Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
IQ tests developed for industrialized societies are of no use in the
dwindling number of hunting and gathering cultures that still exist in
some parts of the world. In some of these groups, people cannot count
beyond the fingers on one hand or read, but this does not mean that
they are less intelligent than people in industrialized societies. Rather,
their intelligence is used for cognitive activities other than the ones that
have become adaptive in Western cultures. For example, without writ-
ten records, individuals in traditional societies have rich oral traditions,
including grasps of family networks that are unparalleled in industrial-
ized societies. People in many nonindustrialized societies also grow up
learning to recognize plants and “read” animal tracks with a facility that
amazes visiting anthropologists. In short, people everywhere use their
highly evolved brains to develop cognitive skills that are appropriate
for their particular environments—be they from a huge, bustling city
or a desolate desert in a remote part of the planet. A poignant example
is offered by cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene:
Years of experience with hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, New Guinea,
or the African bush led anthropologists to marvel at the aborigines' ability
to
read
the natural world. They decipher animal tracks with amazing ease.
Meticulous inspection of broken branches or faint tracks in the dirt allows
them to quickly figure out what animal has been around, its size, the direc-
tion in which it went, and a number of other details that will be invaluable
for hunting. We are essentially “illiterate” about all these natural signs. It is
Anthropologists are at a disadvantage when it comes to assessing
intelligent behaviors in prehistoric hominins, who are no longer around.
Scientists must therefore resort to inferring past behaviors from skeletal
remains and the archaeological record of material culture, the oldest
signs of which are stone-tool cut and percussion marks for flesh and
marrow removal on bones dated to 3.4 million years ago in Dikika,
and blunt stone tools by that time. The earliest recognized actual stone
tools are also from Ethiopia and date to about 2.6 million years ago.
