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Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down

Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.

bobxmax 1y ago
Your strongly held belief that flies in the face of the dominant belief among today's leading linguists
antisthenes 1y ago
Thanks for validating my data-hoarding tendencies. I'm just following my Homo Archivium genetic programming.
moffkalast 1y ago
> calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress" It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who learned sign language have supposedly never done so. To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have information that you don't, and you can access it in their writings or give them information with yours. If you can't conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make sense at all.
ghc 1y ago
If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true. We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation. Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories. Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ . I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.
- mattdeboard 1y ago
  ...but is there another species that writes things down for other individuals in their species to reference?
  - glenstein 1y ago
    I think that's exactly the right question and the answer is pretty clear that there is no comparison. I do understand that there's a little bit of something going on with water-based mammals like orcas and dolphins being able to teach certain skills to their young and so there's a notion of intergenerational knowledge there. But we're just a different order of magnitude in terms of our capability of transmitting intergenerational knowledge and it's not even close. It's almost disappointing because there's no interesting question of comparison between us and other species. As I mentioned in another comment, I'm skeptical of the questions that imply a kind of species essentialism, suggesting that there's such a thing as a one particular trait that distinctly makes us human. I think the real answer to questions like that are vast convergences of immense clusters of facts relating to our evolutionary history and our morphology and so on. I don't think there's any like one single thing. But I do think in comparison to other species a rather elegant way of distinguishing this is to put to our written traditions which as far as I know don't really have any precedent. And if that doesn't blow you away in terms of how miraculous and special are evolutionary trajectory is, I don't suspect anything would. But the important thing is that you don't need a species essentialism to be impressed with who and what we are.
  - Retric 1y ago
    Ants, but that’s a whole other discussion around what constitutes writing. Which is why people look into specific elements of language not just huge generalizations.
    - mattdeboard 1y ago
      Interesting comment. Why ants? Do they use symbols to express complex ideas to each other?
cpa 1y ago
I’d love for that to be true, but our species dates back 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago. Writing is definitely not a fundamental trait of our species, although once we got this update, things started moving quickly.
- mattdeboard 1y ago
  The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...
  - jimkleiber 1y ago
    What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
    - mattdeboard 1y ago
      I think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.
      - bee_rider 1y ago
        I guess it is hard to say… if you looked at humans in any random moment when we’ve been around, I suppose we’d look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments progress generation-to-generation). But, it does feel like there’s something in our storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about the universe). From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of the loop. A big one, though.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  More like 5000 or 6000 years ago at least for permanent writing I'd say? I definitely read about cuneiform tablets and cylinders from 3500BCE. Before that might have been on wood so we don't know much about it.
quickthrowman 1y ago
How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on. Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing was invented. I’m definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in prehistory.
- mattdeboard 1y ago
  I'm not saying there wasn't any cultural advancement prior to the invention of using written language to store information for use by others. Just that there wasn't any human behavior that distinguished it as unique among all other species on earth.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    I’m not sure I follow, which other animals have cities and agriculture?
    - mattdeboard 1y ago
      Bees.
      - quickthrowman 1y ago
        I never even considered insects but bees are a perfect example, I can see where you’re coming from now. A hive as a city, honey as a crop they farm by collecting pollen and refining it. There’s even specialized roles and a class hierarchy, just like humans! Ants build nests that could similarly be considered cities as well.
        mattdeboard 1y ago
        exactly! it's really hard to find something that's truly _uniquely_ human...
jcranmer 1y ago
> rather the fact we write down what we know Writing is a very recent invention, about 5-6kya for the oldest known script, and effectively one of the last inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya, and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest domestication of crops and animals. Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over literate Mayan city-states and still not adopt any writing or proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make you ask "what is a writing system?").
- gnulinux 1y ago
  > Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society Isn't this going a bit too far? Sure they didn't have a modern writing system like Mayans, or even proto-writing systems like Inca's quipu but we do have hard evidence of Teotihuacan society communicating language with painted symbols (e.g. findings in La Ventilla). It's unclear to me how we can say they didn't leave writing to future generations (especially assuming probably there were a lot more stuff that was lost to time than we can see) Also, this comment seems to slightly misunderstand what the GP said imho. Yes writing is a new invention, but e.g. paintings in Lascaux are about 17k years old. Which means even before Catalhoyuk level civilizations, humans were leaving symbols for later generations to look and decipher. This is the same "archival" process GP is talking about. Humans leave a message to future generations. It seems like our biology must prime us to do it, because we see it universally. Whether the messages we leave are writing, painting, music or whatever... humans still produce things for people that'll come after them. But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community. So, perhaps ironically, part of being human-smart is having human-precise hands that can paint/write. Without this ability, we end up like bonobos, elephants, dolphins etc perhaps smart but for all they know their parents were the Adam and Eve.
  - mattdeboard 1y ago
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keybored 1y ago
Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief about anthropology? Just research it for ten minutes. Some beliefs should be lightly held.
- deleted 1y ago
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- mattdeboard 1y ago
  > Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief? What an interesting thing to say/ask.
  - keybored 1y ago
    Where’s the lie?
antonkar 1y ago
You’re directionally right, modern comparative mythology studies suggest that people were telling stories ~100 000 years ago when they went out of Africa, they had an “oral library”. We find many similar tropes alongside their migration roads. The top specialist is Berezkin, he collected thousands of tropes and put it on a map http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/ http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/
contrarian1234 1y ago
By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic. However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level. I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point where there is writing but it's not very accessible... And Egyptian civilization is slow to develop (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)
- igravious 1y ago
  > (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh) i'm not sure if this is the case or not but if it is lack of evidence may not be evidence of a lack! they may have done and it may have not been transmitted to us
  - contrarian1234 1y ago
    If they had a "national epic" of sorts then you'd expect it referenced everywhere. The Iliad is not important b/c it just a story that happened to be preserved. It's a foundational piece of literature for the whole region and people are making allusions to it everywhere There are for instance Greek plays that are of the form you imagine. Where they're important, referenced, and no surviving copies exist
- glenstein 1y ago
  >By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. The Cherokee had an extremely well developed written tradition, so I don't think that inference would follow at all.
  - earleybird 1y ago
    From the early 1800's, created by a single person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
rqtwteye 1y ago
To my knowledge Homo Sapiens developed long before writing was used. And there are plenty of tribes who use only oral transmission. I agree with the idea that we are archivists, be it written or oral. With written you can archive much more info though.
DonaldFisk 1y ago
The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire. By a strict definition of writing (e.g. what we're doing now), people have only been able to write for a few thousand years, and much of the adult population was illiterate until recently. Define it widely enough (visual communication of information), and some other animals (e.g. tigers) also "write": https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-specific-heights/ https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-s... You could reasonably argue though, that we have passed on information over long periods of time orally, e.g. in epic poems, and that (as far as we know) no other animal does that.
- mattdeboard 1y ago
  Re: oral transmission , I'm operating under the (unsubstantiated) assumption at least some species of dolphins and whales, at least, are conveying "tribal" information orally between generations (locations of reliable hunting grounds, stuff like that). There's no definitive proof of this, afaik, it's just something that seems likelier than not to me. Re: defining it broadly... The definition I've landed on thru defending my stated belief in these comments is, "Conveying information symbolically by etching it into or onto a durable medium so it can be referred to later." But I guess an important quality of "writing" is that it's information that could otherwise be communicated with spoken language, and that the written and spoken languages are isomorphic.. maybe? Honestly this is the first time I've put this idea out into the world for criticism so I'm still working thru these things :)
- starspangled 1y ago
  > The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire. There is some suggestion that other animals can control fire. https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-just-humans.php https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-jus... I don't know if that's completely verified or not, but it seems like a problematic definition. You could imagine a group of intelligent birds or apes could discover ways to control fire. No, the thing that truly sets us apart from other animals is the ability to create the hydrogen bomb.
darksaints 1y ago
Writing is a new phenomenon. It's certainly a novel ability, but genetically we were around for a few million years before we even developed civilization, tens of thousands more before behavioral modernity, and only in the last 10k years have we developed writing. But other commenters have already said as much. I would contest that what makes us unique is recursion as a general ability. In that sense, writing is a method of recursively building knowledge. But we also have it with spoken language, as we recursively build vocabulary and grammar into complex communication. We have it with tools, as we are the only species (at least as far as I know) that uses tools to make tools. We also seem to have it with our physical abilities: witness the constantly broken records in competition sports.
