Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.
Thanks for validating my data-hoarding tendencies.
I'm just following my Homo Archivium genetic programming.
> calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress"
It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who learned sign language have supposedly never done so.
To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have information that you don't, and you can access it in their writings or give them information with yours. If you can't conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make sense at all.
If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.
We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation.
Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories.
Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ .
I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.
I’d love for that to be true, but our species dates back 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago. Writing is definitely not a fundamental trait of our species, although once we got this update, things started moving quickly.
How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on. Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing was invented.
I’m definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in prehistory.
> rather the fact we write down what we know
Writing is a very recent invention, about 5-6kya for the oldest known script, and effectively one of the last inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya, and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest domestication of crops and animals.
Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over literate Mayan city-states and still not adopt any writing or proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make you ask "what is a writing system?").
> Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society
Isn't this going a bit too far? Sure they didn't have a modern writing system like Mayans, or even proto-writing systems like Inca's quipu but we do have hard evidence of Teotihuacan society communicating language with painted symbols (e.g. findings in La Ventilla). It's unclear to me how we can say they didn't leave writing to future generations (especially assuming probably there were a lot more stuff that was lost to time than we can see)
Also, this comment seems to slightly misunderstand what the GP said imho. Yes writing is a new invention, but e.g. paintings in Lascaux are about 17k years old. Which means even before Catalhoyuk level civilizations, humans were leaving symbols for later generations to look and decipher. This is the same "archival" process GP is talking about. Humans leave a message to future generations. It seems like our biology must prime us to do it, because we see it universally. Whether the messages we leave are writing, painting, music or whatever... humans still produce things for people that'll come after them. But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community. So, perhaps ironically, part of being human-smart is having human-precise hands that can paint/write. Without this ability, we end up like bonobos, elephants, dolphins etc perhaps smart but for all they know their parents were the Adam and Eve.
The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...
What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
I'm not saying there wasn't any cultural advancement prior to the invention of using written language to store information for use by others. Just that there wasn't any human behavior that distinguished it as unique among all other species on earth.
I think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.
...but is there another species that writes things down for other individuals in their species to reference?
> I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological
In terms of intelligence, yes, but in terms of what we've achieved then "technology" such as writing/archiving certainly has made a massive difference, else we'd be limited to what could be built by passing down oral history and skills passed from one generation to the next, much like Aboriginal Australians.
I suspect that the neurological (& vocal) differences that make us more intelligent than other apes are likely extremely few - more like "fine tuning" differences than anything major.
You’re directionally right, modern comparative mythology studies suggest that people were telling stories ~100 000 years ago when they went out of Africa, they had an “oral library”. We find many similar tropes alongside their migration roads.
The top specialist is Berezkin, he collected thousands of tropes and put it on a map http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/
I guess it is hard to say… if you looked at humans in any random moment when we’ve been around, I suppose we’d look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments progress generation-to-generation).
But, it does feel like there’s something in our storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about the universe).
From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of the loop. A big one, though.
By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic.
However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level.
I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point where there is writing but it's not very accessible... And Egyptian civilization is slow to develop (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)
> (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)
i'm not sure if this is the case or not but if it is lack of evidence may not be evidence of a lack! they may have done and it may have not been transmitted to us
> Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief?
What an interesting thing to say/ask.
To my knowledge Homo Sapiens developed long before writing was used. And there are plenty of tribes who use only oral transmission. I agree with the idea that we are archivists, be it written or oral. With written you can archive much more info though.
The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire.
By a strict definition of writing (e.g. what we're doing now), people have only been able to write for a few thousand years, and much of the adult population was illiterate until recently. Define it widely enough (visual communication of information), and some other animals (e.g. tigers) also "write": https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-s...
You could reasonably argue though, that we have passed on information over long periods of time orally, e.g. in epic poems, and that (as far as we know) no other animal does that.
>If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.
