Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  That’s right, toddlers score the same as animals at the zoo. And it gets worse. Turns out that our working memory and speed of processing information–traditionally regarded as one of the cornerstones of human intelligence–won’t be winning us any prizes either.

  This was demonstrated by Japanese researchers who developed a test to assess how adults stack up against chimpanzees. Subjects were placed in front of a screen that flashed a set of digits (from one to nine). After a given amount of time–always less than a second–the digits were replaced by white squares. Test subjects were instructed to tap the spots on the screen where the numbers had appeared, in order from low to high.

  Briefly, it looked like Team Human would beat Team Chimp. But when researchers made the test harder (by having the numbers disappear sooner), the chimps pulled ahead. The Einstein of the group was Ayuma, who was faster than the other participants and made fewer errors.8 Ayuma was a chimpanzee.

  Okay, judged on raw brain power, humans do no better than our hairier cousins. So, then, what are we using our great big brains for?

  Maybe we’re more cunning. That’s the crux of the ‘Machiavellian intelligence’ hypothesis, named after the Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince (1513). In this handbook for rulers, Machiavelli counsels weaving a web of lies and deception to stay in power. According to adherents of this hypothesis, that’s precisely what we’ve been doing for millions of years: devising ever more inventive ways to swindle one another. And because telling lies takes more cognitive energy than being truthful, our brains grew like the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US during the Cold War. The result of this mental arms race is the sapien superbrain.

  If this hypothesis were true, you’d expect humans to beat other primates handily in games that hinge on conning your opponent. But no such luck. Numerous studies show that chimps outscore us on these tests and that humans are lousy liars.9 Not only that, we’re predisposed to trust others, which explains how con artists can fool their marks.10

  This brings me to another odd quirk of Homo sapiens. Machiavelli, in his classic book, advises never revealing your emotions. Work on your poker face, he urges; shame serves no purpose. The object is to win, by fair means or foul. But if only the shameless win, why are humans the only species in the whole animal kingdom to blush?

  Blushing, said Charles Darwin, is ‘the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions’. Wanting to know if this phenomenon was universal, he sent letters to everyone in his foreign network, polling missionaries, merchants, and colonial bureaucrats.11 Yes, they all replied, people here blush, too.

  But why? Why didn’t blushing die out?

  2

  It’s August 1856. At a limestone quarry north of Cologne, two workers have just made the discovery of a lifetime. They’ve uncovered the skeleton of one of the most controversial creatures ever to walk the earth.

  Not that they realise it. Old bones, mostly bear or hyena, routinely crop up in their line of work and just get thrown out with the other waste. But this time their overseer notices the remains lying in the dump. Thinking they may be the bones of a cave bear, he decides they would make a cool gift for Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a science teacher at the local high school. Like many people in the days before Netflix, Fuhlrott is an avid fossil collector.

  As soon as he lays eyes on them, Fuhlrott realises these are no ordinary bones. At first he thinks the skeleton is human, but something isn’t right. The skull is strange. It’s sloping and elongated, with a jutting brow ridge and a nose that’s too big.

  That week, the local papers report on the astounding discovery of a ‘Race of Flatheads’ in the Neander Valley. A professor at the University of Bonn, Hermann Schaaffhausen, reads about the find and contacts Fuhlrott. They arrange to meet–the amateur and the pro–and exchange notes. A few hours later the two are in agreement:

  The bones belong to not just any human, but to a whole different species of human.

  ‘These bones are antediluvian,’ Fuhlrott declares.12 That is, they predate the Great Flood, which makes them the remains of a creature that lived before God inundated the earth.

