Ever since I took my intro anthropology course in college I’ve been counting the ways humans differ from other animals. Tool making was the big issue of that time. Even then, we noticed that other animals make tools. The message was human differ from animals only in degree. Sure animals make tools but they ordinarily do not focus on improving them or achieve the level of complexity that humans do.  Some chimps do bootstrap on their knowledge to improve their tool making techniques to a rather primitive degree, have “culture” of a sort but not to the extent humans do.

Other animals handle language too, like humpback whales and other primates. They may be found to have music of a sort though music truly is a debatable proposition. Do animals make true music with messages that humans do? They, at least do rhythmic and melodic things that other animals do, such as birds and crickets and frogs attracting mates with what some people call song. But animal songs are highly genetically determined wooden sequences of tones,  somewhat, but little modified,  by culture and experience. Birdsongs sound rather nice and I have commented in these pages how they have inspired humans of 40  thousand years ago to make bone flutes with holes and probably a lot before that.  Men were musical right up from the time they differentiated from other species  and up to the opening measures of Le Sacre du Printemps and Mahler symphonies. Animals are much like us, humans very definitely being embedded in the vast ecology of plants and animals which should engender warm fuzzy feelings which I’m as likely  to have as the next guy hearing birds “sing.”

So animals differ from us not in kind but in degree. I don’t think so. Over my search I’ve noticed that while some few animals seem to briefly and primitively mourn over their dead and miss them for maybe five minutes, for humans, death is far more of a blow. Degree again. But I have yet to find an animal with religion, a belief in God or gods or any kind of accepted syncretized cultural set of stories or myths. Admittedly this may be due to my deficits communicating with other animals since I can’t understand them all that well.  Advanced culture and religion –  literally what “ties ” culture together in a system of meaning, seems to me to be human character, and not found in other animals.  So one could say religion, a common set of meaningful beliefs, which I think mainly arises out of a sense of tragedy, death and destruction,  and relative powerlessness before nature and fate, propels us to make common ground with a cultural narrative. OK here I am editorializing without presenting the evidence. I’m imposing what I perceive as the origin of religion in my own mind to play with you, the reader. The reason is I really want to say something else.

I was brought up under the influence of Walt Disney. If Disney Studios portray anything, it is animals singing and dancing all the time with and without humans. By the way, Disney animals have  human ideals and shared beliefs. No one has to point out that these animals are actually human symbols highly appealing for children and adults alike. These animals are also extremely witty which real animals never are. So I object to that.  I have never ever seen an animal laugh at jokes or make a joke him or herself. Animals are not humorous. So humans and animals would seem to have qualitative differences in matters that lie at the distal extreme of use of language or symbols, an area where animals seem to have limited capacity. We might as well go on and on pointing out that no one ever saw an animal Pythagoras or Plato. Animals that they don’t seem to be able to do math,  engineering or medicine.

In our popular culture we see animals dance all the time. That is why I was absolutely shocked to discover that animals can’t follow a rhythm or truly dance and so do not respond in anywhere the same way that humans do to music, even though it certainly seems to us, that a lot of them are singing and carrying on. Don’t get me wrong.  You see animals doing all sorts of rhythmic things, On You-Tube you will find videos of animals dancing, even on two feet. But you come to discover no animal dances unless doing natural things or is lead. I used to like to dance with my dogs as a  kid. But I did not know I wasn’t really dancing with them. What I didn’t know is that no animal can be entrained to follow a rhythm given from an outside source.  He can’t use his ears to hear a rhythm and then tap it out with his feet.  There may be some limited exceptions but as a general rule you will not find an animal to tap out and reproduce some rhythmic series given to them by an external source.  Holy cow! That was a revelation to me. There may be some bonobo genius or another that might do some reproduction of a primitive tapping but as a general rule no animal can do what even human babies have been able to do, reproduce some rhythmic series of taps.  I am just finishing Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov which makes much of a secret series of raps on a door signaling old man Karamazov that his young woman has arrived. Simple for any of us but no animal can do it, as I say maybe with some few exceptions of some genius bonobo.

I was making much in my just previous essay of how great music commandeers the whole human brain, certainly all three components sensory, associative, motor, to pull those of us humans who are sensitive to music into some higher sphere or at least a trance like state. Certainly this happens to me quite often. So I attest to this in the subjective sense. There are great You Tube videos of less than year old baby twins bouncing  rhythmically in their high chairs and smiling with delight, entranced by music.  You will find an eight year old conducting an orchestra playing Franz Liszt. This entrainment of rhythmic material seems another example of qualitative, not quantitative, difference between men and animals. Humankind is part of the animal kingdom yes, but is truly unique.

What is at the root of these qualitative human differences?  The old view is that it is in the hand, the opposable thumb, the right hand particularly, lie suspiciously very close, in the left peri-sylvan cortex,  to cortical representation of throat and mouth therefore language.  Language comes out of Homo habilis, “handy man”   Language is a happenstance of  increased computational capacity attached to the human tool-maker.  So we are back to tools again. I like these anatomical arguments because again, that is the way I was brought up, just as I am a Disney baby.

But I happen to think there is more to it.  Entrainment, the ability to follow a rhythm, the infectious spread of rhythm not only over the brain,  but an assemblage of people, as with the waving of  hands at religious gatherings, ties all of these phenomena together.  Music as rhythm makes Homo socialis,  just as music unites the brain to one purpose, religifies us. This is key to our humanity. We should change the concept of handy man to social man.

I am not suggesting we should get religion here, or advocating for religion in the our twenty-first century. I am saying that the human mind is even more unique than once thought, born not only out of the proximity of hand and language functions, but the fervor of the group. In future I will have more to say about the utility of this idea.