I see no evidence that humans smell especially bad, and having been in close contact with animals before, find that a very unlikely theory. It’s far more likely that animals learned that human smells are dangerous as we speared any who didn’t get the point. Wild animals in close contact with humans, or who live in human-dominated areas, don’t appear to be bothered by the smell of man.
Pun most definitely intended
What are we good at? We’re the dominant creature on this shit-pile.
We can breed like nobody’s business.
Or using Foley pits. Seriously. Almost all the animal and environmental sounds in movies are created by Foley artists. Very few are natural. Once I was watching a movie on TV, and my cats freaked out to some dogs barking, which they’d never done before. That’s how I knew it was a rare example of real dogs on the soundtrack, and not human vocal artists.
Humans seem to be remarkably good at eating plants that many other animals find toxic, with little or no ill effect. We’re fairly successful omnivores, even without our fire-making, tool-using smarts.
Consider how many foods seem perfectly ordinary to us, even in large quantities, but carry warnings to keep them away from pets: chocolate, garlic, onions, grapes, avocados, milk, cheese, carrots, macadamia nuts, caffeine, sugar, salt, alcohol, and others.
Pattern recognition is a basic ability of a lot of animals. A house-mate once asked me if I though Simon (the cockatiel) could recognize the sound of his (the house-mate’s) car coming up the driveway. This is the sort of thing that animals excel at.
Dolphins easily learn to track what the people around them are looking at, and I suspect that other animals being trained by people can pick up on that too. When doing training that requires dolphins to respond to specific signals (e.g., sounds or hand-gestures) by going to a specific object in the tank (like the ball or the surfboard), the dolphin will learn more readily to just go where the trainer is looking. Trainers have to wear opaque goggles to avoid this.
The reason is simple: It’s that old simple pattern recognition. It’s much more mental effort to learn all the sounds or hand-gestures for lots of different commands or objects, and much simpler to notice a common pattern to them all: Just go where the trainer is looking.
Why do you think a lot of other animals can’t locate a sound? If your pet dog hears Master’s voice, do you think he can’t tell where it’s coming from? (As for isolating one voice out of a crowd, I don’t know about that. If I had to guess, I’d guess they can do it as well as we can.)
We used transducers (underwater speakers) to play artificial whistle-sounds for our dolphin training. One set of training involved using those sounds to direct the dolphins which object to go to. It turned out, they could NOT tell where the sounds were coming from. But then it further turned out that the problem was with the nature of the sounds: The computer-generated sounds were square waves and it’s hard to localize those. You’ve all noticed this: Modern electronic items that beep often use square waves, and you can’t tell where they are coming from. That’s why it’s hard to find your wrist watch when you leave it somewhere and it starts beeping. We’ve had whole threads on this here. When we changed the waveforms to stop using square waves, then the dolphins could easily tell where the sounds were coming from.
Dolphins have spontaneously learned this too, without any deliberate effort by their trainers. Karen Pryor, one-time head dolphin trainer at Sea Life Park, Honolulu, tells of a dolphin who was used as a messenger by a group of scuba-diving researchers. They would write messages with a grease-pencil on a slate and give it to the dolphin, who would carry it around to the others until someone accepted it. But, apparently without any intention, the writer of the message would point at the person to whom the message was directed, and the dolphin learned to go to that person. (Cite: The book Lads Before The Wind: Adventures in Dolphin Training by Karen Pryor.)
(Yes, she trained otters too.)
This can also be understood as pattern-matching. The dolphin sees the pointed finger a lot of time, and at first thinks nothing of it. But the dolphin also notices which person accepts the message. By and by, the dolphin connects the dots and sees that the finger pointing predicts who will accept the message. It’s a simple consistent pattern, and critters are good at noticing things like that.
OTOH, you humans are among the very few species that are bothered by poison oak. Cows, for example, eat the stuff.
That’s simply not true. A lot of animals can run humans into the ground when it comes to endurance running. Why do you suppose we started riding horses and using dogs for hunting? Both can run much faster than humans and go for much longer.
The only really interesting thing about humans is that we use language to accumulate and pass knowledge down through generations and over time. All other species have to start over again with each generation and we do not.
Humans who don’t sit around on couches are certainly in the top tier for extreme endurance. That’s not to say that they can necessarily do better than dogs and horses, but they can pursue many prey animals to exhaustion.
