Cognition Center. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist, journalist, and author of children’s books. A member of the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, she works with Duke University as well as Lola Ya Bonobo in the Congo. Their books include The Genius of Dogs.From page 99:Visit Brian Hare's website and Vanessa Woods's website.Our species was not doing much better. Mega droughts, erupting volcanoes, and advancing glaciers threatened our survival, and we may have neared extinction.We love the page 99 test for our book! It was so fun to actually open to page 99 and see what we had written. This quote is behind our favorite ideas because especially right now, it feels like things have never been worse. Seriously, we don’t want to curse ourselves but how could 2020 possibly get any worse??
But this is not the only moment our species has been in crisis. And as we see in the quote above, we were plagued with challenges that eclipse what we are experiencing now.
We (obviously) made it through. And understanding how we survived will help us survive again - - and it wasn’t being the strongest or meanest or even the smartest. A little known fact is that for most of the 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. They had brains as big or bigger than ours. For millennia their technology rivaled our own.
But around 50,000 years ago, we made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over the other human species. What happened? In Survival of the Friendliest, we propose that like dogs, we unintentionally domesticated ourselves. This process of ‘self domestication’ altered our bodies and minds. An increase in friendliness super-charged our ability to innovate and our technology exploded. While others have proposed our species grew friendlier or smarter, self domestication links the two; becoming friendlier caused the critical increase in our social intelligence that allowed us to thrive while the other humans died out.
Self-domestication also uncovers the neurobiological link that makes us the most tolerant and cruelest species on the planet. Just as a mother bear is most dangerous around her cubs, we are at our most dangerous when a group we love is threatened. The same brain network that allows for our friendliness, becomes dampened. We do not see people in a group threatening ours as fully human. Cruelty follows.
This new understanding has major implications for our modern world, including how we govern ourselves, educate our children, and build cities. We can develop actionable solutions based on the knowledge that to survive and flourish, we must expand our definition of who belongs.