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- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal, naked, large-brained.
Long the master of fire, tools, and language,
but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from our
shared understanding of the past.
Carta brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here,
an exploration made possible by
the generosity of humans like you.
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- Thank you all for this long ride
that I hope was as interesting to you as it was to me.
And I'd like to just say a few words as closing remarks,
using the images from our past symposia.
To summarize what I think we have learned,
we have learned that we learn a lot
from comparing other animals,
be they horses, whales, ravens, or wolves.
There is big messages in understanding the ecology
and the behavior of our fellow habitants of this planet,
and so comparative ethology,
using experiments in the wild and in the lab,
will continue informing us.
We find new fossils.
More importantly, we find new context for the fossils.
We heard about these new drilling programs that give us
pollen profiles and paleo climate information.
Interestingly, we have ancient DNA that allows us
to travel back in time, so to speak, and get glimpses.
Ironically, we now have complete genomes of lifeforms
that only exist in the form of a pinky bone
and a tooth, the Denisovans.
We still don't know how they looked,
because we don't have a single Denisovan skeleton,
but we have the genomes in high quality.
And we can combine this information with
high-quality genomes of all our closely-related relatives,
and compare the incredible dynamics
that happens in these genomes
with almost shuffling of decks, with duplications
of large sequences that contain functional genes
that have done so differentially in each lineage.
We can reconstitute paleo diet
by using stable isotopes, calculus from teeth.
We get a view into what our extinct relatives
used to live on, and how they fuel
these really expansive brains,
and this long dependency of their slowly developing infants,
and manage to shorten the birth interval,
even though that kids are so costly.
This of course involves others in the group.
It involves changes in mating systems and in pair bonding,
and in the role of the kids themselves
in finding their own food,
and finding ways to exploit adults.
Sensory exploitation by cuteness of babies
that are in tune to get what they need
from their parents and their friends.
Comparative brain anatomy teaches us
what has happened to cortical regions
that have been co-opted for new features.
Where did we park this emerging function we call language?
We have ways to image brains as they do tasks,
be they flint-knapping or using an iPad,
and asking what happens in those brains
as they perform these functions.
And the very recent exciting development
of induced pluripotent stem cells
allows some of us to study living neurons
derived from the skin, a little bit of skin
taken from a living ape or from a human,
and we can even use genome editing
to then introduce genetic changes
and watch these neurons in company of some other cell types
acting and connecting,
and starting to have action potentials and so forth.
So I think the last 10 years have seen
a lot of new developments that are extremely exciting.
All this being said, Homosapiens remains a singularity.
Some of us might be accused
of more human exceptionalism than others.
Perhaps we'll probably accuse me
of being too human exceptionalist.
The troubling thing is,
it happened once, we are the last surviving hominid,
and we do not have time machines,
we can't really travel back and see what happened
anciently, and there is a form of a time machine
for the geneticists.
We still don't know why we became bipedal.
Almost certainly has something to do
with ecology, as Jim alluded to.
We know that we have these large costly brains,
but what exactly drove that?
Was it in conjunction with language,
or did it predate language,
and is it linked to the type of cultural dual inheritance
that Joe Henrich was talking about?
It's embarrassing that we don't even know
when humans started using fire at will,
and then use it to cook and essentially
detoxify the entire landscape.
Over 80% of things out there would
kill you if you eat them.
You boiled them, the very same thing
that would kill you now is a nutrient.
We don't know how we became so obsessed with
guessing and trying to understand
what others feel and think about us,
usually wrongly, but we do it all the time.
What was it that made us symbolic?
What allowed us to form these endlessly
common notarial system that allows to
create meaning and share meaning?
And finally, why is it only us
that seem to be obsessed with understanding
how we got where we are?
To our knowledge, we haven't observed
many chimpanzees in bow, suit, tie, or Gombey
having discussions about why humans are so strange?
So we hope to learn much more,
and it involve the integration of ecological data,
we can now reconstruct past ecologies.
We hope to learn more by understanding emerging languages
and how language shapes cultures
and with it, our brains.
A payoff of this is instant, as we've heard from these genes
that seem to be human specialities,
the beta versions of our species.
But they tend to crash, and when they crash,
we have neurological disorders.
Ideas like the self domestication hypothesis
allow us to shoot down predictions.
They might be wrong, but at least you learn something
when you disprove them.
Completely new perspectives, such as
Sarah Tishkoff's work on genomes from Africa
will actually completely change the view we have
on the variability in the human genomes that is
totally dominated by pink people from Northern Europe.
(audience laughing)
Gene culture coevolution, the role of
how biological phenomena are influenced by inventions,
technology from fire to projectile weapons,
and then this notion of a liability,
the new constellations that allow the human phenomenon,
tend to be the same things that come with
a very big liability for mental health,
for all kinds of interesting problems
that we haven't really described in non-humans.
I think one of our biggest hope is
the incredible human imagination,
that now is enriched by deep learning imagination,
that we'll probably imagine things
that we can't even imagine yet.
We also need to look at the big picture,
and where we fit in in this blip of time,
the last 10,000 years, the last integration
that allowed us to go and take over the entire planet,
and now effect essentially causing
the latest mass extinction.
And hopefully, by thinking about things
like the origins of morality,
this might even help us get along a little bit better,
maybe like the ravens and the wolves.
But I'll take that, that sounds pretty good.
So with that, I'd like to thank all of you.
Thank the people who made the symposium possible.
Thank the chairs, my co-chair Rusty.
Thank all of you speakers for giving us
an incredible, rapid-fire ride today.
And thank our supporters and sponsors, and also
you the audience here and whoever is
watching this in the webcast.
And we hope very much to see you again soon.
Thank you very, very much.
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