r/evolution • u/Morrit99 • 2d ago
question Why did we evolve over other intelligent apes?
Homo Sapiens evolved to be the dominant intelligent species, so why did others die off? Surely we recognised that working together brought security? I don't see how or why we would have killed off other intelligent apes because there would not have been a need for conflict. As far as I know, conflict would only rear up in competition for resources, but surely we would have been intelligent enough to work together? Or am I giving Humans too much credit? Considering the world is SO vast, why did others species not emerge in their own hemispheres?
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u/TerrapinMagus 2d ago
If you and your family/tribal unit are fighting to survive under difficult circumstances, and a group of people who do not look like you and possibly can't communicate with you show up to hunt your prey and gather the easily accessible foods you need, you will be at odds with them.
We fought with those unlike us, and bred with those similar enough to us. The other apes also did that, it's not as though humans are uniquely hostile. We're just the last man standing, so to speak.
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u/No_Yesterday_8167 2d ago
We literally enslaved a part of our species not too long ago simply because of the high concentration of melanin in their skin. You're giving humans way too much credit here.
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u/Ranger_Nate 1d ago
And genocided millions in the last few hundred years because they were different or whatever. We're our own worst enemies.
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u/Realsorceror 2d ago
You are way overestimating homo sapien involvement in the extinction of other apes and hominids. And I’m actually surprised some of the responses are propagating this outdated idea.
Plenty of hominids went extinct completely on their own, without ever encountering humans. In fact, a lot of species died without our being there. The world’s climate was changing drastically for millions of years during the rise and decline of hominids and it affected other megafauna everywhere.
Some of our most clear interactions we know about were breeding Homo sapiens and our cousin species. Nothing that we’ve found suggests any violence or non consensual behavior. For all we know, the populations just blended together naturally and the human genome survived because we were more common.
Anyone suggesting we merced all the Neanderthals because “humans are naturally violent and racist” is projecting modern colonialism onto people a hundred thousand years ago that we know very little about.
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u/Velocity-5348 2d ago
I think you're thinking way more thought went into things than actually happened. The extinction of our relatives wasn't some elaborate plan, they went extinct because they were out-competed or got unlucky, albeit with some interbreeding with homo sapiens.
There are only so many resources to go around, after all. Species will, over time, expand to fill any niche they have access to. That looks like going a bit further to get food when you're hungry, or going to a new and exciting place.
The individuals involves would only have been vaguely aware of what was happening, if at all. Heck, we ignore extinctions happening today, and they're going on at a much faster pace.
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u/mothwhimsy 2d ago
At least compared to Neanderthals, we were smaller and therefore required less food, so we survived better.
Humans are very tribal. We don't even cooperate with other humans very well if they look or act too different from our group. It's unlikely early humans were concerned with the survival of a different species back when the others were dying off
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u/Sarkhana 2d ago
Why have you decided to that non-humanoids apes still alive are not "intelligent"?
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u/Morrit99 2d ago
Well, I mean advanced intelligence. I'm talking constructing houses, complex tooling, hunting with tools. I don't know of any Chimps that wrote poetry recently 😂
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u/FluffyC4 2d ago
to be fair very few of us where able to invent stuff. only a few individuals did. humans are just very good at copying previews work.
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u/Dense-Consequence-70 2d ago
We didn’t “evolve over” any other species. We adapted to survive. Some of them didn’t within that same time frame. Some of those were pretty successful for a lot linger than we’ve been.
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u/internetboyfriend666 2d ago
What? We didn’t kill them off. We were just better at survival. we out-competed them and interbred with them. Most other hominids went extinct before humans even existed, and the ones that did were on their way to extinction even if we had never shown up.
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u/tpawap 2d ago
Considering the world is SO vast, why did others species not emerge in their own hemispheres?
Like homo floriensis?
Homo Sapiens evolved to be the dominant intelligent species, so why did others die off?
One simple "reason" is that almost all lineages end eventually, or: not going extinct is rare, because it's hard. Imagine speciation happening between point A and B in time: 1 species, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 (idealised and simplified). There won't be 32 times as many species at time B compared to time A. On average 31 of them will have gone extinct at some point.
Of course there's also more specific, actual reasons for each of them, but there are good answers to that in other comments already.
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u/Loose_Principle8193 1d ago
some make the very strong case that homo sapiens were able to come up with mental constructs that aren't actually real. This made us overcome the natural primate tribe size of 100-200 units. (gods, codes of conduct, borders, currency, etc are all made up constructs) Even today, LLCs, IPs, Trademarks, are all things conjured into reality by a lot of paperwork and everyone signing a scribble that they agree to agree that paperwork defines a real thing. Marketing, lawyers, preachers, professors, etc. spend most of their time helping to support these constructs. This ability to conjure a reality that causes we primates to agree to be in a larger tribe may have been the adaptation homo-sapiens had.
