The other night a friend and I got really high and came up with a new theory of evolution.
Humans used to be like animals, before they progressed and built language and society and learned to use their bodies in different ways with tools to aid them. If humans can, why can't animals?
What if we were once sharing the world with very advanced animals (This would explain how pyramids were built) and one day we went to war with them, wiped them out and wiped them from our history books.
anyways. what you describe is nothing new altough it is doubtful that any civilized animals have existed amongst humans, some animals do inhibit early signs of civilized society.
for example raccoons. have you seen them do stuff? they have their own social order and they take upon stealth missions into human houses to steal food.
or ravens for example. they understand shit. a lot of shit. they can trick people into giving them food. they can use tools to manipulate shit. they know that other ravens are thieving bastards and thus when they have food that they won't eat right away, they will bury that food ONLY when other ravens are not looking.
or for example chimpansees have complex social orders. they trade food for favors and favors for food. they sometimes get into arguments and some others will try to break the fight apart while trying to calm them. they sometimes develop friendships with other chimps. once there was this chimp herd and the leader went into a conflict with one weak skinny chimp. most chimps cheered for the leader, but the skinny chimp had a friend who was also the right hand man of the leader. skinny chimp's friend didn't like that fight and went apeshit on the leader and K.O'd that bitch. But since he betrayed the leader, everyone thought of him as of a traitor now. So the skinny chimp and his friends decided to leave the herd. they then went to adventure around the land together as bros. pretty heartwarming story.
and chimp herds also sometimes organize very professional raids. they climb down the trees and very quietly move to their location. during that time no chimp makes a peep or even a crack. when they reach their target, they surround them very quitely and when leader signals, they go total apeshit sort of like in the recent Planet of the Apes movie where they storm like lunatics doing grazy sounds. and when they return to their herd they will flaunt their kills to those who stayed home
Luke Bennett
Why haven't we trained chimps to use guns yet?
Brody Reyes
But we have
Luke Lopez
who is this semon demon
Ryder Cooper
>What if we were once sharing the world with very advanced animals (This would explain how pyramids were built) No animals, possibly excluding chimpanzees, even remotely approach the threshold of human cognitive capacity, from an anatomical standpoint. We would have long since discovered lions, tigers and bears (oh my) with colossal, enormous Yakub skulls by now if tool-using animals coexisted with ancient humans in the way you describe.
>Humans used to be like animals, before they progressed and built language and society and learned to use their bodies in different ways with tools to aid them. If humans can, why can't animals? This is the more interesting part of your post. Why do we have language and civilization while other animals don't? The development of human consciousness, and language before that, is still something of a mystery. The scientific understanding is that hunting selected gradually for modes of communication that compounded into language, while the rich caloric density of cooked meat allowed the energy surplus necessary to finance brain growth and leisure over time. A positive feedback loop of language and surplus resulted in where we are today. There are other hypotheses like the Stoned Ape theory by McKenna, however, where early man made the leap from bipedal ape to language-forming thinker through the accidental consumption, and subsequent hallucinatory episode of a psilocybe mushroom trip. McKenna of course is on the fringe and widely disregarded as a pseudoscience, but evidence has emerged that pre-civilized man probably did draw inspiration from hallucination at some point. The earliest known "petroglyphs" resemble phosphenes, or the repetitive pattern of some hallucinatory states (with or without psychedelic influence, like the Ganzfeld Effect from sensory-deprivation)
Andrew Jenkins
Holy shit kek
Grayson Wright
video game streamer. don't really remember who she is, so you will have to ask around /v/
Orangutans are smarter than chimps, they just have trouble gathering in large groups do to food scarcity.
Brody Sanchez
i think that our intelligence evolution has more to with our scavenger nature. we weren't particularily strong, we didn't have any special traits. we weren't really fit for anything.
So one useful path was to start using our wits while others went other paths. Like for example chimps decided to seek refuge from trees, gorillas decided to start lifting and we decided to become scanvengers. At first we were like super annoying raccoons. We would steal meat from lions, we would run away in panic when said lion decided that enough is enough. We would eat berries and fruits and shit and then also rotting caracasses when the oppurtunity presented itself.
Since we were such annoying little cunts we were annoying to our own species as well. So we developed social order to at least function as a group but also developed stranger hate to protect ourselves from other annoying cunt proto-humans. From there on it is just a culmination of small incremental changes.
Pictured: the most annnoying vermin cunt in the world a few hundred thousand years back.
And similar behavior is notable in other current day "vermin" animals. I personally think that if any animal has a chance to become human tier intelligent, it is the raccoon.
It is not gonna be rats, because rats have their bases covered due to their fast breeding. It is not gonna be ravens since they know how to fly already and that is too significant bonus for them. And chimps will not become civilized because they are ripped as fuck and thus they don't really need much intelligence to solve their problems, they can go about it the russian way: >If you don't have brains, you better have strength."
Isaac Rivera
Interesting point, but I think your scavenging aspect is overstated. Humans have the capability for endurance-running of any animal. Some hunter-gatherer tribes today still hunt the "traditional" way of chasing prey to exhaustion before stabbing them to death. If you think about it, this itself may have forced the development of forward-thinking humans. How many berries and pieces of mammoth jerky do you have to eat beforehand or carry with you to have enough energy for the hunt, and not starve the next day if you fuck up? It may sound simple, but imagine how difficult timing lunch-breaks at a physically intensive modern job would be without clocks, time-keeping or writing!
Raccoons and rats both too r/selected for cognition, and any marine animal is permanently stunted by their environment - a dolphin and octopus can't cook their food, so they can never really take the next step up. scientificamerican.com/article/cooking-up-bigger-brains/
It's totally possible for chimps to evolve human-like intelligence if they slowly make the transition to cooked meat and hierarchy that rewards tool-using rather than brute-strength hunters.
Benjamin Campbell
*have the greatest capability for endurance-running
Charles Ward
Can't find the actual source, but here is a very similar story. Might be that I remember the story incorrectly and it is this story here, but I am unsure. youtube.com/watch?v=CPznMbNcfO8
Jonathan Peterson
But about dolphin and octopus. What do theiy have to gain from better brain function. They are both top predators in their circles already. They have no need for anything more advanced.
Carter Miller
Octopi and cuttlefish actively cuck each other in their mating seasons, where the more wily feminine male sneaks off with octobae and breeds with her while Chad is distracted. This kind of sexual selection could be a pressure for intelligence, or intelligent-deception, but because of the nutritional limitation they would almost certainly stagnate before developing cognitive skills comparable to humans.
Kevin Jones
How does this explain the pyramids any better than the theory that they were built by humans?
If anything this would just raise more unanswered questions, like "where is the fossil evidence?"