Karin Bojs: after all, We are unique in a few areas

I would be able to draw plenty of stories about birds that can talk, monkeys that can interpret the letters, the bees that count, chimps understand what other people think and other examples that it's actually not so easy to identify what is unique to us humans.

But let me get straight to the question of what distinguishes us from our nearest relatives.

For 80,000 years ago, there were at least three other kinds of people on earth: the neanderthals, Denisovamänniskor and dvärgmänniskorna Homo floresiensis in the current Indonesia.

The other dog out. We are now closer to 8 billion.

the neanderthals who lived in Europe and parts of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before we arrived there – through multiple ice ages. They were dexterous to make tools, and in no way some approved with amendments.

But we, at least, seems to have been better at music and art.

From our istidsgrottor, from the time when we first arrived to Europe, are preserved flutes of fågelben and ivory. No such flutes are preserved from the neanderthals.

And we made the cave paintings and figurines, advanced fine art with motifs of animals and people. The ”art” that can surely be attributed to neanderthals is much more rudimentary, mostly in the form of simple geometric figures.

to interact with the other, hold together the large groups and avoid inbreeding. A week came, a new study that shows how people moved in Europe during the istidskultur called the aurignacien and lasted from approximately to 43,000 to 33,000 years ago.

At the time lived only about 1,500 people in central and western Europe, according to calculations by the researchers, Isabell Schmidt, and Andreas Zimmermann report in the journal Plos One.

A number of previous researchers have landed in similar numbers, while others are a little higher. Very sparsely populated, it was in all the cases.

What is really interesting in Schmidt's and Zimmermanns study are maps that show how people moved.

It seems to have been common to live in groups of no more than forty persons. But these small groups met annually and lived for a time together in large common camp. People could go twenty miles to a meeting, where they changed the jewelry and raw materials, stone tools and, at times, met someone to have children with.

to keep these great samlingsläger was when the migratory fish, such as salmon, went to the. Then there was food enough for all.

we ate namely fish.

It is highly doubtful if the neanderthals did it. In this week's issue of the journal PNAS reports a research team from Leipzig, the analyses of nitrogen and carbon isotopes from neanderthal. They state that their staple was the medium sized mammals, such as reindeer and horses. Not huge mammoths. And not the fish.

We, however, were not only good at hunting mammoth and fish. We were able to capture other small fast animals, like squirrels and småapor. It shows a different study, published in Nature Communications this week by a group of researchers from the Max planck institute for scientific history in Jena.

the research team found support for the small game in Sri Lanka as early as 45.000 years ago.

Large and slow animals were easier to hunt, and sometimes could such a game become extinct when humans arrived in a new place. Then, it was essential for our survival and success, the researchers write in Jena, we were flexible and were able to go over to the more elusive animals.

a list of a few behaviors that – according to the latest robust evidence – actually separates us modern humans from our predecessors.

We played the instruments. We made figurative art. We were able to keep together large networks. We ate fish and we were able to hunt small game.

the Typical human, and unique to only us.

Read more: Scientists may have found the man's earliest works of art