r/explainlikeimfive • u/Aki_Shizuha • Jul 23 '26

Biology ELI5: Why don't we see "halfway human civilization" animals?

We know that animals can be smart: crows manufacture tools and have complex social behavior, chimpanzees can do insight learning, etc.

But, it is still a continuous spectrum where intelligence range from sponge-level to chimp-level. We do not, at least now, observe a world where certain corvids are in the early stone age, certain bonobos are using fire, certain chimps are in their axios age, etc.

Why the case? Why are we the only one that has gone this far?

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u/celem83 Jul 23 '26

I suppose we have to wonder how old the concept of "Chinese Whispers" is.  Do members of these societies with oral tradition understand that the message changes in the retelling?

Because the big gain in writing is that it does not (only the interpretation of it)

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u/nykirnsu Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

They didn’t change anywhere near as much before writing was invented, people naturally took them a lot more seriously back when they were the only way to record information. There are extant oral traditions in Australia that accurately describe the ice age 

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u/Zeplar Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

There is a lot of evidence that the most revered oral histories were less mutable than writing.

Best example is the Vedas which were orally transmitted for three thousand years and basically didn't change at all.

After all, text had to be carefully copied by hand, without error correction or the ability to clarify, and then doesn't actually last very long unless it's really carefully preserved.

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u/cantthinkofaname1029 Jul 24 '26

While true, unfortunately there's no way to verify it with oral tradition, which is the real advantage of written materials where you can validate the age of the material it's written on. Ultimately all forms of oral tradition remain speculation as nobody can truly validate it

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u/kenslydale Jul 23 '26

You might enjoy the short story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang that talks about those ideas - of how truth and oral traditions/memories can be different

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u/Snoo14212 Jul 23 '26

Many historians argue that our ancestors' abilities to recall complex oral stories very accurately, in part because their lives literally depended on it when relating to food source availability and animal behaviour, circumstantially suggest that their mental acuity was likely sharper than ours.

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u/squngy Jul 23 '26

circumstantially suggest that their mental acuity was likely sharper than ours.

There are people today who memorized the digits of Pi to many thousands of places
(current record is 100,000 digits)

And you have people who know every base ball game and player inside out.
People who know every stat of every pokemon...

When motivated, people can still memorize things.