- mattdeboard 1y ago
  Chimps and crows are documented using tools to make tools. Crows in particular can make compound tools. Orangs make cutting tools out of two rocks they pound together. Neither tool use nor manufacture is uniquely human!
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timeon 1y ago
This part of title is interesting: "...once thought to be unique to humans" Which could apply to anything in future.
NoTeslaThrow 1y ago
This seems sort of a secondary cause of our unique linguistic abilities. Afaik no other animal can use recursive grammars. Certainly not to the same extent. Anyway this also excludes all the humans that never wrote anything, which is most of them. If anything our verbal history is our strongest and most ancient culture.
1024core 1y ago
Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so? For the longest time, humans memorized their stories and passed them down to younger generations by rote memorization.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so? No, absolutely not. It's barely 5,000 years old.
lithocarpus 1y ago
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lo_zamoyski 1y ago
> Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. "Strongly held belief" would suggest authority on the subject, but I suspect this is not the case. By comparison, while I accept the efficacy of vaccines on the authority of the authors of scientific texts on immunology and draw on circumstantial information to infer probable reliability of said authorities, I wouldn't say I have a "strongly held belief" either as this would suggest that I, personally, have authority on the subject, which I don't. My knowledge, as descriptively rich as it might be, nonetheless rests on a chain of authority. In any case, the first problem in these discussions is the superficial notion of "language" that's often employed. "Language", as a system of signs, entails signification, and the kind of signification human language engages in is not merely a degree removed from the kind of signification other animals engage in. There is a difference in kind. There is a big difference between a distress call and expressing the proposition "There are five red berries in the tall bush". A distress call requires no abstract concepts; the latter proposition requires five. While we can say there is something like or analogous to syntactic structure in a distress call or some series of joined calls, none of these require concepts. And abstraction of concepts is the most central and unique faculty of rationality, as it is by means of concepts that we can reason about the world. They are the seat of intentionality, not mere imagism.
tombh 1y ago
Whilst some here are critiquing this point of view due to writing's recency, there's actually some academic support for the ancient impact of "archival" if we can consider a broader definition for it, namely: linguistic works such as stories, poems, songs etc. A classic study of this is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Literacy_2nd_ed.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Li... The basic idea is that say, lyrics, are a technological innovation that "stores" information across time and space because it aides in recall.
mppm 1y ago
As others have pointed out, writing is a very recent phenomenon, but your intuition seems correct in general - what sets humans apart from chimps and bonobos is efficient transfer learning to future generations. If you are interested, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello makes this point in detail. Tomasello argues that chimps, while being impressive learners and problem solvers in some ways, actually have extremely inefficient cultural transfer, which prevents runaway cultural evolution that has happened in humans.
simonh 1y ago
I think the key differentiator is Prefrontal Synthesis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_synthesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_synthesis This is the ability to mentally compose conceptual objects in complex relationships. In fact I don’t think there really is one single significant differentiator. There are many. However without this one technology beyond simple single function tools such as a hand axe or pointed stick, and simple linguistic statements wouldn’t be be possible. The linguistic composition described in the article sound similar if dramatically more primitive, but I don’t think we can assume it comes from a common ancestor. It may well be that this capability has a different neurological basis, since these animals don’t have a prefrontal cortex. So it seems plausible this is a case or parallel evolution of a very rudimentary similar feature. Fascinating stuff though.
nine_k 1y ago
I would say that the real killer invention of humans, compared to other apes, is the way to overcome the Dunbar number and organize very large coordinated groups. The rise of agriculture in Mesopotamia enabled by it predates writing systems, and the first cuneiform records are purely numerical, for asset tracking. Huge armies, like these of Alexander or Genghis Khan, consisted of mostly illiterate warriors. I'd argue that the invention of the virtual hierarchies, when a peasant submits to a king who he never saw in person, eventually led to the invention of gods, and later a supreme "creator of the universe" figure. That allowed for even more complex cooperative social structures, still across mostly illiterate populations, even though holy scriptures play a central role in such religions.
wqaatwt 1y ago
> but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build As far as we can tell humans were doing that orally for thousands of years before writing became a thing. You had major civilizations with complex bureaucracies that were not effectively almost entirely illiterate..
MarcelOlsz 1y ago
Interesting that this is the only place on the internet where "Homo Archivum" has ever been uttered.
cmsj 1y ago
Surely what sets us apart is complexity? Our brains are able to understand and process very complex abstract concepts and we can communicate those to each other. Oral tradition is almost an unavoidable byproduct of that, and while writing it down is certainly useful, it's clearly the case that humans were archiving and disseminating information orally for a long time before we invented writing.

