Re:Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens ...
by red75prime on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:11AM
(#27103205)
That's just a general problem of defining intelligence. Humans are able to excel in many different areas. Bringing domain experts here is like looking at an elephant through a magnifying glass (yep, it's just a skin patch, nothing unique here).
Re:Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens ...
by ekianjo on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:46AM
(#27114311)
You still do not adress the domestication of fire. This leads to cooking, pottery, metal work and technology at large. Other animals never ever reached that step.
Re:Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens ...
by redis_mlc on Sunday May 09, 2021 @06:33AM
(#27094839)
I was going to say that.
We can see the Great Wall of China from space.
And we can also see beaver dams from space.
(Note the Great Wall was built for a mundane reason - the Han people couldn't defeat the Mongols on horseback, but they could keep building walls until the horses could no longer enter. Byzantium/Constantinople also adopted that strategy, which worked for over 1,000 years until the Ottomans built the world's largest cannon and blasted holes in it.)
Re:Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens ...
by Others on Sunday May 09, 2021 @02:55PM
(#27098628)
Nit: you cannot see the Great Wall from space unaided: https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall....
Re:Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens ...
by azundo on Sunday May 09, 2021 @02:04PM
(#27098143)
That said, no beaver has seen either from space.
Re:Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens ...
by wombatmobile on Sunday May 09, 2021 @02:47PM
(#27098549)
We can see water coloration from algae in space.
If you weren't impressed when you read the above sentence, imagine how algae feel when they read your sentence about the Great Wall of China.
The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”?
I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.