Compared to other species, what is our best developed feature?

The traits that make human beings unique

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We're all just animals… right? Not so fast, says Melissa Hogenboom, a few things make us different from any other species.

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." And then said the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who helped to invent the atomic bomb.

The ii bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 killed around 200,000 Japanese people. No other species has e'er wielded such power, and no species could.

The technology behind the atomic flop only exists because of a cooperative hive mind: hundreds of scientists and engineers working together. The same unique intelligence and cooperation besides underlies more than positive advances, such as modernistic medicine.

But is that all that defines us? In recent years, many traits once believed to be uniquely man, from morality to civilization, have been found in the fauna kingdom (meet office 1 in this ii-function series). So, what exactly makes the states special? The list might be smaller than it once was, simply at that place are some traits of ours that no other creature on Earth can friction match.

No brute can get shut to the devastation humans tin crusade (Credit: Thinkstock)

E'er since we learned to write, we have documented how special nosotros are. The philosopher Aristotle marked out our differences over 2,000 years agone. We are "rational animals" pursuing cognition for its own sake. We live past art and reasoning, he wrote.

Much of what he said stills stands. Yes, we meet the roots of many behaviours once considered uniquely human being in our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Simply nosotros are the only ones who peer into their earth and write books about it.

"Obviously we have similarities. We take similarities with everything else in nature; information technology would be amazing if nosotros didn't. Merely we've got to look at the differences," says Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, U.s.a..

To understand these differences, a good place to commencement is to look at how we got here. Why are we the only homo species still alive today whereas many of our early-human ancestors went extinct?

Neanderthals (left) didn't fare also as we did (Credit: SPL)

Humans and chimpanzees diverged from our common ancestor more than six one thousand thousand years ago. Fossil prove points to the ways which we have gradually inverse. Nosotros left the copse, started walking and began to alive in larger groups. And then our brains got bigger. Physically we are some other primate, simply our bigger brains are unusual.

We don't know exactly what led to our brains condign the size they are today, but we seem to owe our complex reasoning abilities to it.

It is probable that we have our large brain to thank that we exist at all. When we – Homo sapiens – first appeared about 200,000 years ago we weren't lone. We shared the planet at to the lowest degree four other upright cousins; Neanderthals, Denisovans, the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis and a mysterious fourth grouping.

The man brain is advantageously large (Credit: Thinkstock)

Evidence in the form of stone tools suggests that for nearly 100,000 years our technology was very like to the Neanderthals. But 80,000 years ago something changed.

"The Neanderthals had an impressive but basically routine material tape for a hominid. Once H. sapiens started behaving in a strange, [more sophisticated] way, all hell broke loose and change became the norm," Tattersall says.

We started to produce superior cultural and technological artefacts. Our stone tools became more than intricate. 1 study proposes that our technological innovation was key for our migration out of Africa. We started to assign symbolic values to objects such as geometrical designs on plaques and cave art.

Past contrast, at that place is picayune testify that any other hominins made any kind of art. One example, which was possibly fabricated by Neanderthals, was hailed as proof they had similar levels of abstract thought. Nevertheless, it is a simple etching and some question whether Neanderthals fabricated it at all. The symbols made by H. sapiens are conspicuously more advanced. We had also been around for 100,000 years before symbolic objects appeared and then what happened?

Nosotros had the capacity for fine art early in our history (Credit: SPL)

Somehow, our linguistic communication-learning abilities were gradually "switched on", Tattersall argues. In the same mode that early birds developed feathers before they could wing, we had the mental tools for complex language before we developed it.

We started with language-like symbols as a way to stand for the world effectually united states, he says. For example, before you say a word, your brain first has to have a symbolic representation of what it means. These mental symbols eventually led to language in all its complexity and the power to process information is the master reason we are the just hominin still alive, Tattersall argues.

Information technology's not clear exactly when oral communication evolved, or how. But it seems likely that it was partly driven by another uniquely human trait: our superior social skills.

Comparative studies between humans and chimps testify that while both volition cooperate, humans will e'er help more. Children seem to be innate helpers. They deed selflessly before social norms set in. Studies have shown that they volition spontaneously open doors for adults and pick upward "accidentally" dropped items. They will fifty-fifty end playing to assist. Their sense of fairness begins young. Even if an experiment is unfairly rigged so that one child receives more rewards, they will ensure a reward is fairly dissever.

Children evidence 'proactive' kindness, dissimilar our close relatives (Credit: Thinkstock)

We know that chimpanzees also piece of work together and share food in apparently unselfish ways. All the same, Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck constitute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says they will only cooperate if there is something in information technology for them.

"Humans do that too, but in improver they intendance about what their partner gets. In some experiments we have children as young equally xiv-18 months who seem to expect their partner to collaborate in certain ways and who share in means chimps don't."