bobxmax 1y ago

Your strongly held belief that flies in the face of the dominant belief among today's leading linguists

antisthenes 1y ago

Thanks for validating my data-hoarding tendencies. I'm just following my Homo Archivium genetic programming.

moffkalast 1y ago

> calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress" It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who learned sign language have supposedly never done so. To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have information that you don't, and you can access it in their writings or give them information with yours. If you can't conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make sense at all.

ghc 1y ago

If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true. We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation. Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories. Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ . I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.

mattdeboard 1y ago
...but is there another species that writes things down for other individuals in their species to reference?
- glenstein 1y ago
  I think that's exactly the right question and the answer is pretty clear that there is no comparison. I do understand that there's a little bit of something going on with water-based mammals like orcas and dolphins being able to teach certain skills to their young and so there's a notion of intergenerational knowledge there. But we're just a different order of magnitude in terms of our capability of transmitting intergenerational knowledge and it's not even close. It's almost disappointing because there's no interesting question of comparison between us and other species. As I mentioned in another comment, I'm skeptical of the questions that imply a kind of species essentialism, suggesting that there's such a thing as a one particular trait that distinctly makes us human. I think the real answer to questions like that are vast convergences of immense clusters of facts relating to our evolutionary history and our morphology and so on. I don't think there's any like one single thing. But I do think in comparison to other species a rather elegant way of distinguishing this is to put to our written traditions which as far as I know don't really have any precedent. And if that doesn't blow you away in terms of how miraculous and special are evolutionary trajectory is, I don't suspect anything would. But the important thing is that you don't need a species essentialism to be impressed with who and what we are.
- Retric 1y ago
  Ants, but that’s a whole other discussion around what constitutes writing. Which is why people look into specific elements of language not just huge generalizations.
  - mattdeboard 1y ago
    Interesting comment. Why ants? Do they use symbols to express complex ideas to each other?

cpa 1y ago

I’d love for that to be true, but our species dates back 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago. Writing is definitely not a fundamental trait of our species, although once we got this update, things started moving quickly.

mattdeboard 1y ago
The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...
- jimkleiber 1y ago
  What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
  - mattdeboard 1y ago
    I think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I guess it is hard to say… if you looked at humans in any random moment when we’ve been around, I suppose we’d look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments progress generation-to-generation). But, it does feel like there’s something in our storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about the universe). From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of the loop. A big one, though.
barbazoo 1y ago
More like 5000 or 6000 years ago at least for permanent writing I'd say? I definitely read about cuneiform tablets and cylinders from 3500BCE. Before that might have been on wood so we don't know much about it.

quickthrowman 1y ago

How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on. Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing was invented. I’m definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in prehistory.

mattdeboard 1y ago
I'm not saying there wasn't any cultural advancement prior to the invention of using written language to store information for use by others. Just that there wasn't any human behavior that distinguished it as unique among all other species on earth.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  I’m not sure I follow, which other animals have cities and agriculture?
  - mattdeboard 1y ago
    Bees.
    - quickthrowman 1y ago
      I never even considered insects but bees are a perfect example, I can see where you’re coming from now. A hive as a city, honey as a crop they farm by collecting pollen and refining it. There’s even specialized roles and a class hierarchy, just like humans! Ants build nests that could similarly be considered cities as well.
      - mattdeboard 1y ago
        exactly! it's really hard to find something that's truly _uniquely_ human...

jcranmer 1y ago

> rather the fact we write down what we know Writing is a very recent invention, about 5-6kya for the oldest known script, and effectively one of the last inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya, and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest domestication of crops and animals. Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over literate Mayan city-states and still not adopt any writing or proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make you ask "what is a writing system?").

gnulinux 1y ago
> Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society Isn't this going a bit too far? Sure they didn't have a modern writing system like Mayans, or even proto-writing systems like Inca's quipu but we do have hard evidence of Teotihuacan society communicating language with painted symbols (e.g. findings in La Ventilla). It's unclear to me how we can say they didn't leave writing to future generations (especially assuming probably there were a lot more stuff that was lost to time than we can see) Also, this comment seems to slightly misunderstand what the GP said imho. Yes writing is a new invention, but e.g. paintings in Lascaux are about 17k years old. Which means even before Catalhoyuk level civilizations, humans were leaving symbols for later generations to look and decipher. This is the same "archival" process GP is talking about. Humans leave a message to future generations. It seems like our biology must prime us to do it, because we see it universally. Whether the messages we leave are writing, painting, music or whatever... humans still produce things for people that'll come after them. But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community. So, perhaps ironically, part of being human-smart is having human-precise hands that can paint/write. Without this ability, we end up like bonobos, elephants, dolphins etc perhaps smart but for all they know their parents were the Adam and Eve.
- mattdeboard 1y ago

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keybored 1y ago

Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief about anthropology? Just research it for ten minutes. Some beliefs should be lightly held.