  It’s hard to overstate just how shocking this conclusion was at the time. Pure heresy. When Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen announce their findings at a gathering of the erudite Lower Rhine Society for Science and Medicine, they meet with stunned disbelief.13 Ridiculous, shouts an anatomy professor, this is the skeleton of a Russian Cossack who died in the Napoleonic Wars. Nonsense, calls another, it’s just ‘some poor fool or recluse’ whose head is misshapen from disease.14

  But then more bones turn up. All over Europe, museums dive into their collections and resurface with more of the oblong skulls. At first, they get dismissed as malformations, then it begins to dawn on scientists that this could indeed be a whole different kind of human. Before long, someone dubs the species: Homo stupidus.15 His ‘thoughts and desires,’ expounds a respected anatomist, ‘never soared beyond those of a brute.’16 The classification recorded in the annals of science is more subtle, and refers to the valley where the bones were found.

  Homo neanderthalensis.

  To this day, the popular image of the Neanderthal is of a stupid lout, and it’s not hard to fathom why. We have to face the uncomfortable fact that, until not long ago, our species shared the planet with other kinds of humans.

  Scientists have determined that 50,000 years ago there were at least five hominins besides us–Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, Homo denisova and Homo neanderthalensis–all of them humans, just as the goldfinch, the house finch and the bullfinch are all finches. So besides the question of why we put chimps in the zoo instead of the other way around, there’s another mystery: what happened to the ‘Race of Flatheads’? What did we do with our other Homo brothers and sisters? Why did they all disappear?

  Was it that the Neanderthals were weaker than us? On the contrary, they were the proto-muscleman, with biceps like Popeye after downing a can of spinach. More importantly, they were tough. That’s what two American archaeologists ascertained in the 1990s after detailed analysis of a vast number of Neanderthal bone fractures. This led them to draw parallels with a modern occupational group that also suffers a high rate of ‘violent encounters’ with large animals. Rodeo cowboys.

  The archaeologists got in touch with the–I kid you not–Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, which in the 1980s had registered 2,593 injuries among its members.17 Comparing this data with that from Neanderthals, they found striking similarities. The only difference? Neanderthals weren’t riding bucking broncos and roping cattle, but spearing mammoths and sabre-toothed cats.18

  Okay, so if they weren’t weaker, maybe Neanderthals were dumber than us?

  Here things get more painful. The Neanderthal brain was, on average, 15 per cent larger than our brains now: 1,500 cm3 versus 1,300 cm3. We may boast a superbrain, they packed a gigabrain. We have a Macbook Air, and they got the Macbook Pro.

  As scientists continue to make new discoveries about Neanderthals, the growing consensus is that this species was astoundingly intelligent.19 They built fires and cooked food. They made clothing, musical instruments, jewellery and cave paintings. There are even indications that we borrowed some inventions from the Neanderthals, like certain stone tools, and possibly even the practice of burying the dead.

  So what gives? How did Neanderthals, with their brawn, big brains, and ability to survive two whole ice ages, end up getting wiped off the earth? Having managed to stick it out for more than 200,000 years, why was it game over for the Neanderthals soon after Homo sapiens arrived on the scene?

  There is one final and much more sinister hypothesis.

  If we weren’t stronger, or more courageous, or smarter than the Neanderthals, maybe we were just meaner. ‘It may well be,’ speculates Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, ‘that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history’.
20 Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer Jared Diamond concurs: ‘murderers have been convicted on weaker circumstantial evidence’.21

  3

  Could it be true? Did we wipe out our hominin cousins?

  Flash forward to the spring of 1958. Lyudmila Trut, a biology student at Moscow State University, comes knocking at the office door of Professor Dmitri Belyaev. He’s a zoologist and geneticist and is looking for someone to run an ambitious new research programme. She’s still in school, but determined to land the job.22

  The professor is kind and courteous. At a time when the Soviet scientific establishment mostly takes a condescending attitude towards women, Dmitri treats Lyudmila as an equal. And he decides to let her in on his secret plan. This plan will require her to travel to Siberia, to a remote location near the border with Kazakhstan and Mongolia, where the professor is launching an experiment.

