Do the Evolution

Is there nothing Alec Baldwin doesn't know? He was the host of The Discovery Channels "Walking with the Cavemen" show that I watched last night. If you ever get a change, watch it, it is high quality education. It starts with apes and goes to humans, telling us how different branches of human-like beings evolved and eventually died off leaving only us. The big difference...the ability to think, and according to the show it was our species' ability to make art and develop communities that allowed our brains to grow to where we are now.

An interesting fact from the show... the species Homo ergaster was the first to take a stone and chip parts of it away to form a stone axe to use as a weapon. Over a million years this tool did not change, this species' technology did not progress, and eventually they died off. In less than 100 years we went from the first airplane to the first spaceship, in less than ten years we progressed from libraries to the internet. Our adaptability is apparently limitless*.

The thing that made Homo sapien special was its ability to reason and think about consequences. They would put water in ostrich eggs, fill the tiny whole with straw, and bury the egg in dirt with the straw showing so that it could be found later. They knew the pain thirst could bring, and they planned for it.


*On a side note, I read an interesting article in NewScientist last month on how human imagination may not really be limitless. The author (I forget his name) made a point that a cat will never know astrophysics no matter how hard you try to teach it. A cat's brain is just not that developed. Our brains are developed, but that doesn't mean it is limitless. There may be things that no one has ever even imagined, things that are real but beyond humans' capacity to understand, and the crazy thing is we will never know if this is true.