The distinction between ourselves and other animals is, arguably, artificial. Animals are more like humans than we might think – or like to think…. Chimps, for example, have simple gestural and verbal communication. They make crude tools, even weapons, and different groups have different suites of tools – distinct cultures. Chimps also have complex social lives and cooperate with each other.
As Darwin noted in Descent of Man, almost everything odd about Homo sapiens – emotion, cognition, language, tools, society – exists, in some primitive form, in other animals. We’re different, but less different than we think.
Homo sapiens is the only survivor of a once diverse group of humans and human-like apes, the hominins, which includes around 20 known species and probably dozens of unknown species.
The extinction of those other hominins wiped out all the species that were intermediate between ourselves and other apes, creating the impression that some vast, unbridgeable gulf separates us from the rest of life on Earth. But the division would be far less clear if those species still existed. What looks like a bright, sharp dividing line is really an artefact of extinction.
