Allan Milne Lees
1 min readSep 25, 2023

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If humans didn't have advanced technologies, dolphins and elephants would be doing precisely what they are doing now. There is no way to mine and smelt minerals underwater. Moreover, no cetacean has the bodily mechanisms necessary for fine motor skill manipulation. Elephants, despite their astonishing trunks, equally would find it very difficult to construct advanced tools. The most important feature, however, seems to be the human propensity for fantasy thinking which has the very occasional byproduct of enabling invention. My guess is that were it not for the fact they exist in water, cephalopods (particularly octopods) would be capable of making advanced tools - but existing in an aquatic environment definitively rules this out. My suspicion is that advanced tool-making species are an extreme rarity in the universe, because a great many factors must be just right in order for this to come about. And even humans would likely never have begun to invent tools had grass not significantly diminished forests and thereby forced our distant ancestors down onto the ground. So the odds against advanced tool-making species are astronomical.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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