meritocrat

Chimpanzees use basic tools (to say open nuts) but their tool making abilities were not as advances as homo habilis', a hominid species that lives almost 2 million years ago.

If habilis were alive today, would they display the same social traits as contemporary chimpanzees? In essence would they be 'smarter' than modern chimps?

keyser_soze

Why stick with chimpanzees? There are many species, and I would think that several are closer to human interaction than chimps.

Santas little helper

My impression is ( and I could be totally wrong )
that the social interaction of chimps is closest
to humans than any other species.Possibly , in
certain respects , bonobos are even closer , but
bonobos have a matriarchal society which obviously
isn't the case for humans.

I'm guessing that it's impossible to speculate as
to what path evolution would have taken over a period of 2 million years.As for smarter I'm not
sure what intelligence has to do with social interaction.Seems to me that in many cases human
social interaction is anything but smart.

contracycle

Ah well - isn't it? No indeed, observed human socieities today are patriarchal, but I'm not sure that this can be reliably projected back into our past for any great length.

I think social interaction uses signals, ad [art of brain development is signal processing, which bringsn about the complexity threshold required for sapience.

cheetah

Homo habilis lacked complex speech, as do chimps, so I would add that potential similarity, were they both extant today. Speech obviously helped us take a huge leap forward in innovation and interaction and I definitely think any species with speech like ours would be formidable.

T. E. Lords

I forget, did homo habilis make tools or just use tools they found?

cheetah

They made them out of rocks they found.

ksagnostic

I think it would be a mistake to assume that Homo habilis was more similar to us socially because they are "closer" to us. Their biology would have been more similar to ours, and to the extent that that biology would have influenced behavior, they would have been more "similar" behaviorally. On the other hand, habilis was not the only species of hominid at the time, and competetion with other hominids (such as ergaster, which was probably more similar to our ancestors) might have made habilis a specialist in ways that would have made that species' behavioral adaptations unique, replacing some behavioral commonalities that we and chimps still share.

scumble

There are matriarchal societies in the world, the men just think they're in control, and twat about all day while the women do the work.