 In comparing human and animal creativity, we humans win on both the quantitative and qualitative levels. This seems obvious and natural to us, that we should be more creative and clever than animals, apes included. And yet we share with those most similar to us – the Bonobo (Pan paniscus) and the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) – fully 98.6% of our genetic makeup. How can such a tiny genetic difference account for such an enormous difference in behavior and potential? And why, if we raise a young chimp as if it were human, do his abilities fail to align with ours as he grows, whereas if a human child is raised by animals – and this has actually happened – his abilities align with those of the species that raises him?
According to science, the extraordinary development of human faculties, foremost among which being creativity and all its adaptive components, derives from several causes that a neither obvious nor very well known. To identify them we must go back to a time when the differences between humans and the great apes were not so evident.
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Humans vs. animals
Descent of the larynx
Development of language
Development of the cerebral cortex
Development of abstract thought (symbolization and planning)
Sense of self
Formation of a transmittable culture
| | The first cause is the descent of the larynx. The setting is Africa, about 2 million years ago, and the climate is drying. In order to breathe better, and after a couple of million years of walking around more and more often on two feet (and therefore of using their hands to manipulate tools), our African hominid ancestors need longer necks.
Generation after generation, as their necks grow longer and the morphology of the throat changes, the larynx is now located at a lower point in the throat than in any other mammal. This is relevant because the larynx is, of course, the main organ of phonation – i.e. the production of sounds. In its new, lower position, the human larynx can now produce a much greater range of distinct and repeatable sounds, unlike our fellow mammals. As such, our ancestors are now physiologically capable of speech.
This advantage is not fully shared, however, by Neanderthal man, whose evolution took different paths until eventually ending in extinction, the reasons for which remain unclear.
The second cause is the development of language. Communication is useful, even in the Stone Age as our ancestors slowly migrate from Africa to Asia and Europe.
We shouldn’t imagine lengthy discourse, but rather sequences of organized and recurring sounds that serve as signals for coordinating group activities, such as hunting.
Over the course of many hundreds of thousands of years, as the exchanges between individuals gradually come to resemble word-based discourse, their brains become larger, reconfiguring and developing whole new areas. To use Gregory Bateson’s term, this is an example of coevolution, which is to say a phenomenon whereby the development of factor A encourages the development of factor B, which in turn encourages the development of factor A, and so forth.
Logically, the third cause is the development of new cerebral areas.
The fossil record tells us that between 2 and 2.3 million years ago (when we had already tamed fire, were wearing clothes, conducting funeral rites and social organization was based on communication between individuals), the brains of our ancestors grew alarmingly fast, going from the 75-800 cm3 of Homo habilis to 1000-1200 cm3 of Homo erectus until reaching the 1200-1500 cm3 of Homo sapiens.
The volume of the contemporary human brain averages around 1400 cm3, and can reach 1550 cm3. But the most important development is not so much the brain’s greater dimensions, but rather the differentiation of the neural centers, particularly in the prefrontal area, that enable the development of a complex and articulated language, which in turn enables us to express thoughts that are organized by symbols and planning.
Planning means being able to conceive and complete an action geared toward an objective. Symbolization means being able to assign recurrent and shared meaning to anything – whether it be a gesture, an inscribed sign, or a sequence of sounds – that can become a reciprocally understood word. Symbolization and planning are the two features of thought that determine the existence of what we call ‘culture’. Essentially, it is the interaction between cerebral development and linguistic development that allowed the formation of a culture which, endowed with symbolization (for representing the world) and planning (for modifying the world), also has an enormous adaptive value, insofar as it enables us to interact more effectively with our surroundings, and to do so not through random, long-term genetic variations but through (relatively) rapid cognitive improvements.
The fourth cause is therefore the ability to use symbols to formulate and easily manage complex thoughts with a high degree of abstraction that refer not only to objects but also to concepts and the relationships between objects and concepts.
An additional and very important consequence of this is the development of a sense of self – in other words, the ability to speak and think made it possible to conceive of oneself as a thinking being. Our ancestors are finally able to say “I”.
The surviving figurines, cave paintings, tools and burial sites tell us that the human race was already capable of symbolization 30-40,000 years ago, which by definition means we were able to produce abstract thought: not just objects, but complex ideas and their connections with other ideas. Among these is the concept of beauty, for the decoration and the symmetry found in many early human artefacts are clearly done for purely esthetic reasons, with no functional value at all.
The last and perhaps the most significant consequence of the creation of a complex and codified language lies in the fact that culture, whose formation is contingent upon language, is also transmittable, thanks to language. This is what enables humans, unlike even those animals genetically closest to us, to rely on the enormous competitive advantage represented by the cultural heritage developed and passed on by our forebears over thousands and thousands of years, which we can study and learn and make our own, without having to start over again every time in order to understand and interpret the world.
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