I'm not sure I understand why this would necessarily be what you would expect. I would say it's entirely the other way around. If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists, that might be at the frontier of the outer limits of the capability we're able to reach, so it might only show up in certain pockets or subsets of our overall population. Getting there would still hinge on favorable probabilities and circumstances that might only obtain in a small percentage of cases.
As for Socrates, I must confess I am rather smitten with him as a historical figure and as a philosopher, but for the many great things that Socrates is, I don't think he's a reliable authority for the evolutionary history of humanity writ large. I suspect that you're entirely right that oral traditions are more emotionally resonant and powerful than written traditions. But don't think there's any logical fallacy or contradiction in supposing that nevertheless a written tradition could emerge in parallel with oral traditions.
I suppose I do agree with your end point though, which is that I'm not sure that a disposition towards the writing can be pointed to as like a singular thing that's at the essence of what it is to be human. In fact, I would say that that very question is kind of romanticized and abstract in a way that doesn't make clear contact with our scientific understanding and therefore is kind of a malformed question. But I don't have to agree with that form of question to nevertheless believe that our capability to put language into a written form had rather transcendent consequences for us as a species.
Writing is a new phenomenon. It's certainly a novel ability, but genetically we were around for a few million years before we even developed civilization, tens of thousands more before behavioral modernity, and only in the last 10k years have we developed writing. But other commenters have already said as much.
I would contest that what makes us unique is recursion as a general ability. In that sense, writing is a method of recursively building knowledge. But we also have it with spoken language, as we recursively build vocabulary and grammar into complex communication. We have it with tools, as we are the only species (at least as far as I know) that uses tools to make tools. We also seem to have it with our physical abilities: witness the constantly broken records in competition sports.
I think that's exactly the right question and the answer is pretty clear that there is no comparison. I do understand that there's a little bit of something going on with water-based mammals like orcas and dolphins being able to teach certain skills to their young and so there's a notion of intergenerational knowledge there. But we're just a different order of magnitude in terms of our capability of transmitting intergenerational knowledge and it's not even close. It's almost disappointing because there's no interesting question of comparison between us and other species.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'm skeptical of the questions that imply a kind of species essentialism, suggesting that there's such a thing as a one particular trait that distinctly makes us human. I think the real answer to questions like that are vast convergences of immense clusters of facts relating to our evolutionary history and our morphology and so on. I don't think there's any like one single thing. But I do think in comparison to other species a rather elegant way of distinguishing this is to put to our written traditions which as far as I know don't really have any precedent. And if that doesn't blow you away in terms of how miraculous and special are evolutionary trajectory is, I don't suspect anything would. But the important thing is that you don't need a species essentialism to be impressed with who and what we are.
I’m not sure I follow, which other animals have cities and agriculture?
From the early 1800's, created by a single person.
This seems sort of a secondary cause of our unique linguistic abilities. Afaik no other animal can use recursive grammars. Certainly not to the same extent.
Anyway this also excludes all the humans that never wrote anything, which is most of them. If anything our verbal history is our strongest and most ancient culture.
Interesting comment. Why ants? Do they use symbols to express complex ideas to each other?
Cave drawings throughout the American southwest demonstrate Native Americans of antiquity were just as capable of expressing symbolic thought via a durable medium to express meaning to other humans as so-called modern humans.
I know I'm arguably moving the goalposts here from "writing stuff down for others to read" to "using symbols on a durable medium to express meaning to other humans." But that's a category of behavior that writing belongs to so I don't think it's logically inconsistent. :)
Awesome. A truly impressive feat that, among all the various and sundry species populating the earth, is only achievable by a human. That is exactly my point... thank you! :)
great point about our "biomorphology" being a perhaps-essential building block of the uniquely human ability to convey information symbolically for later retrieval.
Chimps and crows are documented using tools to make tools. Crows in particular can make compound tools. Orangs make cutting tools out of two rocks they pound together.
Neither tool use nor manufacture is uniquely human!