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mattdeboard 1y ago
> Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief? What an interesting thing to say/ask.
- keybored 1y ago
  Where’s the lie?

antonkar 1y ago

You’re directionally right, modern comparative mythology studies suggest that people were telling stories ~100 000 years ago when they went out of Africa, they had an “oral library”. We find many similar tropes alongside their migration roads. The top specialist is Berezkin, he collected thousands of tropes and put it on a map http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/ http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/

contrarian1234 1y ago

By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic. However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level. I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point where there is writing but it's not very accessible... And Egyptian civilization is slow to develop (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)

igravious 1y ago
> (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh) i'm not sure if this is the case or not but if it is lack of evidence may not be evidence of a lack! they may have done and it may have not been transmitted to us
- contrarian1234 1y ago
  If they had a "national epic" of sorts then you'd expect it referenced everywhere. The Iliad is not important b/c it just a story that happened to be preserved. It's a foundational piece of literature for the whole region and people are making allusions to it everywhere There are for instance Greek plays that are of the form you imagine. Where they're important, referenced, and no surviving copies exist
glenstein 1y ago
>By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. The Cherokee had an extremely well developed written tradition, so I don't think that inference would follow at all.
- earleybird 1y ago
  From the early 1800's, created by a single person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

rqtwteye 1y ago

To my knowledge Homo Sapiens developed long before writing was used. And there are plenty of tribes who use only oral transmission. I agree with the idea that we are archivists, be it written or oral. With written you can archive much more info though.

DonaldFisk 1y ago

The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire. By a strict definition of writing (e.g. what we're doing now), people have only been able to write for a few thousand years, and much of the adult population was illiterate until recently. Define it widely enough (visual communication of information), and some other animals (e.g. tigers) also "write": https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-specific-heights/ https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-s... You could reasonably argue though, that we have passed on information over long periods of time orally, e.g. in epic poems, and that (as far as we know) no other animal does that.

mattdeboard 1y ago
Re: oral transmission , I'm operating under the (unsubstantiated) assumption at least some species of dolphins and whales, at least, are conveying "tribal" information orally between generations (locations of reliable hunting grounds, stuff like that). There's no definitive proof of this, afaik, it's just something that seems likelier than not to me. Re: defining it broadly... The definition I've landed on thru defending my stated belief in these comments is, "Conveying information symbolically by etching it into or onto a durable medium so it can be referred to later." But I guess an important quality of "writing" is that it's information that could otherwise be communicated with spoken language, and that the written and spoken languages are isomorphic.. maybe? Honestly this is the first time I've put this idea out into the world for criticism so I'm still working thru these things :)
starspangled 1y ago
> The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire. There is some suggestion that other animals can control fire. https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-just-humans.php https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-jus... I don't know if that's completely verified or not, but it seems like a problematic definition. You could imagine a group of intelligent birds or apes could discover ways to control fire. No, the thing that truly sets us apart from other animals is the ability to create the hydrogen bomb.

darksaints 1y ago

Writing is a new phenomenon. It's certainly a novel ability, but genetically we were around for a few million years before we even developed civilization, tens of thousands more before behavioral modernity, and only in the last 10k years have we developed writing. But other commenters have already said as much. I would contest that what makes us unique is recursion as a general ability. In that sense, writing is a method of recursively building knowledge. But we also have it with spoken language, as we recursively build vocabulary and grammar into complex communication. We have it with tools, as we are the only species (at least as far as I know) that uses tools to make tools. We also seem to have it with our physical abilities: witness the constantly broken records in competition sports.

mattdeboard 1y ago
Chimps and crows are documented using tools to make tools. Crows in particular can make compound tools. Orangs make cutting tools out of two rocks they pound together. Neither tool use nor manufacture is uniquely human!

