Posts Tagged ‘society’

The Rise of Humanity

Monday, March 14th, 2011

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.