Today’s New York Times article has nothing to do with Facebook, in fact, it’s 15,000 years older than the six year old social website. Check out: “Supremacy of a Social Network“.
It’s so amazing it was hard to find just one key quote:
The two principal traits that underlie the human evolutionary success, in Dr. Hill’s view, are the unusual ability of nonrelatives to cooperate – in almost all other species, only closely related individuals will help each other – and social learning, the ability to copy and learn from what others are doing. A large social network can generate knowledge and adopt innovations far more easily than a cluster of small, hostile groups constantly at war with each other, the default state of chimpanzee society.
It’s the most concise report detailing the transition from primates to humans – it’s got it all from walking upright to tools to monogamy, to the building of societies.
Clever.
Tags: anthropology, chimpanzee, human, NY Times, society