anthropocentrism and recognize the fuzziness
of the distinctions within our extended family? We are one rich
collection of mosaics, not only genetically and anatomically, but also
mentally.
Frans de Waal, a primatologist and professor of psychology at Emory
University, is the author of the forthcoming book “Are We Smart Enough
to Know How Smart Animals Are?”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com