"The proper study of mankind is man", sang the poet Alexander Pope. Of course, he knew nothing about tool-using chimpanzees, language-manipulating gorillas, self-recognizing orang-utans or problem-solving New Caledonian crows. Nor had he heard of extinct hominins, hunter-gatherer energy budgets, Palaeolithic artefacts, the significance of sweat glands or the evolutionary rewards of cooking, bipedalism and long-distance running.Still, when he wrote in his 1732 Essay on Man about a being "placed on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great", he demonstrated what Thomas Suddendorf, author of The Gap, calls the "two foundational capacities" (think of them as legs) that help us to stride the divide between ape and human minds.
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