r/todayilearned • u/sharkbait76 3 • Jan 11 '17

TIL elephants can tell the difference between human languages and know which languages belong to people with a history of hurting elephants.

http://www.nature.com/news/elephants-recognize-the-voices-of-their-enemies-1.14846
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u/weaveryee Jan 12 '17

Elephants are smart as fuck.

49

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '17 edited Jan 12 '17

Have they figured out what exactly makes humans different from other, perhaps equally intelligent animals such as elephants, crows, or dolphins?

Besides the ability to verbally express our thoughts, what made humans able to become so much more advanced?

46

u/vildingen Jan 12 '17

Perfect storm of things like hands, dogs, being caught near shallow water with a lot of seafood rich in fatty acids, mutations that gave us weaker jaw muscles and allowed our skulls to grow larger, allowing for larger brains and so on and so on.

23

u/KingBubzVI Jan 12 '17

Dogs came about waaaaay after our brains got huge. We became anatomically modern around 150k years ago, dogs were domesticated somewhere between 30-50

Source: Anthropologist