Question: What makes us human

Jess Wade answered on 19 Jun 2015:

This is such a difficult question! We know we aren’t plants and we aren’t bacteria and we probably aren’t animals- but some people seem to be more like animals than others! Unlike monkeys and other apes, we can walk on two legs and that means we can use our hands. We have quite big brains. Birds can fly pretty well, dogs can smell quite well, wombats can dig quite well- well- we can’t do those, but we can think quite well. We can communicate. We don’t think there is much literature or art for fish! We seem to have spent most of the time out of any species thinking about survival and reproduction. Fifty thousand years ago we had the same bodies and maybe some kind of language but we didn’t have art, and we only had tools to cut meats up. around 40,000 years ago we started making art and musical instruments. Then we stopped being ‘hunter/gatherers’ and started to focus on agriculture, cities, markets, governments… The human mind has looked at huge things- the universe, DNA, the mind. There is loads of stuff we don’t understand- like what really defines us- but we’re still working on all those questions. The fact that we’re asking the questions is what makes us human.