Translator: Natalia Valencia Henao Reviewer: Sigal Tifferet
Thank you. It's so wonderful to be here.
I've been so moved
by all these incredibly courageous personal stories,
so now I want to tell one.
I married a Neanderthal.
(Laughter)
I only just found out.
I went to this talk by Steve Churchill, who is the world's expert on Neanderthals,
and he puts up a slide of a Neanderthal.
And I'm sitting next to my husband Bryan,
I'm like - (Laughter)
I mean he had everything!
He had the prognathic jaw,
the heavy brow ridge,
he even had the barrelled chest and the stubby little fingers.
And the kicker was when he leaned over to me and said
- because Steve had said how big Neanderthal heads were,
they were like 1600 cubic centimetres -
and Bryan leaned over and said,
'I measured my head in college. It's 1600 cubic centimetres.'
(Laughter)
And I was like: So much is making sense to me now!
(Laughter)
How is it?
You know I've been married for ten years,
and I never realized I could fly a spaceship up your nose!
I mean your head is actually really quite big!
So later, when Bryan and I were trying to kill each other,
this is something I know that all married people do at least once,
but Bryan and I are writing another book together,
so it happens all the time,
and we were in this throw-down fight when I realized,
because I have this crazy imagination,
and it turned into this 3D video game in my head,
where he was the Neanderthal,
and I was us, I was like the modern human,
you know, skinny, flat-faced, small head.
And I realized I was not going to win!
It was just - it was just like physics.
- We've lots of physicists here -
And it's a size issue.
And then I was wondering,
it spun out into this larger question:
How did we ever win?
Like, how did we ever beat a Neanderthal?
And it wasn't just Neanderthals,
there were four other species of humans that were around when we were around,
and you know we weren't even doing that well,
we almost went extinct a couple of times.
(Laughter)
And so the question that I deal with a lot is:
What is it that makes us human?
But I think probably the real question is what makes us the human?
You know? What makes us the human, and why are we still around?
So, anyway, I want to talk about this guy,
who should have his own reality TV show,
except for the fact that he is dead.
But, seriously, he should be more famous than he is.
He was a Russian geneticist
at a time when it was a really bad idea to be a Russian geneticist.
You know, Stalin had decided that genetics was the enemy of the people,
and it was torn from textbooks, it was banned from the curriculum.
I would have really liked 1930s Russia, because genetics was my worse subject.
(Laughter)
But I mean, then he also took the geneticists out,
and sent them to forced labour camps and shot them.
And I think that was probably a little bit extreme.
(Laughter)
So it was under these conditions
that Dimitri, his name is Dimitri Belyaev,
and he had this brother whom he adored,
I mean his older brother Nikolai.
He moved to Moscow and basically took care of Dimitri
since he was in the second grade, about eight years old.
So he kind of raised him.
His older brother was a geneticist,
so Dimitri wanted to be a geneticist.
And then, one day, during one of Stalin's purges,
they took Dimitri's older brother out and shot him without trial.
You can imagine under these conditions and with this kind of personal story
how courageous Dimitri was
to then conduct the greatest experiment in genetics in the 20th century.
What he did was -
he was really interested,
like a lot of people have been all the way back since Darwin,
in domesticated animals.
Because, domesticated animals,
they have this really weird motley of traits all in common.
So they have like floppy ears, curly tails and splotchy coats,
and these changes to their behaviour,
and sexual reproductive system and smaller teeth, smaller heads.
And not all domesticated animals have exactly these traits,
but these traits keep popping up.
And the one thing they do have in common,
is that all of them are super friendly and much less aggressive
than their wild cousins.
And so the question was always: Well, how did they get this way?
You know, you can understand breeding an animal for smaller teeth,
but why would you breed them for a smaller head?
Why would you want them to have splotchy coats?
And so Dimitri then decided to do what nobody else has done before or since,
and he was going to domesticate an animal from scratch.
Because we didn't have a time machine to go back and see what happened
and take some notes as the first wolves were turning into dogs.
So he took this population of silver foxes,
and he selected them for one criterion, just one.
He had this oven mitt,
because these foxes were essentially wild, they would bite if you tried to hold them,
so he had this oven mitt, and he put it out to a fox,
and if the fox approached, then he would keep them,
and breed them for another generation.
