Animal civilazations

[Ankers]

So comparing human evolution to other primates like monkeys and apes what would be the best candidate for building a civilazation. Humans would be out of the picture

i was thinking capuchins. Since the already use specific rocks for tools and have a complex method of breaking open nuts.

what if they started farming the nuts

also they have a flatter face so I would think that would allow them to evolve a bigger brain

[Anthony Morris]

Very likely any future civilization would spring from some species that does not yet exist. Capuchins would not be capable of doing this and if they had descendants that could do it, they would not be the same species and would be largely unrecognizable as capuchin monkeys. 

[Area54]

4 hours ago, Anthony Morris said:

Very likely any future civilization would spring from some species that does not yet exist. Capuchins would not be capable of doing this and if they had descendants that could do it, they would not be the same species and would be largely unrecognizable as capuchin monkeys. 

Ankers suggestion is an unsupported assertion. However, you rebuttal contains three unsupported assertions. Do you wish to put any meat on the bones of those assertions?

[Itoero]

I think the great apes

On ‎18‎-‎9‎-‎2017 at 10:39 PM, Ankers said:

So comparing human evolution to other primates like monkeys and apes what would be the best candidate for building a civilazation. Humans would be out of the picture

i was thinking capuchins. Since the already use specific rocks for tools and have a complex method of breaking open nuts.

what if they started farming the nuts

also they have a flatter face so I would think that would allow them to evolve a bigger brain

Capuchin monkeys are imo too small and too adapted to live in trees...this decreases their chance to spread while increasing in population because they need to evolve a lot to become the apex predator. The great apes ( esp bonobo-chimpanzees ) already have a good size, need to evolve less to live on the ground and are better adapted for using tools.

[Anthony Morris]

9 hours ago, Anthony Morris said:

Very likely any future civilization would spring from some species that does not yet exist. Capuchins would not be capable of doing this and if they had descendants that could do it, they would not be the same species and would be largely unrecognizable as capuchin monkeys. 

Humans are very different from the australopithecines who were at a basic tool-using level as capuchins are today. We are dramatically different from them. Furthermore, there was no guarantee they would evolve into us. They evolved into a number of different species and only one happened to become civilized although civilization probably was not beyond the capabilities of Homo neandertalensis or Homo denisova. None of these was on the level of capuchins today but far beyond them. Capuchins would likely need to grow larger and grow larger brains as well. Just those two changes would be dramatic enough to call them different genera, hence not capuchins. The changes for any species to become a civilization-building species will simply change them far beyond what they are now.

 

Furthermore, capuchins are far from the only species that is intelligent enough to use tools. Crows, whales, elephants, parrots and octopi are all sentient enough to use tools but none of them have the social organization necessary to build a civilization. All of these groups have been around for millions of years and yet not produced a civilization. They would each have to change enough to be called something else (by us) in order to build a civilization. Apes can be reasonably claimed to have done so through the development of Homo sapiens and look how different we are from the other apes.