Humans Are Not So Special After All

Whales mourn, magpies exhibit self-awareness, and Venus flytraps make memories.

- Kate Wong

IT WAS THE TELEGRAM EXCHANGE that sparked an identity crisis for humankind. In 1960 a young Jane Goodall working in a remote forest in Tanzania observed a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard using blades of grass and twigs to fish nutritious termites out of their nest. The primatologist wrote to her mentor, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, to tell him about her observation, which flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that held that only humans made tools.

For decades—centuries, even—scholars have attempted to draw a hard line between our kind and the other organisms with whom we share the planet. They have argued that only humans have culture—sets of learned behaviors, such as toolmaking, that are passed down from generation to generation. They have proposed that only humans think symbolically, using signs to represent objects or ideas. That our species alone is self-aware, capable of planning for the future and experiencing emotions such as joy and fear, love and grief. That only humans are conscious, possessed of an inner world of subjective experience.

For his part, Charles Darwin, writing in the late 1800s, opined that nonhuman animals have the same cognitive abilities and emotions that humans have and that any differences were a matter of degree and not kind. In the absence of any way to reliably read animal minds, however, scientists who studied animal behavior and cognition took the position that ascribing human thoughts, feelings and motivations to animals—anthropomorphism—was a cardinal sin. But in recent decades examples of other species demonstrating these capabilities have emerged from across the tree of life. The findings have spurred fresh thinking about what, exactly, distinguishes Homo sapiens, with our vaunted intellect, from every other species on Earth.