Nature reports that a hominin in the Republic of Georgia which dates to nearly 2 million years B.P. seems to have survived with only one tooth (popular summation).1 This isn’t that surprising, I’ve been reading a few books on what we used to call Homo erectus and it seems other aged individuals in various states of decrepitude have also been recovered. Over the past 20 years with the explosion of mitochondrial Eve and the “Great Leap” theories “human nature” has often been conceived to be the preserve of Homo sapiens, to such an extent that Homo sapiens neandertalis is often excluded from the party. Visual arts which express a symbolic capacity are essential facets of our humanity, but so is compassion and empathy, too often I suspect that we have simply viewed the pre-human homonids as bipedal apes, but it seems logical that emotional sensitivity would long precede fluency in its artistic expression. Anyone who has watched a David Attenborough special has probably engaged in some level of “anthropomorphism,” but though animals do not feel as we do, it does seem plausible that they have some of the same emotional responses to given inputs as humans. In fact, the second chapter of Why We Love explores “animals in love,” and I was rather surprised how much many mammals resemble humans in this aspect of our shared personalities.
1 – This seems to be of the Dmanisi group which shocked scientists with how soon they had left Africa, as well as a few anatomical peculiarities which suggested that they were a localized Homo population.
Posted by razib at 09:01 AM