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timeon 1y ago

This part of title is interesting: "...once thought to be unique to humans" Which could apply to anything in future.

NoTeslaThrow 1y ago

This seems sort of a secondary cause of our unique linguistic abilities. Afaik no other animal can use recursive grammars. Certainly not to the same extent. Anyway this also excludes all the humans that never wrote anything, which is most of them. If anything our verbal history is our strongest and most ancient culture.

1024core 1y ago

Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so? For the longest time, humans memorized their stories and passed them down to younger generations by rote memorization.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so? No, absolutely not. It's barely 5,000 years old.

lithocarpus 1y ago

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lo_zamoyski 1y ago

> Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. "Strongly held belief" would suggest authority on the subject, but I suspect this is not the case. By comparison, while I accept the efficacy of vaccines on the authority of the authors of scientific texts on immunology and draw on circumstantial information to infer probable reliability of said authorities, I wouldn't say I have a "strongly held belief" either as this would suggest that I, personally, have authority on the subject, which I don't. My knowledge, as descriptively rich as it might be, nonetheless rests on a chain of authority. In any case, the first problem in these discussions is the superficial notion of "language" that's often employed. "Language", as a system of signs, entails signification, and the kind of signification human language engages in is not merely a degree removed from the kind of signification other animals engage in. There is a difference in kind. There is a big difference between a distress call and expressing the proposition "There are five red berries in the tall bush". A distress call requires no abstract concepts; the latter proposition requires five. While we can say there is something like or analogous to syntactic structure in a distress call or some series of joined calls, none of these require concepts. And abstraction of concepts is the most central and unique faculty of rationality, as it is by means of concepts that we can reason about the world. They are the seat of intentionality, not mere imagism.

tombh 1y ago

Whilst some here are critiquing this point of view due to writing's recency, there's actually some academic support for the ancient impact of "archival" if we can consider a broader definition for it, namely: linguistic works such as stories, poems, songs etc. A classic study of this is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Literacy_2nd_ed.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Li... The basic idea is that say, lyrics, are a technological innovation that "stores" information across time and space because it aides in recall.

mppm 1y ago

As others have pointed out, writing is a very recent phenomenon, but your intuition seems correct in general - what sets humans apart from chimps and bonobos is efficient transfer learning to future generations. If you are interested, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello makes this point in detail. Tomasello argues that chimps, while being impressive learners and problem solvers in some ways, actually have extremely inefficient cultural transfer, which prevents runaway cultural evolution that has happened in humans.

simonh 1y ago

I think the key differentiator is Prefrontal Synthesis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_synthesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_synthesis This is the ability to mentally compose conceptual objects in complex relationships. In fact I don’t think there really is one single significant differentiator. There are many. However without this one technology beyond simple single function tools such as a hand axe or pointed stick, and simple linguistic statements wouldn’t be be possible. The linguistic composition described in the article sound similar if dramatically more primitive, but I don’t think we can assume it comes from a common ancestor. It may well be that this capability has a different neurological basis, since these animals don’t have a prefrontal cortex. So it seems plausible this is a case or parallel evolution of a very rudimentary similar feature. Fascinating stuff though.

nine_k 1y ago

I would say that the real killer invention of humans, compared to other apes, is the way to overcome the Dunbar number and organize very large coordinated groups. The rise of agriculture in Mesopotamia enabled by it predates writing systems, and the first cuneiform records are purely numerical, for asset tracking. Huge armies, like these of Alexander or Genghis Khan, consisted of mostly illiterate warriors. I'd argue that the invention of the virtual hierarchies, when a peasant submits to a king who he never saw in person, eventually led to the invention of gods, and later a supreme "creator of the universe" figure. That allowed for even more complex cooperative social structures, still across mostly illiterate populations, even though holy scriptures play a central role in such religions.

wqaatwt 1y ago

> but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build As far as we can tell humans were doing that orally for thousands of years before writing became a thing. You had major civilizations with complex bureaucracies that were not effectively almost entirely illiterate..

MarcelOlsz 1y ago

Interesting that this is the only place on the internet where "Homo Archivum" has ever been uttered.

cmsj 1y ago

Surely what sets us apart is complexity? Our brains are able to understand and process very complex abstract concepts and we can communicate those to each other. Oral tradition is almost an unavoidable byproduct of that, and while writing it down is certainly useful, it's clearly the case that humans were archiving and disseminating information orally for a long time before we invented writing.