Instant Genius - How our intimate relationship with animals shaped human evolution

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Thanks to our highly developed brains, sophisticated ability to communicate and use of advanced technology, it can be easy to think that we humans are separate from, and even superior to, the animals we share the Earth with. But the truth is that animals have profoundly influenced the progress and evolution of human beings for tens of thousands of years. In this episode, we’re joined by science writer Michael Bond to talk about his latest book, Animate – How Animals Shape the Human Mind. He tells us what the elaborate cave paintings found across the globe can teach us about our ancient ancestors’ relationship with animals, how evolution has finetuned our brains to help us recognise animals and understand their behaviour, and what we can learn about ourselves by more deeply investigating the way we treat other living beings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, confessions. My boss asked for results. So I opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions.

Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, terms of conditions apply. Transport your senses with Sol de Janeiro's limited edition perfume mist collection at Sephora. Sprits on lush notes of rainforest orchid and crisp sea breeze with he fresco paraizzo.

Embrace a floral and fruity scent inspired by Rio's nude beach with chiqui bikini. Or capture sun-kissed bliss with limonada gelada, where zesty Brazilian lemonade accord meets coconut milk and golden brown sugar. Don't miss Sol de Janeiro's limited edition perfume mist collection only at Sephora. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order.

Ralph's, fresh for everyone. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials,

delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Incident Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, the BBC Science Focus.

Thanks to our highly developed brains, sophisticated ability to communicate, and use of advanced technology, it can be easy to think that we humans are separate from, and even superior to the animals we share the earth with. But the truth is that animals have profoundly influenced the progress and evolution of human beings for tens of thousands of years. In this episode, we're joined by science writer Michael Bond to talk about his latest book, Animate,

how animals shape the human mind. He tells us what the elaborate cave paintings found across the globe can teach us about our ancient ancestors' relationship with animals, how evolution has fine-tuned our brains to help us recognise animals and understand their behaviour. And what we can learn about ourselves by more deeply investigating the way we treat other living beings. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for inviting me. So today we're talking about your book, Animate, How Animals Shape the Human Mind.

So this is all about the intimate link between humans and other animals. that started back, way back in history. So why did you choose this as a topic? Was there a certain experience or set of experiences that you had that triggered this idea? Well, I usually write about human psychology and how people interact with the world around them, and particularly the dynamics of in-groups and out-groups. And animals are really the sort of ultimate outgroup for humans, if you like, the ultimate other. So it seemed like an interesting and rich subject to explore.

So one of the things that you sort of kick off the book with is early evidence of humans' relationships with other animals. And that's these fascinating cave paintings. So let's start there. Can you tell us a bit about these and what we can learn from them? Yeah, well, we don't know a lot about the culture and thinking of those early humans in the ice age. So going back, say, 40,000 years. But we do know a bit about what they thought about animals because they painted animals on the inside of caves in that period. and their paintings are quite extraordinary really. I mean, firstly, they're very sophisticated.

They are really expert in their art. They knew about perspective, the use of colour, shading, their presentation of form. So these paintings are really incredible. But one of the most amazing things is the content, the animals that they painted, The detail in the paintings is quite extraordinary. They depict particular aspects of an animal's shape or form or anatomical detail that they would only have got through close observations. So it's clear that they really knew their animals.

Another remarkable thing is a sense of the animal in the pictures. They are not just plain portraits. It looks like they painted them with some kind of reverence or even awe. So the animals look to be individual animals rather than generic representations of their species. Finally, it's interesting that these paintings are almost entirely of non-human animals. There are very few humans in these pictures. I mean, among the tens of thousands in the caves in around the Dordogne area, there's probably 100 human figures.

So clearly animals were the most important thing for them in their environment. So maybe some people haven't seen these pictures, although I'd venture most people have. But what animals are depicted in them? There are a lot of animals that are no longer around, like the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, cave bears, huge deer. And then there are things like reindeer and wolves and occasionally birds.

