Scientists on 3 continents now have evidence: Some chimps have entered the Stone Age.

I'd love to see a documentary about that one population in ancient Africa who evolved into our human ancestor. I don't think another species could ever evolve to being more powerful than us because that species would observe all of our weapons, and would rather isolate themselves from us.

Life would be a lot more interesting if we had super intelligent animals that co-existed with humans.

There are obviously some posters here who are way ahead of me on this topic, which makes this thread easy to stick with. The back and forth about why humans happened to branch out so far apart from the rest of the pack is interesting. I don’t know that there is an established consensus on that. There can only be 1 leader of the pack, though, and by luck of the draw it happened to be us.

How we have created such a large gap between us and the rest, though, I would guess has a lot to do with both genetics and environmental influences, with a particular emphasis on environmental influences. Bear with me here - I’m just playing it by ear. I imagine at some stage along the way we began to distinguish ourselves from the other primates. Maybe we were the first ones to discover that we could use rocks as projectile weapons, or we had a knack for making better rock hammers, or we figured out how to use tree limbs as spears for hunting game, or whatever... Who knows? At any rate, whatever it was it distinguished us from the crowd, and we ended up forming our own social group. Now let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was the discovery that tree limbs make good spears that started the ball rolling. This made our group both superior game hunters and superior warriors. Consequently our improved diet and more limited competition for resources resulted in a small, but significant, change in our gene pool. With time we gradually became further and further seperated from the other primates. In the beginning there were significant periods of time between 1 new discovery and the next, and it may have been hundreds of thousands of years between learning to fashion a spear from a tree limb to the discovery of fire and then eventually the wheel. But with each step along the way our genetic makeup changed in a tiny way. And so, our intelligence (ability to learn) increased a tiny bit, as well. Remember, even today there remains around a 99% overlap between our genetic makeup and that of the chimp’s. Anyway, over time the gap began to lessen between each new discovery. Not only are we getting a little smarter, but our knowledgebase from all that we have learned so far is increasing, giving us more each step of the way to build from. Now fast forward all the way up to say the 17th century. At that time things probably weren’t so different than it was 100 years before that. Then came along industrialization and technology, and change began to pickup it’s pace a bit so that the gap began to close at a geometric rate. Maybe noticeable change then occurred each 50 years. Then a little later each 25 years, and then 15 years... And now today it seems things can noticeably change significantly over a 5 year period. As Humans we’re having to process more and more information at an alarming rate. Soon change may begin to occur at an exponential rate. At that time maybe our machine creations will have to take over the reigns, as our primate brain reaches it’s limit and we can no longer process the amount of information bombarding it every day, hour, minute, second...

I don’t know that added anything to the thread. Was just a stab in the dark...

Haaaaha transgender gay monkeys want equal rights to I can see the headline now. a reply to: hiddenNZ

Ill just Place this here!

a Rodent that thinks its a Ape/Human

www.youtube.com...


Houdini Honey Badgers Can Escape From Anywhere

April 20, 2014 | by Stephen Luntz
www.iflscience.com...

a reply to: Wolfenz

Yup honey badgers are high up there on my intelligent animals to keep a watch on list.

a reply to: abe froman

I'm not surprised.

I remember the touching story of how some chimps formed a guard of honor along the enclosure wall when zookeepers took one of their deceased pals away. They mourn, they make tools, they have a complex 'vocabulary'...

It reminds me of another species.