Just saw a short clip of this wonderful BBC series, New Scientist.
The discovery of a skull dating back roughly 300,000 years. A big leap from the 200,000 year benchmark that apparently was “the oldest” previously found. This was unearthed in Morocco. Which does make sense.
So here’s my question. And no way should this be in G.Q. cause there cannot be a factual answer.
At what point in the evolution of our species ( writ large, not just Homo Sapien ) might there have been recognition of another type of Homo? I’ve read about some fascinating cross-breeding between Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens.
At 300,000 years, would that living being/ person have recognized…you or me? And, real hypothesizing- when would they have had the intellectual capacity to recognize and react to a similarly appearing species?
I have had many dogs over my life and I was frequently amazed that they instantly identified other dogs as dogs. My dog would see a bird or a squirrel or horse or you name it and be interested but if it saw another dog the recognition was immediate as…another dog! And her eagerness (all my dogs have been female) to meet “other dog” was instant and urgent.
Didn’t matter if it was a Chihuahua or a Great Dane. She knew they were all dogs from a long way away.
My understanding is that even fish - who have limited ability to view themselves - are able to identify their own species through smell, behavior, and other factors.
For early humanoids, I would imagine one relevant factor would be the degree of isolation they were raised in - both WRT their own and other species. Are they a small band? Are they well-travelled?
Isn’t there a question as to how immediately Europeans recognized gorillas as nonhuman? At the very least, I would imagine a bipedal humanoid would recognize a slightly different appearing bipedal humanoid as more similar to him/her than other animals.
You’d, I think, have to assume that that ability was present in some form in the first single celled colonial organisms. And that puts it back reeeaaallly far.
Not my subject, really; but my missus follows the developments. They are complex and constantly changing. From this diagram, it looks like that there was interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals at 80,000 years b.p., and with Denisovans 40,000 years ago. Presumably this interbreeding occurred on other occasions too, but perhaps with fewer lasting consequences. Modern humans never seem to have encountered H. floresiensis, however, except maybe way back at the dawn of hominids.
But did these early people recognise each other as human? Interesting question.
Humans are very good at classifying entities into categories, and so are other primates; I’m sure they had a good idea of the similarities and differences between these species and subspecies, although what their opinions were about each other can only be guessed.
Dogs have scent glands that emit pheromones and other odors that allow dogs to identify one another, assess health and stress levels, et cetera. That is pretty straightforward even though there is massive phenotypical and morphological variations in domestic dog breeds.
The biological species concept is a human invention and whether different versions of genus Homo which were still capable of interbreeding would have viewed each other as significantly ‘different’ is in question; we would certainly look at early Homo sapiens as not being identical to modern humans even though we are chromosomally compatible.
Fair enough but I noted my dog would identify them at some distance. Across the street…I dunno…seemed to be sight based. She’d see them long before smelling them. I live in a big city and loads of dogs around. Lots of dog smells. I noted she’d spot them (see them visually) and get interested.
You’re assuming that;
Your sense of sight is roughly equivalent to your dog’s sense of sight, which is mostly correct.
and,
Your sense of smell is roughly equivalent to your dog’s sense of smell, which is entirely incorrect.
I agree my dogs’ sense of smell (and how she perceives the world) is far different and more acute than mine.
But, again, this is in a big city with lots of dogs walking around (really lots with their humans). I see no way that she’d look at a dog and get very interested when accounting for distance based on smell alone. Which way is the wind blowing? Didn’t matter.
In short, my experience is my dog could identify other dogs by sight alone from at least 100 feet or (I think) more.
Was it a classification that would have been salient to them even?
I’d imagine that the first classification no matter what it looked like was if it was a threat or not. Looks more or less similar to me might be used to help the threat assessment.
Then does that group have something I want and how can I get it?
Then if there is enough similarity between species that sexual attraction is triggered. Enough anyway. And can I arrange for that to happen if I want to.
Or maybe the things of what it is not? Not my family? Not my tribe? Not acting like it could be an ally or a threat? Not food? Not something I want to have sex with?
If not any of those things then it is not something I care much about?
I can’t speak, of course, for the Neanderthals and the Denisovians; but Homo Sapiens is well known for having some members who will have sex with anybody that moves and some things that don’t. I don’t think we can assume that interbreeding must have meant recognition of each other as being members of the same species.
And this, of course:
– so did a lot of other slaveholders.
I agree that other species do seem to have some sense of species differentiation. Dogs have been mentioned – and they don’t only recognize other dogs; farm dogs can learn to hunt some species and not others. Cats clearly recognize not only other cats as cats, but humans as humans, dogs as dogs. And so on – fish have been mentioned. So I’m sure previous hominins had some such sense. How they classified other hominins and simians, and whether their divisions were the same as the ones we currently make, would be a lot harder to figure out. For that matter, the divisions we currently make are often argued about.
I once had a cat whose eyesight I wondered about.
Then one day I was hanging up laundry in the company of the cat when he suddenly froze, stared intently into the distance, and started to growl. I looked where he was looking. Some six or seven hundred feet uphill, paying us no attention and not moving in our direction, a strange dog was moving across the field.
He never reacted like that to, say, a deer moving across the field.
Whether he was going by sight or scent, he certainly knew that was a dog. (And he could certainly see well enough to tell where he was looking. He wasn’t flemening; he was staring.)
Humans are pretty often a threat to other humans.
But the first classification probably has to be “something’s moving. Do I know what it is?”
