A Puzzling Primate: A Selection from Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success (2017)
“You and I are members of a rather peculiar species, a puzzling primate. Long before the origins of agriculture, the first cities, or industrial technologies, our ancestors spread across the globe, from the arid deserts of Australia to the cold steppe of Siberia, and came to inhabit most of the world’s major land-based ecosystems—more environments than any other terrestrial mammal. Yet, puzzlingly, our kind are physically weak, slow, and not particularly good at climbing trees. Any adult chimp can readily overpower us, and any big cat can easily run us down, though we are oddly good at long-distance running and fast, accurate throwing. Our guts are particularly poor at detoxifying poisonous plants, yet most of us cannot readily distinguish the poisonous ones from the edible ones. We are dependent on eating cooked food, though we don’t innately know how to make fire or cook. Compared to other mammals of our size and diet, our colons are too short, stomachs too small, and teeth too petite. Our infants are born fat and dangerously premature, with skulls that have not yet fused. Unlike other apes, females of our kind remain continuously sexually receptive throughout their monthly cycle and cease reproduction (menopause) long before they die. Perhaps most surprising of all is that despite our oversized brains, our kind are not that bright, at least not innately smart enough to explain the immense success of our species.
Perhaps you are skeptical about this last point?
Suppose we took you and forty-nine of your coworkers and pitted you in a game of Survivor against a troop of fifty capuchin monkeys from Costa Rica. We would parachute both primate teams into the remote tropical forests of central Africa. After two years, we would return and count the survivors on each team. The team with the most survivors wins. Of course, neither team would be permitted to bring any equipment: no matches, water containers, knives, shoes, eyeglasses, antibiotics, pots, guns, or rope. To be kind, we would allow the humans—but not the monkeys—to wear clothes. Both teams would thus face surviving for years in a novel forest environment with only their wits, and their teammates, to rely on.
Who would you bet on, the monkeys or you and your colleagues? Well, do you know how to make arrows, nets, and shelters? Do you know which plants or insects are toxic (many are) or how to detoxify them? Can you start a fire without matches or cook without a pot? Can you manufacture a fishhook? Do you know how to make natural adhesives? Which snakes are venomous? How will you protect yourself from predators at night? How will you get water? What is your knowledge of animal tracking?
Let’s face it, chances are your human team would lose, and probably lose badly, to a bunch of monkeys, despite your team’s swollen crania and ample hubris. If not for surviving as hunter-gatherers in Africa, the continent where our species evolved, what are our big brains for anyway? How did we manage to expand into all those diverse environments across the globe?
The secret of our species’ success lies not in our raw, innate, intelligence or in any specialized mental abilities that fire up when we encounter the typical problems that repeatedly challenged our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Pleistocene. Our ability to survive and thrive as hunter-gatherers, or anything else, across an immense range of global environments is not due to our individual brainpower applied to solving complex problems. . . . Stripped of our culturally acquired mental skills and know-how, we are not so impressive when we go head-to-head in problem-solving tests against other apes, and we certainly are not impressive enough to account for the vast success of our species or for our much larger brains.
In fact, we have seen various versions of the human half of our Survivor experiment many times, as hapless European explorers have struggled to survive, stranded in seemingly hostile environments, from the Canadian Arctic to the Gulf Coast of Texas. . . . These cases usually end in the same way: either the explorers all die, or some of them are rescued by a local indigenous population, which has comfortably been living in this ‘hostile environment’ for centuries or millennia. Thus, the reason why your team would lose to the monkeys is that your species—unlike all others—has evolved an addiction to culture. By ‘culture’ I mean the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people. Your team’s only hope is that you might bump into, and befriend, one of the groups of hunter-gatherers who live in the central African forests, like the Efe pygmies. These pygmy groups, despite their short stature, have been flourishing in these forests for a very long time because past generations have bequeathed to them an immense body of expertise, skills, and abilities that permit them to survive and thrive in the forest. . . . The secret of our species’ success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities.”—Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2017)