  He cautions Lyudmila to think carefully before she agrees, because this venture is dangerous. The communist regime has stamped evolutionary theory as a lie propagated by capitalists and has banned genetic research of any kind. Ten years earlier, they executed Dmitri’s older brother, also a geneticist. For this reason, the team will present the experiment to the outside world as a study on precious fox pelts.

  In reality, it’s about something altogether different. ‘He told me,’ Lyudmila said years later, ‘that he wanted to make a dog out of a fox.’23

  What the young scientist didn’t realise was that she had just agreed to embark on an epic quest. Together, Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut would unravel the very origins of humankind.

  They started out with a very different question: how do you turn a fierce predator into a friendly pet? A hundred years earlier, Charles Darwin had already noted that domesticated animals–pigs, rabbits, sheep–present some remarkable similarities. For starters, they’re a few sizes smaller than their wild forebears. They have smaller brains and teeth and often floppy ears, curly tails, or white-spotted fur. Perhaps most interesting of all, they retain some juvenile traits their whole lives.

  This was a puzzle that had perplexed Dmitri for years. Why do domesticated animals look the way they do? Why did all those innumerable farmers, all those innumerable years ago, prefer puppies and piglets with corkscrew tails, droopy ears and baby faces, and breed them for these particular traits?

  The Russian geneticist had a radical hypothesis. He suspected these cute features were merely by-products of something else, a metamorphosis that happens organically if over a sufficiently long period of time animals are consistently selected for one specific quality:

  Friendliness.

  So this was Dmitri’s plan. He wanted to replicate within a couple of decades what had taken nature millennia to produce. He wanted to turn wild animals into pet material, simply by breeding only the most amiable individuals. For his test case, Dmitri chose the silver fox, an animal never domesticated and so viciously aggressive that the researchers could only handle them wearing elbow-length gloves two inches thick.

  Dmitri warned Lyudmila not to get her hopes up. The experiment would take years, maybe even a lifetime, most likely with nothing to show for the effort. But Lyudmila didn’t need to think twice. A few weeks later, she boarded the Trans-Siberian Express.

  The fox breeding farm Dmitri contracted turned out to be a vast complex, the thousands of cages emitting a cacophony of howling. Even with everything she’d read on the behaviour of silver foxes, Lyudmila was not prepared for how ferocious they were in person. She started making her rounds past all the cages that first week. Wearing protective gloves, she would reach a hand inside to see how the animals reacted. If she sensed the slightest hesitation, Lyudmila selected that fox for breeding.

  In retrospect, it’s remarkable how quickly it all happened.

  In 1964, with the experiment in its fourth generation, Lyudmila saw the first fox wag its tail. To ensure that any such behaviours were indeed the result of natural selection (and were not acquired), Lyudmila and her team had kept all contact with the animals to a minimum. But that became increasingly difficult: within a few generations, the foxes were literally begging for attention. And who could say no to a drooling, tail-wagging fox cub?

  In the wild, foxes become significantly more aggressive at about eight weeks old, but Lyudmila’s selectively bred foxes remained permanently juvenile, preferring nothing more than to play all day long. ‘These tamer foxes,’ Lyudmila later wrote, ‘seemed to be resisting the mandate to grow up.’24

  Meanwhile, there were noticeable physical changes, too. The foxes’ ears dropped. Their tails curled and spots appeared on their coats. Their snouts got shorter, their bones thinner and the males increasingly resembled the females. The foxes even began to bark, like dogs. And before long they were responding when the keepers called their names–behaviour never before seen in foxes.

  And remember, none of these were traits for which Lyudmila had selected. Her only criterion had been friendliness–all the other characteristics were just by-products.

  Dmitri Belyaev with his silver foxes, Novosibirsk, 1984. Dmitri died the following year, but his research program continues to this day. Source: Alamy.

  By 1978, twenty years after this experiment began, a lot had changed in Russia. No longer did biologists have to conceal their research. The theory of evolution was not a capitalist plot after all, and the Politburo was now keen to promote Russian science.