I don't think this really holds. we know, for example, that there were precolombian civilizations that wrote things down like the Maya and the Aztec, though much of it was destroyed during colonization.
Re: oral transmission , I'm operating under the (unsubstantiated) assumption at least some species of dolphins and whales, at least, are conveying "tribal" information orally between generations (locations of reliable hunting grounds, stuff like that). There's no definitive proof of this, afaik, it's just something that seems likelier than not to me.
Re: defining it broadly... The definition I've landed on thru defending my stated belief in these comments is, "Conveying information symbolically by etching it into or onto a durable medium so it can be referred to later."
But I guess an important quality of "writing" is that it's information that could otherwise be communicated with spoken language, and that the written and spoken languages are isomorphic.. maybe?
Honestly this is the first time I've put this idea out into the world for criticism so I'm still working thru these things :)
> Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on.
"Strongly held belief" would suggest authority on the subject, but I suspect this is not the case. By comparison, while I accept the efficacy of vaccines on the authority of the authors of scientific texts on immunology and draw on circumstantial information to infer probable reliability of said authorities, I wouldn't say I have a "strongly held belief" either as this would suggest that I, personally, have authority on the subject, which I don't. My knowledge, as descriptively rich as it might be, nonetheless rests on a chain of authority.
In any case, the first problem in these discussions is the superficial notion of "language" that's often employed. "Language", as a system of signs, entails signification, and the kind of signification human language engages in is not merely a degree removed from the kind of signification other animals engage in. There is a difference in kind. There is a big difference between a distress call and expressing the proposition "There are five red berries in the tall bush". A distress call requires no abstract concepts; the latter proposition requires five. While we can say there is something like or analogous to syntactic structure in a distress call or some series of joined calls, none of these require concepts. And abstraction of concepts is the most central and unique faculty of rationality, as it is by means of concepts that we can reason about the world. They are the seat of intentionality, not mere imagism.
> If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists
Intelligence - predicting the future rather than reacting to the present - unlocks the possibility of communicating about the future rather than just the present (basic animal calls - predator alerts, intimidation threats, mating calls, etc), which means the message can have value in the future if stored and transmitted (unlike a predator alert which is useless if not delivered in the moment).
It seems that writing, or proto-writing (drawings become symbolic glyphs?), probably developed before message carrying/sending, which then becomes the big capability unlock - the ability to send/spread information and therefore for humans to become a "collective intelligence" able to build upon each other's discoveries.
It's interesting why some groups of humans never culturally developed along this path though - aboriginees and forest peoples who have no written language. Is it because of their mode of life, or population density perhaps? Cultural isolation? Why have these groups not found the utility for written language?
Apparently as recently as 1800 global literacy rate was only around 10% - perhaps just a reflection that in the modern world you can passively benefit from the products of our collective intelligence without yourself being part of the exchange, or perhaps a reflection that desire for information is not the norm for our species - more for the intelligentsia?!
> Why ants?
It fits the basic concept of writing, where complex ideas are communicating through time rather than space.
As to using symbols it depends on what you mean by symbols. Though an ants nest is a dark environment so writing the way we think of it via coloration would be a useless. In such an environment pheromones have inherent advantages, but you can’t get the same highly detailed shapes.
> The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire.
There is some suggestion that other animals can control fire.
https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-jus...
I don't know if that's completely verified or not, but it seems like a problematic definition. You could imagine a group of intelligent birds or apes could discover ways to control fire.
No, the thing that truly sets us apart from other animals is the ability to create the hydrogen bomb.
Whilst some here are critiquing this point of view due to writing's recency, there's actually some academic support for the ancient impact of "archival" if we can consider a broader definition for it, namely: linguistic works such as stories, poems, songs etc. A classic study of this is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Li...
The basic idea is that say, lyrics, are a technological innovation that "stores" information across time and space because it aides in recall.
