When in our evolution did we humans become so clever, so creative, so boundlessly ingenious? Writer Heather Pringle tackles exactly this question in the cover story of the March issue of Scientific American. The answer, in a nutshell, is rather earlier than scientists traditionally thought, which itself raises all sorts of questions about what factors kindled our ancestors’ cognitive prowess. Pringle marshals considerable evidence of surprisingly ancient innovation—from sophisticated tools to spectacular works of art—to make her case. The list below links to stories that explore many of those finds in greater detail.

Ancient Cut Marks Reveal Far Earlier Origin of Butchery

Humans Tamed Fire by 1 Million Years Ago

Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500,000 Years Ago

Oldest Arrowheads Hint at How Modern Humans Overtook Neandertals

When the Sea Saved Humanity

The Morning of the Modern Mind

Oldest Cave Paintings May Be Creations of Neandertals, Not Modern Humans

Stone Age jams: Humans playing the flute for at least 35,000 years, no word yet on sax

9 Comments

1. 1. timbosta 03:31 PM 3/10/13

   ....so clever, so creative, so boundlessly ingenious? I can't believe I read that.. Are you kidding? Seems to me that your criteria are a whole lot different than mine. Sure, there have been people that fulfill some of those criteria, but I could almost count them on the fingers of one hand... The human race is by and large a lame collection of lazy, greedy half-wits. The universe won't mourn us when the big rock comes....

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2. 2. cranial in reply to timbosta 09:28 PM 3/10/13

   You must be fun at parties.

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3. 3. Epke-Oranda 02:53 AM 3/11/13

   Of course a certain guy with zentradi hairstyle will claim the Alien factor.

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4. 4. phalaris 04:37 AM 3/11/13

   Deeper than expected by who? Presumably anthropologists. They seem to have their own agenda, but quite how this expectation fits into it is unclear to me.
   
   Many of the rest of us never signed up to any big-bang theory of human development.
   
   Next it'll be "roots of human language/culture/behaviour etc. deeper than expected..", and we'll be solemnly lectured on how these things go back further than we'd -- all -- dreamed of.
   

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5. 5. jgrosay 05:41 PM 3/11/13

   Probably we've been equally creative from the very beginning to now, as creativity is just finding new combinations from existing things, and in combinating the knowledge of mathematics and geometry can help a lot, nobody but the Almighty can create from nil, the pace and number of new objects, ideas and procedures depends on the previously existing pool of knowledge, as Jean Piaget? pointed, any new knowledge is put on the basis of the pre-existing concepts on the subject, be they experimented facts or just conjectures, thus, the pace of inventions and creativity may be today having an exponential growth in speed and number of findings, the problem today may be that just from the web, the amount oh data available surpasses any human being's ability to read and digest it.

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6. 6. shaik1982 in reply to timbosta 03:28 PM 3/12/13

   You do realize they mean compared to other animals right?
   
   Your average person has more thoughts in a day than any animal would probably have its whole life, and most will have none but instinctive reactions.
   
   Obviously compared to other species, we are creative. Compared to most aliens, I'm sure we stink, but I haven't done the leg work.

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7. 7. joeshmoe in reply to shaik1982 05:34 PM 3/12/13

   MOST aliens? I doubt it. I suspect most aliens are bacteria. And even among the complex ones... I suspect technological/cultural species like ours are vanishingly rare. (But of course they exist somewhere, given the vastness of the universe.) I think Steven Pinker made a good case in...maybe How the Mind Works, I'm not sure... He compared human-style intelligence to an elephant's trunk. Of course WE think it's the most special thing in all of nature, but from an evolutionary perspective, it's just another set of adaptations...just another way of making a living. There's nothing inevitable about it...it's by no means the "goal" of evolution.

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8. 8. bucketofsquid in reply to timbosta 06:01 PM 3/20/13

   Should we count you as a lazy, greedy halfwit? The Universe certainly won't miss you.

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9. 9. bucketofsquid in reply to phalaris 06:09 PM 3/20/13

   The vast majority of the planetary population don't "sign on" to weird creationist garbage either. Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Many Jews, Samaritans, Some Muslims, Orthodox Christians, a lot of Catholic clergy and common Catholics that read where the Catholic Bible starts out with "This is the history of the Hebrew people" and wonder about all the other people and of course, Atheists all don't buy the silly young Earth postulate that was invented fairly recently. Indeed, even among Protestants, where the theory originated, there are many who think that postulate doesn't make sense and is certainly unsupported.

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