  In August that year, Dmitri managed to arrange for the International Congress of Genetics to be hosted in Moscow. Guests were received at the State Kremlin Palace–capacity 6,000–where the champagne flowed freely and there was plenty of caviar to go around.

  But none of that impressed the guests nearly as much as Dmitri’s talk. After a brief introduction, the lights dimmed and a video began to play. Onto the screen bounded an unlikely creature: a silver fox, tail wagging. A chorus of exclamations arose from the audience, and the excited chatter continued long after the lights came back up.

  But Dmitri wasn’t finished yet. In the hour that followed, he set out his revolutionary idea. He suspected, he said, that the changes in these foxes had everything to do with hormones. The more amiable foxes produced fewer stress hormones and more serotonin (the ‘happy hormone’) and oxytocin (the ‘love hormone’).

  And one last thing, Dimitri said in closing. This didn’t apply only to foxes.

  The theory ‘can also, of course, apply to human beings’.25

  Looking back, it was a historic statement.

  Two years after Richard Dawkins published his bestseller about egoistic genes, concluding that people are ‘born selfish,’ here was an unknown Russian geneticist claiming the opposite. Dmitri Belyaev’s theory was that people are domesticated apes. That for tens of thousands of years, the nicest humans had the most kids. That the evolution of our species, in short, was predicated on ‘survival of the friendliest’.

  If Dmitri was right, our own bodies should hold clues to prove this theory. Like pigs, rabbits, and now silver foxes, human beings should have got smaller and cuter.

  Dmitri had no way to test his hypothesis, but science has since advanced. When in 2014 an American team began looking at human skulls from a range of periods over the past 200,000 years, they were able to trace a pattern.26 Our faces and bodies have grown considerably softer, more youthful and more feminine, they found. Our brains have shrunk by at least 10 per cent, and our teeth and jawbones have become, to use the anatomical jargon, paedomorphic. In plain English: childlike.

  If you compare our heads to those of Neanderthals, the differences are even more pronounced. We have shorter and rounder skulls, with a smaller brow ridge. What dogs are to wolves, we are to Neanderthals.27 And just as mature dogs look like wolf puppies, humans evolved to look like baby monkeys.

  Meet Homo puppy.

  Source: Brian Hare, “Survival of the Friendliest,” Annual Review of Psychology (2017).

  This transformation in our appearance accelerated roughly fifty thous
and years ago. Intriguingly, that’s around the same time Neanderthals disappeared and we came up with a slew of new inventions–like better sharpening stones, fishing lines, bows and arrows, canoes and cave paintings. None of this appears to make evolutionary sense. People got weaker, more vulnerable, and more infantile. Our brains got smaller, yet our world got more complex.

  How come? And how was Homo puppy able to conquer the world?

  4

  Who better to answer this question than a true puppy expert? Growing up in Atlanta in the 1980s, Brian Hare was crazy about dogs. He decided to study biology, only to find out that biologists weren’t too interested in dogs. After all, canines may be cute, but they’re not all that clever.

  In college, Brian took a class with Michael Tomasello, a professor in developmental psychology who would become his mentor and colleague. Tomasello’s research focused on chimps, a species generally deemed far more interesting than dogs. During his sophomore year, Brian, then just nineteen, assisted in administering an intelligence test.

  It was a classic object choice test in which a tasty treat is hidden and subjects are given hints about where to find it. Human toddlers ace this test, but it stumps chimpanzees. No matter how emphatically Professor Tomasello and his students pointed to the spot where they had hidden a banana, the apes remained clueless.

  After another long day of gesticulating, Brian blurted out, ‘I think my dog can do it.’

  ‘Sure,’ his professor smirked.

  ‘No, really,’ Brian insisted. ‘I bet he could pass the tests.’28

  Twenty years later, Brian Hare is himself a professor in evolutionary anthropology. Using a series of meticulous experiments, he’s been able to demonstrate that dogs are incredibly intelligent, in some instances even smarter than chimpanzees (despite dogs’ smaller brains).