Human children are less selective nearly who they share with. Chimpanzees though, largely merely share with close relatives, reciprocating partners or potential mates.

Felix Warneken of Harvard University in Cambridge, US, differentiates it like this. Children are "proactive", that is, they aid even when presented with only very subtle cues. Chimpanzees though, need more encouragement. They are "reactive": they volition hand over objects but only afterward some nudging.

Something must have happened in our development, Tomasello says, to make humans increasingly reliant on each other. Our brains needed fuel to get bigger and and then collaborative hunting may have played a key role in that. Our advanced teamwork may simply reverberate our long history of working together to become food.

Mind readers

The fact that our nearest relatives share too simply shows that it is an aboriginal trait. It was already present in the messy branch of early on humans that led to us, just none of these other species were as hyper cooperative every bit nosotros are today.

Humans accept a unique power to understand the beliefs of another person (Credit: Thinkstock)

These cooperative skills are closely tied to our incredible mind reading skills. Nosotros understand what others think based upon our knowledge of the world, just we also understand what others cannot know. The Sally-Anne task is a elementary way to examination immature children's power to do this.

The child witnesses a doll chosen Sally putting a marble in a handbasket in full view of another doll, Anne. When Emerge leaves the room, Anne moves the marble to a box. Sally then comes back, and the experimenter asks the child where Emerge will look for the marble.

Considering Emerge didn't meet Anne move the marble, she will have a "false belief" that the marble is still in the handbasket. Most four-twelvemonth-olds can grasp this, and say that Sally will look in the handbasket. They know the marble is non at that place, simply they as well understand that Sally is missing the key chip of data.

Chimps can knowingly deceive others, so they understand the world view of others to some extent. Nevertheless, they cannot sympathise others' faux beliefs. In a chimpanzee version of the Emerge-Anne task, researchers found that they sympathise when a competitor is ignorant of the location of food, but non when they have been misinformed. Tomasello puts information technology similar this: chimpanzees know what others know and what others can run across, but not what others believe.

This tells the states something profound about ourselves. While we are non the only creatures who understand that others take intentions and goals, "we are certainly unique in the level of abstractness with which we can reason about others' mental states", says Katja Karg, also of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Linguistic communication gave us the skill to exchange complex thoughts and ideas (Credit: iStock)

When you pull together our unparalleled linguistic communication skills, our ability to infer others' mental states and our instinct for cooperation, you have something unprecedented. Us.

But await effectually you lot, Tomasello says, "we're chatting and doing an interview, they (chimps) are not."

Nosotros take our advanced linguistic communication skills to thank for that. Nosotros may encounter testify of bones linguistic abilities in chimpanzees, only we are the only ones writing things downwards.

Nosotros tell stories, we dream, we imagine things nigh ourselves and others and we spend a great bargain of time thinking about the future and analysing the by.

In that location's more to it, Thomas Suddendorf, an evolutionary psychologist at the Academy of Queensland in Australia is cracking to point out. Nosotros accept a key urge to link our minds together. "This allows us to take advantage of others' experiences, reflections and imaginings to prudently guide our own behaviour.

"We link our scenario-building minds into larger networks of knowledge." This in plow helps us to accumulate information through many generations.

We connect upwardly our brains, and it's one of our defining traits (Credit: SPL)

That our rapidly expanding technology has allowed us all to get instant publishers means nosotros can share such information at the touch of a push button. And this manual of ideas and engineering helps the states in our quest to uncover even more about ourselves. That is, nosotros use language to continue ideas that others put forward.

Of class, nosotros laissez passer on the good and the bad. The technology that defines u.s.a. can as well destroy worlds.

Accept murder. Humans aren't the only species that kill each other. We're not fifty-fifty the only species that fight wars. But our intelligence and social prowess mean nosotros can do so on an unprecedented scale.

We can fight and kill on an unparalleled scale (Credit: istock)

Charles Darwin, in his book The Descent of Homo, wrote that humans and animals only differ in degree, not kind. This however stands true but Suddendorf says that it is precisely these gradual changes that make the states extraordinary and has led to "radically different possibilities of thinking".

And it is these thoughts that allow united states of america to pinpoint to our differences with chimpanzees. That nosotros do so is because they are the closest living relative nosotros have. If any of the now extinct early humans were still alive, we would be comparing our behaviour to them instead.

All the same, as far as we know, we are the only creatures trying to understand where we came from. We as well peer further back in time, and farther into the hereafter, than any other animal. What other species would call back to ponder the historic period of the universe, or how information technology volition cease?"

Nosotros take an immense capacity for practiced. At the same time we risk driving our closest relatives to extinction and destroying the but planet we accept ever chosen home.

This is function of a two-role feature serial looking at whether humans are really unique. Role one looks at the similarities between us and our closest relatives .

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150706-the-small-list-of-things-that-make-humans-unique