eli5, what makes humans so advanced compared to other species on Earth?
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By evolution, humans are essentially an all-or-nothing gamble on these big brains of ours, more so than any other animal on earth, though there are plenty of others who have advanced and complicated brains, and use them to great effect.
It is important to understand that intelligence *has a cost*, and that cost is in energy and diet: You need a lot of fats in your diet to make a fancy brain, and it consumes a pretty significant amount of energy to operate.
Herbivores would be a bad fit for an advanced brain like ours, because their source of food doesn’t really require smarts to pursue (Grass doesn’t put up much chase or require complicated hunting tactics) , and doesn’t provide the requisite ingredients to grow and maintain a brain in large amounts. This did not stop cows and horses from becoming *social animals*, interestingly, so clearly they’re managing it reasonably well, but it wouldn’t have worked for us.
So humans went more extreme on the brains than anything else, and adjusted our diets to match: Lots of the animals I listed also have very specialized digestive systems, to get the absolute most out of the food they eat, heavily specializing in efficient stomachs, sometimes several of them. We don’t have this, or the highly acidic stomachs of vultures that make them good at eating rancid carrion, or many other narrow specializations: Instead, we’re adapted as generalists, able to eat *almost* anything, including a lot of plants that are toxic even to other omnivores (dogs being allergic to beans like chocolate, but not humans is a widely known example).
Why adapt as generalists? Because it means that when we use our huge brains to gain access to a new source of food, odds are high we can make the time and effort worth it. Our brains are really good at giving us access to new, weird food sources through clever means: You wanna dive underwater and scrounge up as many mollusks and crescateans from the bottom of the ocean as you can grab while holding your breath? Sure, we can probably digest most of those. You’ll have to use your huge brain to do some trial-and-error and learn which ones are poisonous, but you’ll eventually figure it out. Wanna dig up random plants and start gnawing on roots until you find a tasty one? You don’t have big paws or claws to help you do that, but you got your big brain to make a makeshift shovel, so you can manage it, and you can probably digest those safely too. Gonna try to throw rocks at birds to kill and eat them? Have at it, your stomach is ready to make the most out of them, and your hand-to-eye coordination is *almost* good enough to make the shot!
Humans are adapted to *experiment* and *figure out what works* on a case-by-case basis, and that is a big evolutionary gamble. Sure, most of our ancestors (and the things we are specialized to do) hunted by chasing prey to exhaustion, essentially a violent cross-country jog with an antelope, but we evolved a very keen mind to seek out ways to *supplement* those adaptations with alternate sources of food that eventually started overshadowing our main gig, though we never lost those long-running adaptations.
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