The Humanity of Nature: It's a very wuzzy line

mobbs (69)in #nature • 7 years ago (edited)

As Jane Goodall, noted Primatologist says, ‘We find animals doing things that we in our arrogance used to think was just human’ She continues ‘There isn’t a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s a very wuzzy line and it’s getting wuzzier all the time’.

Today, I’d like to look a little deeper at that wuzzy line and see how wuzzy things really get. Just what does make us human, and can we find it elsewhere in nature? Let’s take a look.

Farming

It seems natural to think that farming is unique to humans. What other animal ever came up with such an intuitive way to store and grow a continuous supply of food without having to move around all the time?

Answer: Ants.

Ants have a number of farming methods, from fungi to aphids. With the aphids, the ants will gather them together and clip their wings off. Chemicals on the ants’ feet tranquilize these farm animals to keep them steady and ready and further chemicals in the glands of ants prevents the growth of wings. Why? Because aphids excrete a delicious, sugary honeydew, perfect for an ant’s taste buds.

It’s not all doom and gloom for the aphids, however. Being farmed protects the aphids from ladybirds and other hunters.

Now replace Ant with Human, Aphid with Cow, Honeydew with Milk and Hunter with Wolf. Hmm.

Tools

Anyone reading this should know that many of the higher animals out there can use tools, but the actual extent of animals that can do this is quite astonishing.

Typically, we think of Apes and monkeys since they are the most closely related to us, but tool use also extends to elephants, dolphins and whales, otters, parrots, owls, vultures, crows, ants (again), stingrays, fish, octopuses and even crocodiles.

The mugger crocodile has learnt to balance a stick on its head while partially submerged, at the right time of year. When a bird comes to take the stick, SNAP. Lunch.

Crows are even more amazing. They have larger brains than most any other bird in relation to body size, and it shows. They can use sticks, wire, grass or anything else suitable for larva fishing, they can make their own toys, transport tools, and they have even been observed using busy traffic to crush walnuts open for them, making sure to drop them at the traffic lights so they can safely pick up the rewards when the man goes green.

If this wasn’t enough, stick use has been learnt by crows spontaneously, without the need of elders to pass the knowledge down.

Language

Obviously, humans have the most developed language and nothing else in nature comes close; this is more or less the primary force that differentiates us from other animals (that and manipulating fire). But it’s still not unique! In fact, a number of animals have seemingly sophisticated language systems, and even regional dialects.

Whales, such a sperm whales, are able to communicate in long strings of clicks, or ‘codas’, but they can also distinguish which members of their community are talking based on various properties of those codas. Killer whales have even learnt to speak the language of dolphins.

Kanzi, a bonobo, understands several thousand words, and communicates using a keyboard with over 400 visual symbols. That’s more than most students I teach!

Dogs are also capable of this. Rico is a border collie that has learnt to distinguish 500 toys based on their names alone.

Dolphins have taken it even further, with the ability to distinguish sentences based on grammar, in particular the relation between a verb and the surrounding nouns.

War

This is one people usually use to demonize humans. No other animal is capable of war, we are despicable. Well…

Ants (again) commit war crimes. Ants are known to storm termite nests in huge numbers, and even sneak into rival nests under the guise of their opponent’s scent in order to sabotage their food supply. These are, to be fair, hunting strategies, but it strikes a resemblance. Most wars in our history are wars of resources, after all.

Chimp wars can resemble human wars even more. They actually go on raids and annex territory from other chimp groups, as well as fight to the death. Their wars can be so extensive, that one in particular, named The Gombe Chimpanzee Civil War lasted for 4 years, and involved kidnapping, rape and murder.

Realistically, war is a more formal approach to these things, but the roots are there in plain sight.

Politics

This one even surprised me.

Termites have been observed having some kind of election. When the time is right, a group of about 50-100 gather together, presumably to discuss who will be the next queen. After some time, barely 10 of those get through to the next round and make the physical transformation that allow them to lay eggs. These selected few will fight it out to the death. But there will be more than one survivor, typically.

Once the fighting is over, the termite candidates become more amicable with each other and start socializing with other termites. They are seen providing extra food from their rear-end to butter up other termites to get their vote (I suppose), until there is a winner to become queen of the colony.

More broadly, politics is used all over the place in nature; collective deliberation, division of labour, ritualized conflict resolution and more.

Chimps are quite political creatures, often buttering up, grooming individuals to help themselves climb the social ladder to being alpha male. In fact, to gain power, they create ruling parties and alliances to better their chances more than just, say, fighting it out.