I remember when I was younger hearing some  ‘expert’ saying that the thing that differentiated man from the animals was our ability to make & use tools.  That myth has since been exploded many times over as it has been shown that chimps can use sticks to extract termites form the their nests, water to separate rice, and even birds use stones to crack the shells of their prey animals.

Never mind, surely planning ahead is a purely human trait after all it requires you to anticipate future events and act on your preferences.  Not so apparently.  A 31 yr old chimp called Santino in Furvik zoo in Sweden doesn’t like visitors intruding on his privacy and he communicates this by flinging stones at them.  Apparently he isn’t the only great ape to do this but what was a big surprise was when the zoo keeper found he was caching his ammunition ahead of time so he had plenty of stones to throw!  Not only that but he pounds the concrete to make discus like projectiles.

So it seems the dividing line between man and his closest cousins isn’t is planning either .. .perhaps it is his hubris?  We are so anxious to label everything and having labelled it we can then safely dismiss it.  I suspect that labels and standard responses are uniquely human.  Of course this saves us a lot of time  and is one of the corner stones of our advance up the evolutionary ladder but it also has inherent problems, especially when the ‘thing’ we are labelling is another person.  Comments such as “Oh Joe.. he’s just a trouble maker!” enable us to cease to listen to anything Joe says.  The trouble is that sometimes Joe is right! 

Having recently been on the periphery of a spat on a social network, I can see that this might well have been at the root of the misunderstanding.  I know that when I recently met someone who had often been labelled as a bit of an idiot, I was very impressed with the real person.  We have to be very careful what we do with our labels.

“Labels are for cans, not people.”   Anthony Rapp

Resources:

• Guardian article