But there's a lot of deer, a lot of horses. And these would have been the sort of precursor to the domestic horse. And in many cases, the paintings are vast. I mean, there are images of horses and mammoths that stretch five, six meters, nose to tail. So you go into these caves and there's this sense of it, this sort of a gallery, really. There's something celebratory about the art. And what's interesting is that they painted animals, not necessarily the animals that they were eating, so not the most common animals. There are some caves where they were clearly eating reindeer, the artist, because

archaeologists have discovered the remains of reindeer on the cave floors, but they were not painting the reindeer. They were painting predators or, you know, bigger animals, more impressive animals. You know, what inspired them to do, or this is a mystery we can only speculate. But that art is an extraordinary record of their culture of that time. Yeah, so one of the things you talk about in the book and why you speak about this is the kind of evidence that our brains are fine-tuned to recognize animals. And you mentioned things like the phenomena of paradolia. So what is that?

And what can that tell us about the way that we actually perceive animals, even now? Parodolia is the recognition of patterns in a scene. And our brains are very good at picking out patterns and even making them up. And what archaeologists have found is that a lot of the paintings of animals, specifically on areas of the interior of caves that sort of lend themselves to enhancing the anatomy of the animals, as if that the artists were seeing the animals in the rock before they actually painted them. And there have been various experiments recently testing modern humans, and people are equally as good today picking up on those sort of shapes,

incoherent forms and making them into animals. And this is all because our brains evolved to be hardly sensitive to the presence of animals, both human and non-human, in the environment. Experiments have found that people are much quicker to recognize a change in an animal or human or animal form in a scene, much quicker. than they are to pick up on a change to an inanimate object. So this suggests that we evolve this ability to be highly sensitive. And it's to animals.

And it actually stands to reason because individuals in the I say, or before that, in their environment, who were good at picking up and noticing animals, both predator and prey, would have been more likely to survive and reproduce. And so that characteristic became inherited. part of the human brain. So this is part of the sort of overriding

the thesis of the book that at some point humans and early humans became animal-minded. So what exactly do you mean by that? I mean that partly that idea that neurologically

we became particularly attuned to recognising animals in the landscape, You know, in the Ice Age, humans were living among animals. There was really no sort of separation, no boundary. That changed in the Neolithic, in the agricultural age, when our relationship with animals became one more that we saw them as objects of use, something to exploit.

And today there's a sense, and this has been true for at least 2,000 years, that animals are inferior to humans, that they do not share what we consider our most valuable qualities in terms of intelligence and rational thinking and thought and that kind of thing. And yet, all through this period, and still today, animals are playing an incredibly important role in our culture and they creep into our thoughts and particularly are non-conscious states of mind. They have appeared in art all through our evolution. And so the idea of being animal-minded is just this sense that we are very aware and attentive to animals, even though consciously we might think of them as something very separate to us.

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity,

which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial account, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shared. every innovation in hi-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist's focal,

name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Let's stick with the sort of ancient times for a little bit then. So some things that you mention is like sort of going back to the caves in a way. It's burials, like ritual burials. So this is really interesting because, you know,

early humans were often buried with animal remains, you know, suggesting some sort of, I guess, relationship in the afterlife with animals, which would mean that the bond was very strong. Absolutely. And this is the other set of archaeological evidence that tells us something about the culture of early humans, these burials where animals appeared in the graves. I mean, there are some examples. There's a child who was buried 80,000 years ago with the antlers of a fallow deer on her chest. And then more recently, sort of in the early Neolithic,

a young woman who was buried with her newborn child and the child had been placed on the wing of a hoopas swan. And there are many examples of people. people being buried with parts of the wings of birds near their hands. It's impossible to know why they are in the graves, but it looks deliberate. And it certainly, as you say, it suggests some kind of spiritual element to that relationship or perhaps the animals were there to assist the humans in whatever came next in the afterlife. but it sort of re-emphasises the quality of that relationship

