Mining History

Along with asking, “What is the meaning of life?” and “How do we fit into the cosmos?”, philosophers across cultures and history have asked, “What separates humans”—itself a variously defined concept—"from other creatures?” The Greek philosopher Aristotle argued in the 4th century BCE that humans possessed an innate and unique capacity for rationality—for thought and reflection. “Human beings philosophize…” according to the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that “a human being is just what it always has been and always will be, namely being rational.”   Chinese scholars from a few centuries earlier, like Confucius (traditionally dated to the 6th century BCE), held similar views, albeit with an added emphasis on the emotional intelligence of humans when compared to other animals. More contemporary answers have relied more on science than theology or metaphysics. Based on the work of Charles Darwin, European biologists in the 19th century argued that certain morphological differences between archaic humans like Neanderthals—discovered in Germany in 1856—and their ape ancestors formed the crucial difference between the two. More recent studies have looked at the level of our genes to find even more fundamental ways of distinguishing modern humans from our most recent ancestors.