Humans are pitifully slow in a sprint (cheetahs must look at us and just giggle) but for really long distances, we’re hard to beat.
For very long endurance races, humans are very tough to beat (think ultramarathon distances, not a few miles). Wolves and huskies can outpace a human over long distances, but only when it’s cold. In hot weather, humans beat wolves and dogs. Horses do pretty well over long distances, but humans generally win that battle as well.
We use horses and dogs for hunting because we’d rather eat in a few minutes instead of chasing our prey for hours on end. Over short distances, horses and dogs both move much faster than we do.
By the way, you may find this interesting. It’s a marathon between men on foot and men on horses.
The horses usually win, though the race is closer when the temperature is warmer.
It should also be noted that the horses are being ridden, and therefore the horse’s pacing is controlled by a human brain. Horses don’t tend to pace themselves as well if they aren’t being ridden, which is why humans have historically been able to run down horses over longer distances.
Of course, the horses in the race also have to carry the additional weight of their rider, so there is a disadvantage to being ridden as well. Overall, the better pacing outweighs the additional weight.
Elite humans - say, the top 1% - are quite good at endurance running. But, yes, perfectly average animals of a number of species can beat them.
The champion of all is probably the pronghorn. They easily top 50 mph for a mile or so, and (Googling suggests) have no trouble doing 20 miles at 30 mph.
Only a tiny fraction of humans are capable of covering ultramarathon distances at any pace that can properly be called running.
Quite a substantial percentage of us would be hard put to cover marathon distance even at a gentle walking pace.
Yet a group of marathoners was able to run down a pronghorn buck and get within 25 feet of it. If it had been their intention, they could have easily brought it down with a spear.
Modern urbanized humans. The percentage was no doubt much higher during our evolutionary past in East Africa. Some recent cultures in various parts of the world did make a practice of running down game over long distances.
Faster, yes. longer, no. A human will outdistance any horse under any circumstances. A human will easily outdistance any dog if the temperatures are above about 32oC. At temperatures above 35oC, normal tropical temperatures, a human will run a dog into the ground within 30 minutes.
Humans started riding horses because a horse is much stronger than a human and can thus carry heavier loads. Their speed over short distances was also a major advantage in battle, as was the ability to sustain that speed and still be able to fight when you hopped off your chariot. It had nothing to do with ability to cover large distances.
Really? Can we have a cite for these claims?
You are saying that no scientist considers human use of technology or human ability for abstract thought or human environmental modification or human art to be in the least interesting.
You are also saying that it is language that allows humans to accumulate knowledge, and not our other mental abilities.
Neither of those claims is correct.
No, other species certainly do not have to start over with each generation. Other mammals and birds learn huge amounts from their parents.
Where humans do have a huge advantage is in our ability to both comprehend and communicate abstract concepts. A person who has personally never been seen a snake can know that snakes are dangerous and know what to do if they are ever bitten by a snake. They know those things because that information was passed on to them by people who have had such experiences, or who have received that information in a similar way. Animals simply can not do that. If an animal has never seen a snake, it can’t learn how to react to a snake, even if its parents do know how to react.
That is the big advantage humans have: we can learn through means other than observation. Other animals can’t.
Draw ankhs and sculpt Venuses, of course.
Not quite that simple I think.
We can see more colors than non-primate mammals, but fewer than not just birds but also many reptiles, amphibians, insects etc. Most such species have at least four color sensitive cones and some have five or more, often with less “overlap” than the three humans have, giving them a much richer color gamut than we can see.
And even if we can see more colors than a cat, say, they have us beat for night vision, so it’s not so straightforward to say who wins.
Similarly, you have the issue of whether binocular vision (which is good for judging distances) is better than a wider field of view
Finally, I guess in humans a heck of a lot of post-processing happens allowing us to categorize the world into discrete, recognized objects very well, but this blurs the line (so to speak) between vision and intelligence.
Very interesting article. It pretty well makes the point, even if the author’s conclusion is “They didn’t quite succeed”.
It’s worth noting that they were a group of elite marathoners chasing the pronghorn in a confined valley. So what it principally illustrates is humans’ skill at planned, cooperative hunting - something that various animal species do, but not nearly so well as us.
Probably the best direct answer to the OP’s question is: make and control fire. All groups of humans do this routinely; no other species does it at all.