One may ask: why aren’t elephants making rockets and computers yet?
But one may ask the same question about any uncontacted human tribe.
Seems more surprising for elephants, by default: elephants have apparently had similarly large brains for about 20 million years, which is far more time than uncontacted human tribes have had to build rockets. (~100x as long as anatomically modern humans have existed at all, for example.)
I agree. Additionally, the life expectancy of elephants is significantly higher than of paleolithic humans (1, 2). Thus, individual elephants have much more time to learn stuff.
In humans, technological progress is not a given. Across different populations, it seems to be determined by the local culture, and not by neurobiological differences. For example, the ancestors of Wernher von Braun have left their technological local minimum thousands of years later than Egyptians or Chinese. And the ancestors of Sergei Korolev lived their primitive lives well into the 8th century C.E. If a Han dynasty scholar had visited the Germanic and Slavic tribes, he would’ve described them as hopeless barbarians, perhaps even as inherently predisposed to barbarism.
Maybe if we give elephants more time, they will overcome their biological limitations (limited speech, limited “hand”, fewer neurons in neocortex etc), and will escape the local minimum. But maybe not.
Seems more surprising for elephants, by default: elephants have apparently had similarly large brains for about 20 million years, which is far more time than uncontacted human tribes have had to build rockets. (~100x as long as anatomically modern humans have existed at all, for example.)
I agree. Additionally, the life expectancy of elephants is significantly higher than of paleolithic humans (1, 2). Thus, individual elephants have much more time to learn stuff.
In humans, technological progress is not a given. Across different populations, it seems to be determined by the local culture, and not by neurobiological differences. For example, the ancestors of Wernher von Braun have left their technological local minimum thousands of years later than Egyptians or Chinese. And the ancestors of Sergei Korolev lived their primitive lives well into the 8th century C.E. If a Han dynasty scholar had visited the Germanic and Slavic tribes, he would’ve described them as hopeless barbarians, perhaps even as inherently predisposed to barbarism.
Maybe if we give elephants more time, they will overcome their biological limitations (limited speech, limited “hand”, fewer neurons in neocortex etc), and will escape the local minimum. But maybe not.