Humans less superior than we think...

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Humans less superior than we think...

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The closer we look, the less superior humans are...

By Anjana Ahuja

Humans can no longer claim our position is earned through a cultural sensibility, says Anjana Ahuja

You could describe homo sapiens as the last man standing. Our species is the sole survivor among a clutch of humanlike, or hominin, species that have stalked the planet in the past 7m years.

The Neanderthals ran us a close second, becoming extinct only 30,000 years ago and surrendering total dominion to modern man. They are caricatured as brutish and dim-witted.

Yet carvings discovered in a Gibraltar cave suggest that homo neanderthalensis might have possessed the capacity for abstract thought. The appearance of art in the Neanderthal cultural oeuvre, along with evidence that they used feathers for adornment and buried their dead, is forcing a significant reappraisal of our supposedly intellectually inferior evolutionary cousins.

Had a Neanderthal female been invited to view this particular etching, it is unclear whether she would have been impressed. The engraving looks a bit like a noughts-and-crosses grid – or, to the Twitter-savvy, the world’s oldest hashtag.

The geometric pattern was spied beneath a 39,000-year-old layer of sediment; the same site yielded nearly 300 tools fashioned in the Neanderthal style, suggesting that this masterpiece was not of modern man’s making. The researchers who studied it, and who published an analysis last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, insist the carving is not accidental nor the byproduct of utilitarian behaviour, such as cutting meat. It might have been a map; the chamber changes direction nearby.

Whether the prehistoric artist was more of a Mercator than a Matisse matters not a jot. It is the deliberate intention to create a lasting symbolic expression, designed to be seen and interpreted by others, that so fascinates. As the scientists write: “The production of purposely made painted or engraved designs on cave walls is recognised as a major cognitive step in human evolution, considered exclusive to modern humans.”

So humans can no longer claim that our privileged position as the world’s dominant species is earned through a unique cultural sensibility, expressed in art, science and philosophy. We forfeited the monopoly on other capacities long ago – dolphins have rudimentary language, crows can count and last week it was also revealed that cockatoos can teach others how to make and use tools.

If technical mastery is not ours alone, then surely it is as a social species that we reign supreme? Observations of chimpanzee groups suggest otherwise; complex behaviour such as altruism, reciprocity and Machiavellian manoeuvring are routinely observed in our closest relatives.

Their emotional spectrum – happiness, sadness, pride, anger, revenge – mirrors ours. Some of them plan for the future, as was discovered when a zoo-dwelling chimp in Sweden was found hoarding stones in the morning to hurl at visitors in the afternoon.

The more closely scientists look at other species, both extant and extinct, the less remarkable our own becomes. Nearly everything we once thought made us human, does not. This sobering message is reflected in Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which provocatively challenges the concept of human uniqueness. Homo sapiens is unique only in the literal sense that every other member of the genus Homo died out. Now that we know Neanderthals, first identified as early humans from bones found in Germany’s Neander valley in 1856, were clever and cultured, we must include the possibility of human malevolence in any explanation of their disappearance.

Still, Neanderthal genes linger on today, a legacy of sexual encounters between our direct ancestors, who were moving out of Africa, and the Neanderthals they encountered in Eurasia (such interbreeding did not happen in Africa, which is why the genomes of indigenous Africans are Neanderthal-free). These interloper genes mostly produce keratin, of which skin, nails and hair are made; they probably conferred a survival advantage to our shivering, out-of-Africa ancestors.

So, as modern humans evolved, we had plenty of company. Which leaves us with an enigma: how did homo sapiens become the most successful hominin species ever?

This has been attributed to our brains, which ballooned a few hundred thousand years ago – possibly in response to climatic change – and allowed us to live in ever-bigger societies. In the coming centuries, those brains may allow us to do something that no other species has done: transcend nature and write our own evolutionary future, using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to shape our minds and bodies.

We will never know whether Neanderthals, our archaic cousins, could have accomplished the same.

Homo sapiens might indeed be something special. Or, to use the phrase of writer and comedian Chris Addison, maybe we are simply the ape that got lucky.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/519b6a3c-3439-11e4-b81c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3ClkXIqMO