– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)
We probably remember about 1/10,000 of a lived life: Amounting to about 204,960 seconds (thus, each second representing a memory; or about 57 to 60 hours); vocabularies average 50,000 words; episodes are made up of objects and actions. About 2 1/2 days of information. And, this information store is constantly changing and updating itself. The belief that it is much larger is based on the fact that we live in a networked world of people, technology, and information sources that allows us to feel a sense of a much larger mnemonic world.
– Jay Seitz (2019, “Mind Embodied: The Evolutionary Origins of Complex Cognitive Abilities in Modern Humans”)
There is a major organizing concept that drives all human growth and development that will inform the backbone of our story. It’s called “neoteny” or the retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult and a major feature of human evolution.
Neoteny is the slowing down of brain and bodily development through infancy, childhood, and adolescence resulting in the heightened cognitive, affective, and creative abilities of human adults. And those capabilities are found nowhere else in the animal kingdom although there are glimpses of many of those abilities in other species.
Ancestors of modern humans (“hominins”) include the Great Apes (“hominids”), that is:
- Archaic humans
- Orangutans
- Gorillas
- Bonobos and chimpanzees
Hominid families also have an extensive developmental period similar to ours. Let’s see what this means.
Neoteny
Some of the brightest non-human primates are the bonobos, which are closely related to members of the chimpanzee family. They communicate vocally with their kin but use similar calls or vocal signs to mean diverse things so that the receiving bonobo must determine the meaning from the context, a characteristic of modern life not at all unfamiliar to us.
They possess the capacity for self-awareness as they easily pass the mirror self-recognition test. That is, they can distinguish between themselves and others while looking into a mirror. But they also display a keen interest in aspects of themselves such as a red mark placed surreptitiously on their face and the assumption is that this behavior exemplifies self-awareness. So, it turns out we may not be the only creatures on the planet that possess self-awareness or higher-order or secondary consciousness.
Moreover, their facial expressions and hand gestures are very similar to humans and, what’s more, are easily understood by us suggesting that both species—bonobos and humans—are picking up on intentional states conveyed by way of the body.
They engage in observational learning by watching others, including other humans, a sophisticated way to learn that young children and a few other species quickly pick up on.
But, most extraordinarily, they have been taught up to 3,000 words using geometric-like symbols called lexigrams. They can communicate with about 500 or so of them, as they can