And in a really short amount of time, these foxes, who were black, silver,
- the Russians used them for their coats -
started to look like this.
They had floppy ears, they had smaller teeth,
they had splotchy coats.
If you opened the door to their rooms,
they would run up to you and wag their tails,
and bark and lick your face.
So who does that sound like?
Right?
So just by selecting for one thing, whether or not they were friendly,
Dimitri got all these other changes just by accident.
So, here is the thing about my Neanderthal husband:
He worked with dogs and found out
that they actually had a really strange increase in social intelligence.
So, if you throw a ball and your dog doesn't know where it is,
they will look at you, and you will be like: 'It's that way.'
And then they will run off
and usually, sometimes, will go and find the ball.
This is seriously impressive,
because in order to do this
your dog has to understand that you know that they don't know where the ball is,
and that you're then trying to help them
by giving them a gesture that they understand.
And this is seriously meta, right?
Even our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, they can't do this.
And they have this really strange ability
to read our body language in a way that no other animal does,
and this is extraordinary.
So, it turns out that these foxes that Dimitri had domesticated,
they also have this ability.
So basically, just by selecting for friendliness,
not only do you get
all these physical and behavioural and sexual changes,
but actually you have an increase in intelligence.
Let me introduce you to somebody else who should have their own reality TV show:
Bonobos.
I said that our closest relatives were chimpanzees,
but we have two closest living relatives,
just like you have two uncles or two cousins.
So, all you need to know about bonobos is that they're just like people,
except for super more awesome.
Females are in charge
- Tania would like that -
Females are in charge,
they don't kill each other, and have sex all the time.
Doesn't get better than that.
(Laughter)
So what we were interested in is:
Say I give you a $100,
and there's somebody in the next room that you've never seen before,
and you won't see again.
And you can choose to give this person
some of your $100, or you can just choose to keep it.
So, economic theory predicts that we're just going to keep all the money,
because, you know, why would you give any of it away?
But it turns out that across cultures, and across genders and age,
we tend to give as much as half.
And this was seen as something that is really uniquely human,
called altruism.
We do lots of these things, we donate to charity, we give blood,
and we really hadn't seen it in any other animal.
Let me show you this game with Saki here.
This is Saki.
I've just given her the same choice:
her $100 is that she hasn't had any breakfast,
and she's got a big pile of fruit salad.
So Aliki is next door, she doesn't really know him.
Is she going to share, or is she going to keep it all?
She opens the door, she lets in Aliki,
and shares her food.
And that's just to show you they like playing these games, it's fun.
This is like a sanctuary,
they go out and play in a really big forest afterwards.
So, it turns out
that not only do bonobos like to share, they love to share.
And if I rephrase that game to you,
and if there was somebody -
if you had the choice to share the $100 with a stranger,
or with one of your really good friends,
most of us would prefer to share with our friends or family members.
Bonobos don't; they would prefer to share with strangers.
Their friend will be next door going -
'Hey, c'mon, we're buddies, let me in!'
And the bonobo will go and be like:
'No, there's this stranger here, come and eat my food.'
Anyway, what we also found in bonobos was:
They have an increase in social intelligence.
So we gave them this cooperative game,
where you have to cooperate with another bonobo
to get the food.
You could only do it by cooperating.
And it turns out that bonobos are better than chimpanzees at this cooperative game,
even though the chimpanzees that we tested were already experts in this game.
I mean, they'd been playing it for months,
and the bonobos saw it for the first time, and it was just like 'boom!'.
So because of their increased friendliness and tolerance,
and this is the thing about bonobos,
is that they are incredibly tolerant of each other.
I mean, not only do they prefer to share with strangers,
but this friendliness, this lack of aggression,
has allowed them to overcome one of nature's laws.
And that is:
If you are bigger and stronger than somebody else,
then you are dominant.
So, here was this bonobo that I loved at the sanctuary that you just saw
called Mimi.
She was like the little grandmother,
she was all wrinkled, and a little bit haggish,
but she was in charge, right?
And one of the bonobos there, Totonga,
he was this big male.