I never even considered insects but bees are a perfect example, I can see where you’re coming from now. A hive as a city, honey as a crop they farm by collecting pollen and refining it. There’s even specialized roles and a class hierarchy, just like humans! Ants build nests that could similarly be considered cities as well.
The question is whether or not cultures that had no writing systems were limited to the same level of intelligence and/or development that other primates exhibit.
Given that with exception of an interesting knot-encoded (Quipu) system for some period of the Inca empire, the entire human population of the Americas (at least 15-20% of the total human population) fits this description, the answer seems to be "no". These cultures built huge cities (among the largest in the world at the time), used sophisticated irrigation schemes, ceramics technology and more.
Agree with most of what you're saying here, but:
> But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community.
We just don't know if this is true.
But also not a part of the human experience among all the ancestors of the Cherokee people, or more or less all humans in the Americas, all the way back to whenever humans first arrived in the Americas (likely 25k-30k years ago, at least).
There are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human cultures that existed at the time Homer was writing, or when Gilgamesh was written, that also have no equivalent.
The idea that any roughly equivalent human culture will develop the same things is clearly wrong. Just look at the plough - for centuries or even millenia, humans outside of what is now China had ploughs but failed to gain the insight to improve it in the way it was improved in China. Once trade exposed them to the Chinese plough, it was more or less universally adopted within decades.
While multiple (re)invention may be common, it is not universal. Just because culture A manages to find is way to cultural/technological innovation doesn't imply that culture B will, even if the two cultures are very similar.
> Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so?
No, absolutely not. It's barely 5,000 years old.
>By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic.
just as it's not problematic to discover that bonobos talk to each other like Shakespeare, it would not be problematic to discover that humans are animals. keep your fingers off the scales (and, to mix a metaphor) let the scales fall from your eyes: it's science, follow the evidence to the truth. Don't be guided by what you want to hear, in either direction.
As others have pointed out, writing is a very recent phenomenon, but your intuition seems correct in general - what sets humans apart from chimps and bonobos is efficient transfer learning to future generations. If you are interested, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello makes this point in detail. Tomasello argues that chimps, while being impressive learners and problem solvers in some ways, actually have extremely inefficient cultural transfer, which prevents runaway cultural evolution that has happened in humans.
Yes, for sure humans are fundamentally more intelligent than other primates, but still it does seem that writing and written communication is a big capability unlock.
It's impressive, and perhaps a bit surprising, what a culture like the Incas were able to achieve using only (we assume) oral tradition and passing down of skills, but there must be a limit to the complexity of what can be passed down this way - more along the lines of the skillset of an individual man being passed to an apprentice, but presumably also "managers/planners" passing down skills as well as tradesmen.
I think the key differentiator is Prefrontal Synthesis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_synthesis
This is the ability to mentally compose conceptual objects in complex relationships.
In fact I don’t think there really is one single significant differentiator. There are many. However without this one technology beyond simple single function tools such as a hand axe or pointed stick, and simple linguistic statements wouldn’t be be possible.
The linguistic composition described in the article sound similar if dramatically more primitive, but I don’t think we can assume it comes from a common ancestor. It may well be that this capability has a different neurological basis, since these animals don’t have a prefrontal cortex. So it seems plausible this is a case or parallel evolution of a very rudimentary similar feature. Fascinating stuff though.
Don't forget that homo sapiens is not the only humanoid species to evolve on this planet. We had a few different contemporaries in prehistory.
There was literacy in the Americas prior to Columbus. Among the Aztecs, the tlacuilos (scribes) were educated in the calmecac. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmian_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_hieroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixtec_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_script
Just to be pedantic, it is unclear if the Aztecs had "full writing". The notation system in the codices is probably more like a kind of mnemonic and accounting system along with a calendar. They probably couldn't write arbitrary sentences. But so little material survives we don't actually know!
