No other species has cognitive powers as sophisticated as ours; no other has a language or culture as complex as ours. There’s a paradox at the heart of our existence: we are simultaneously animals and extraordinary among animals. (Location 20)
scientists believed we were the only animals to use tools. Now we know that’s not true. Chimpanzees, for example, use sticks to hunt termites. Orangutans use them to fish rivers, and gorillas use them to test the depths of waters they need to ford. (Location 24)
only 1 percent of all species use them. Technology, in other words, is relatively rare . And no other animal’s technologies are nearly as complex as ours. That’s partly because few other animals have brains as big as ours. But it’s also because no other animal is as dexterous as we are. (Location 27)
This is common practice among the bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia. These creative tool users nestle their beaks into living sea sponges before foraging the craggy sea floor. The sponge acts as a sort of nose cap, protecting the dolphins’beaks from all the scratchy nooks and crannies where they go looking for food –one creature using a second to eat a third. But what these dolphins do with the sponge is only half the story. Just as important is how they learn to do it. Sponging isn’t encoded in dolphin DNA; it’s a learned skill. More specifically, it’s something mothers teach their daughters. This is a process scientists refer to as cultural transmission. The key message here is: Very few animals acquire skills through both biological and cultural transmission. (Location 33)
In 2013, researchers in Seattle, Washington, conditioned a group of crows to recognize one face mask as threatening and another face mask as benign. Five years later, they approached the same birds, sometimes wearing one mask, sometimes the other. The response was impressive: the crows fled from the dangerous mask and ignored the neutral one. Apparently, they’d remembered. But that’s not the remarkable part. What’s fascinating is that the new birds in the group –that is, the offspring that had been born in the intervening years –responded the same way. They seemed, in other words, to have learned from their elders how to assess the threat level of human faces. Like the dolphin mothers teaching their daughters how to sponge, or human caregivers teaching children how to speak, the crow parents had passed down the skill of (Location 40)
It’s such a powerful force that it has even changed our genes. The classic example is our ability to process milk, something we couldn’t do for most of human history. About 7,000 years ago, shortly after we began husbanding animals, something changed. A mutation developed in our genetic code that gave us the ability to drink milk into adulthood. (Location 57)
While humans have been farming for the last 12,000 years, leaf-cutter ants have been at it for 60 million! You’ve probably seen them in documentaries, lugging around torn-up bits of leaves. Contrary to popular belief, those leaves are not for eating. Instead, the ants feed them to a fungus they cultivate in their nests, one that’s necessary for their survival. (Location 62)
It took some time for language to develop after humans gained the biological ability to speak. About 130,000 years. What changed during that period wasn’t our DNA, but our culture. And it didn’t stop with language. Over time, our grasp of symbolism expanded even further, from the ability to understand words to the ability to create art. (Location 122)
Behavioral modernity in humans is marked by imagination, abstract thinking, and the ability to make art. Homo sapiens reached full behavioral modernity about 40,000 years ago. That’s the moment we became the humans we are today. It’s the moment we started carving figurines and the moment we started painting cave walls. It’s the moment we started crafting decorative jewelry and the moment we began sculpting fantastical creatures out of ivory and wood. (Location 125)
Löwenmensch, or Lion Man – a chimera carved from the ivory tusk of a wooly mammoth. It is an extraordinary work of art, reflecting not only finger dexterity and fine motor control, but foresight in selecting the right bone and making a plan to carve the figure. It suggests an understanding of nature and, above all, an ability to imagine a thing that does not exist – a make-believe creature with the body of a human and the head of a cave lion. It is, in short, the product of a sophisticated mind. (Location 129)
