Nautilus

The Mystery of Human Uniqueness

If you dropped a dozen human toddlers on a beautiful Polynesian island with shelter and enough to eat, but no computers, no cell phones, and no metal tools, would they grow up to be like humans we recognize or like other primates? Would they invent language? Without the magic sauce of culture and technology, would humans be that different from chimpanzees?

Nobody knows. (Ethics bars the toddler test.) Since the early 1970s, scientists across the biological sciences keep stumbling on the same hint over and over again: we’re different but not nearly as different as we thought. Neuroscientists, geneticists, and anthropologists have all given the question of human uniqueness a go, seeking special brain regions, unique genes, and human-specific behaviors, and, instead, finding more evidence for common threads across species.

In the old days, the main hypotheses were behavioral. “Humans

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus3 min read
Humpback Whales Caught Humping
Two photographers in Maui, out on a boat, spotted a pair of humpback whales in January 2022. They cut the engine and drifted, as the whales approached their boat and began to circle, just 15 feet or so below the surface. Dipping their cameras a foot
Nautilus5 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Scientists and Artists as Storytelling Teams
This article is part of series of Nautilus interviews with artists, you can read the rest here. Zoe Keller is an artist on a mission to capture the beauty of biodiversity before it’s too late. Working in both graphite and digital media, she meticulou
Nautilus7 min read
The Unseen Deep-Sea Legacy of Whaling
First come the sleeper sharks and the rattails and the hagfish, scruffily named scavengers of the sea, along with amphipods and crabs who pluck delicately at bits of flesh. Tiny worms, mollusks, and crustaceans arrive in their hordes of tens of thous

Related Books & Audiobooks