I understand that it took quite a few million years for humans to accommodate to their environment, but why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement. For example why are we into philosophy, writing manifestos, infrastructure, complex design, technology etc while apes aren’t exactly.
Why did it take us 6 million years of hunting to think about farming?
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You’ve asked a lot, so bear with me.
Apes have changed and evolved. They haven’t become humans, but that’s not where their evolutionary branch is headed. But they have changed over the last millions of years, same as us. Recently, some apes/primates have started crafting basic tools to do jobs, which is a major step on civilization development.
We cannot say for absolute certain, but here’s a few things:
Human’s (homo sapiens) have been around approx 300,000 years. The 6 million years of evolution would include a lot of previous divergent evolutions from other lifeforms, including other homo species.
When we were just evolved, we didn’t have languages, we had more basic sounds (think grunt and point sort of communication). Language allows for ideas to be passed on more easily, and between generations.
Add to that that, ultimately, hunter gatherer lifestyles were effective, and account for 90% of human history. The idea that if it’s not broke don’t fox it comes to mind. Then at some point they switched. It’s not understood exactly why we switched, as hunter gatherers had more varied diets, and often worked less. It’s theorized that once humans gathered enough food, they had the freedom to tinker with things like agriculture, as they weren’t at fear of starvation.
This is where civilization can now develop. We had language to convey abstract thoughts, like beliefs, and planning, and teach each other how to grow foods and navigate using stars, and enough food that we didn’t have to spend all our energy worrying about whether we could eat tomorrow. So we could focus on things that didn’t matter in an immediate survival sense.
Very broad strokes there.
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