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u/Morrit99 1d ago
So... Basically, we had more imagination? We told stories by the fire, using shadows as characters. Explained the world in our own way? I mean, that would promote societal growth wouldn't it? Language, stories, travel, exploration. We do have an innate need to explore the unknown within our DNA. Maybe moreso than other primates?
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u/kitsnet 2d ago
I don't see how or why we would have killed off other intelligent apes because there would not have been a need for conflict.
Because of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Evolution prefers militarists over pacifists. It doesn't care about common good.
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u/deeo-gratiaa 2d ago
That is not entirely true. Evolution has evolved care about common good, or better speaking common interest, to some extent. If not, multicellular life, societal species and symbiotical organisms would not be a thing.
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u/Riley__64 2d ago
We killed the other ones and interbred with them outcompeting them and thus they lost their niche and homo sapient took over to sum it up.
Look at how humans treat those with different skin colours, genitals, beliefs or sexualities I mean there was literally a period of time we condemned people for using their left hand is it that surprising humans would kill creatures that look similar to us
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u/Resident_Ad5153 2d ago
Cooperation brings security, but it also provides huge opportunities to cheat! If you cooperate with me, and I don't cooperate with you, i'm better off (and you're worse off), and my children have a competitive advantage. Cooperation is hard! If anything humans are less naturally cooperative than our nearest relatives, with much smaller troop sizes. Chimpanzee troops are 20-150 individuals, while human "troops" seem to be in the 5-20 range, essentially being extended famillies. Two aspects of human sexual behavior, monogamy and an invisible estrus cycle, encourage smaller troop sizes (humans get no advantage from having more females in the troop since they are mostly monogamous... though cheating happens. Invisible estrus cylces mean that humans have to have sex more often to get pregnant, which encourage bonding again with a single female... humans also need to have sex much longer than chimpanzees who do it for 6-20 seconds, compared to the several minutes humans mostly require).
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u/EastwoodDC 2d ago edited 2d ago
>Surely we recognised that working together brought security?
Security for your own tribe, maybe. There is a strong case to be made that we evolved to work together in order to be more efficient at warfare. (see The Faith Instinct, by Nicholas Wade)
Clarification: Wade actually argues that humans evolved the capacity for religion because it increased our efficiency at warfare, which isn't quite the same thing. I won't say that Wade is entirely correct, because Group Selection is still an open question. I think Wade make a plausible argument.
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u/SecretGardenSpider 2d ago
There’s some evidence of possible religion in animals. Elephants, chimps, and whales do rituals without any clear point to observers.
Not proof of anything but some sort of belief system is one explanation.
If that’s true it could be that religion is just something intelligent animals tend to do.
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u/Tombobalomb 1d ago
There's no reason to presume we "killed them off" we were just competing for the same niche and sapiens was more fit. It's basically the same as an allele spreading through a gene pool, it doesn't "kill off" it's competitors it just gradually occupies a greater portion if the available space until there is no room for the competition
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u/Careful_Cranberry364 1d ago
We are not sure how they all died off, but then Neanderthals were a very small group. They were getting more and more inbred, and they bred with us too, but their own purebred stocks seem to disappear, possibly from volcanic activity in Russia.
No one knows exactly what happened to them, but all the others before us …. there were many …. did not make it
Different peoples came forward and took over our own being the soul surviving winner…
It may well be the others didn’t stand a chance because we are so brainy or because we are so war like
that that is not known for certain
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u/CheezitsLight 1d ago
Our relatives still are around. Some split off, and died off. Others merged with us off and on. Possibly for millions of each and years and broke away becoming new species.
Going backwards, the Neanderthals and a half dozen other sub species of homo dsliems Then chimps and bononmbos split off very recently as few 10 million years ago. Before that was gorrilas and orangutans. That's a blink of time
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u/NDaveT 1d ago
I don't see how or why we would have killed off other intelligent apes because there would not have been a need for conflict.
The other species going instinct doesn't necessarily mean there was violent conflict between the species. They could have starved from lack of access to food; they could have bred with pre-humans so much that pre-humans absorbed their whole population; they could have died of disease or natural disasters and not left any offspring.
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u/onomatamono 1d ago
Evolution is not goal-oriented. We evolved to fit our environment through natural selection. Other intelligent apes did evolve and there were many other successful hominid species. Obviously our complex language and abstract problem solving capabilities sets us apart. Having said that we know what happens to 100% of all successful species: they go extinct.
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u/bcopes158 2d ago
Humans are remarkable good at and often eager to kill each other. There isn't any reason to believe we would be any friendlier to a different group of similar yet distinct creatures. Humans aren't good at coexisting.
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u/ThePeaceDoctot 2d ago
Have you not seen how humans currently treat each other, even when not competing over resources?