And he decided that - he was like a third bigger than she was,
and he was just done with this bonobo lifestyle,
and he was going to chimpanzee it up, right?
So, one day he just went across to her
and backhanded her across the face as hard as he could.
And the whole sanctuary went quiet.
And, you know, she took it like a champ.
She was so high she got whiplashed.
Then she just turned around, she looked at him,
and he just started to run.
(Laughter)
Because he knew that five of her friends would be after him.
And they were, within seconds.
And chased him all around the night building
and into the forest.
And when he kept acting like a chimpanzee,
they beat him up so badly he almost lost his testicles.
So this is not to say that bonobos cannot be violent,
but they just use violence to maintain peace and order,
and not to dominate.
So what does all this mean?
We usually think of us as domesticating other species,
so back to this question
that domestication was something that we did.
But what probably happened was this:
So two wolves walk into a bar
- Just joking, I'm not going to tell any bad jokes -
Two wolves walk up to a village, and one of them says,
'Do you smell something?'
And the other wolf sniffs and says, 'It's not me.'
And the first wolf says,
'Smells like poop. It smells delicious!'
So lots of people have had this idea,
but I actually came up with this idea myself,
because when I was potty training my daughter Malu,
we would just leave her pants off,
and leave potties all over the house.
It was not the most genius idea, but all I could come up with,
I was so sleep deprived.
And we had this case of the disappearing poop.
She would come up to me and go, 'Mommy, I did a doodoo.'
And I would be like: 'Great, which one?'
And she was two, so she would go 'goo-er',
so I would go around all the potties to try and find the doo.
And they were all clean, all of them.
And this went on for weeks.
And I was, like, what's happening? Is she going outside?
Is she going to explode?
And then I noticed that every time she left the room,
our dog Tassy would follow her,
and then come back with a really smug look on his face.
(Laughter)
What probably happened is
that the first wolves hanging around human campsites
figured out that we make a lot of trash, and other things that are nutritious.
But we hate large carnivores.
I mean when we arrived in Europe
we wiped out almost all of them, except for wolves.
So if wolves were aggressive towards people,
and they were larger than they are today,
we just would have killed them.
So only the super friendly wolves would have survived.
And what we learned from the foxes is
that when you select for friendliness, an extreme pressure for friendliness,
then you get all these other changes that happen by accident.
So these wolves would have started
to look very quickly, very different to the other wolves.
They would have got floppy ears and splotchy coats and curly tails.
So we would have been able to see them.
And not only that,
they would of had an increase in social intelligence,
so they would have been able to read our body language and our intentions,
and that makes them all of the sudden not a fanged carnivore;
that makes them a really valuable social partner.
So we didn't domesticate dogs; they domesticated themselves.
And if this could happen in dogs,
then probably this could happen in bonobos,
because we didn't domesticate bonobos, they live in a giant jungle.
And if it could happen in bonobos -
and let me take you back, like 50,000 years ago,
something really extraordinary happened to us:
we had this explosion of technology.
We got pyrotechnology, watercrafts, all these tools.
We had this Acheulean hand-axe for like a million years,
and then, all of the sudden, we had all this other stuff.
And everybody always assumes it was because we got smarter.
But at the same time, or just before this started to happen,
we also started to live in really large social groups.
So we had to become much more tolerant of one another,
and if we had then this extreme pressure, again, to be friendly and tolerant,
then maybe all this other stuff,
being really skinny, the small head, the small teeth,
would have happened by accident,
including this increase in social intelligence
that then allowed for all this technology.
So when we are thinking about the problems and the challenges that we face,
the human paradox is that if we see someone as being like us,
as being the same race, religion, sports team, social class,
whatever arbitrary boundary we define,
then we are the most cooperative species on the earth.
But if we see someone as being different from us,
then we are the cruellest species on earth.
And the challenge for us is that we need to learn how to be more bonobo,
to understand how to see everyone as being like ourselves.
Because the problems that we face, and the challenges for the future,
are not questions of intelligence and technology;
they are questions of tolerance.
The thought that I want to leave you with is:
Be more bonobo.
Because as the Neanderthals found out,
it's not the survival of the fittest out there;
it's survival of the friendliest.
Thank you.
(Applause)