The Maya though absolutely had "full writing" at least during the classical phase around 200 - 800 AD, and their writing probably derived from the older Olmec system. The Maya system worked much like classical Japanese or ancient Egyptian, and uses a mix of ideographs and purely phonetic symbols. They could, and did, write anything they could say. There are historical accounts of battles and names and etc. given in monumental inscriptions. And it is almost certain during the classical era that the Maya had full literature, with stories, mythology, histories, anthologies, religious scripture, etc. There were probably still priests who could read the Maya system when the Spanish arrived - one Jesuit recorded notes that indicate some of the phonetic values of some of the symbols correctly! - but they were mostly killed and most of the codices burned by the conquistadors.
It was not deciphered again until the 1970s and it's sadly still not widely appreciated that Mesoamerica had literate civilizations.
Fun fact: The Maya were such good astronomers and record-keepers that we have exact date alignment, which we have neither for Ancient Egypt or for Mesopotamia. For example any dates in Assyrian records are subject to a ~40 year window of uncertainty for exactly when they occurred. There is no such ambiguity for the Maya: Pacal the Great almost certainly died on August 29, 683.
Cultural learning has definitely been observed in animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture
I would say that the real killer invention of humans, compared to other apes, is the way to overcome the Dunbar number and organize very large coordinated groups.
The rise of agriculture in Mesopotamia enabled by it predates writing systems, and the first cuneiform records are purely numerical, for asset tracking. Huge armies, like these of Alexander or Genghis Khan, consisted of mostly illiterate warriors.
I'd argue that the invention of the virtual hierarchies, when a peasant submits to a king who he never saw in person, eventually led to the invention of gods, and later a supreme "creator of the universe" figure. That allowed for even more complex cooperative social structures, still across mostly illiterate populations, even though holy scriptures play a central role in such religions.
> but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build
As far as we can tell humans were doing that orally for thousands of years before writing became a thing.
You had major civilizations with complex bureaucracies that were not effectively almost entirely illiterate..
Interesting that this is the only place on the internet where "Homo Archivum" has ever been uttered.
Surely what sets us apart is complexity?
Our brains are able to understand and process very complex abstract concepts and we can communicate those to each other.
Oral tradition is almost an unavoidable byproduct of that, and while writing it down is certainly useful, it's clearly the case that humans were archiving and disseminating information orally for a long time before we invented writing.
A big capability unlock is cool and all but the claim being disputed is that it's what fundamentally sets humans apart.
You're using a different definition of animal to be contrary. Don't do that.
And "problematic" here means it's racist in a dumb and obviously incorrect manner. We already have plenty of evidence against that idea.
exactly! it's really hard to find something that's truly _uniquely_ human...
humans are animals. this entire topic is "what separates humans from animals--oh, less than we thought".
stop wrapping humanity in the cloak of personification, it's the first [animal] refuge of rats and weasels. also, stop accusing people of racism all the time, it makes me think you are a worse person, not a better one. studying hunter gatherers gives us a lot of important data, and they can't help their race, nor can the researchers, it's an immutable characteristic.
> humans are animals. this entire topic is "what separates humans from animals--oh, less than we thought".
You're using two different definitions of "animal" in the same sentence here. That's only going to cause problems.
> also, stop accusing people of racism all the time, it makes me think you are a worse person, not a better one.
No person was accused of racism. It was a theoretical argument brought up and dismissed in the same sentence, as a rhetorical device to show a problem with a different argument.
> studying hunter gatherers gives us a lot of important data, and they can't help their race, nor can the researchers, it's an immutable characteristic.
But they are not fundamentally set apart and a different species from other humans. And the idea under discussion only works if major groups without writing are fundamentally set apart and a different species.
If the data showed those differences, it would not be racist. But we know those differences don't exist. Humans are all extremely similar.
So the only way someone would think they are fundamentally different is because some neuron misfired in their brain, or they got to that conclusion based on racist teachings or racist reasoning.
And it's more than 99% likely it's the latter. That's enough confidence for me to claim it's a racist idea.
And again, this is based on the actual data, not what anyone wants to be true.