that you see in the Ice Age paintings. Sort of similarly to this, then, something you also talk about, which I think is fascinating, and which is prevalent in different cultures, ancient cultures and even some sort of modern ones over the world, is this notion of shamanic shape-shifting. This again shows like how close our bond

with the animals that live around us is, you know. What can we say about that? People have been fascinated by the idea of crossing the boundary into the animal world. I mean, through mythology, folklore, the idea of a shapeshifter or a therianthrope, which is someone, a human who shares aspects of the anatomy of another species. This seems to be a source of fascination, and it has been throughout history, the suggestion that, or perhaps a recognition that we are, of course, animals and we share a lot with animals, particularly our physical form. And, you know, what does it mean to do that? So in literature and

mythology, it's one area that you can safely explore those themes. What does it mean to be part animal? And clearly people have been thinking about that for tens of thousands of years. And among the few human forms in the Ice Age paintings, there are quite a few a philanthropic figures where the human has, for example, the head of a bison or the body of a deer. And so clearly there was a fascination with that idea going back 30,000, thousand years. And it's still present today. I mean, there are a lot of surviving folkloric stories, a lot of children's stories explore that theme. Yeah, so let's move a little bit closer to the modern

times then. So at a certain point, you're right, that humans' attitude towards animals began to shift, like something referred to as the Great Divide. That's a new one on me. So, you know, when did that occur and, you know, what happened? So that was really at the beginning of the Neolithic, the period when humans stopped the hunter-gatherer foraging lifestyle and became more settled and domesticated animals. We're talking sort of 8,000 years ago, although it happened in different parts of the world at different times. But what's interesting is how the art in that period changed, and the way animals were depicted in art in that period clearly reflects that changing relationship. There's a Neolithic settlement in central Turkey, Chattelholyuk,

where there are murals on some of the walls that show animals being, it looks like they're being teased or torn. by groups of men, not just hunted, but actually, you know, they're depicted as something that people are no longer respecting. There's this one famous mural where there's a man hanging onto the, pulling the nose of a red deer and another figure is pulling its tail. And so that was where it looks as if the way people thought about animals changed and it coincided with the development of agriculture and domestication and what became the domination of animals by humans. Yeah, and you write about many sort of prominent philosophers and thinkers

of the time like Descartes and Francis Bacon, etc., sort of cementing this idea of human's superiority over animals. What can we say about that? Did that come from this domestication process? do we even know? We don't really know, but it's clear that there was sort of a progression from the Neolithic into the early Middle Eastern cultures and ancient Greece and Rome and then through into the Middle Ages, where this changed relationship became more prominent. And as early as Aristotle philosophers were talking about how humans possessed a rational mind, a rational brain that animals lacked. And from there on in, it became, in a way, people were, it looks as if we were trying to establish ways in which our lives were meaningful and significant

and that we weren't simply creatures that were going to die and deteriorate in the earth. So focusing on the sort of cerebral qualities like our rational mind was one way of establishing ourselves as something different to other species. So it became a sort of a way of establishing the superiority of humans and giving us some kind of sense of meaning in life. So in lots of ways, this sort of area, this field of study, is still going now. the kind of idea of figuring out whether animals have consciousness are able to feel emotions. Can you give us some examples of what we've learned about that?

Yeah, well, the science of what animals are capable of has accelerated quite dramatically over the last 20 years. And there's now pretty much agreement among neuroscientists that all vertebrate, certainly, quite a few invertebrates experience a kind of consciousness, a level of consciousness, awareness of their situation in the world. You won't find many primatologists now disagreeing with the notion that all primates, social primates, are capable of levels of empathy, almost on a level with our own. It's been shown that, I mean, it's often the idea that humans possess

language is one thing that has consistently been used to differentiate from animals. Other animals don't have language like we do, but many of them have highly sophisticated forms of communication. So this idea that we are categorically different in terms of those sort of qualities that we possess, it no longer really stands up. Yeah, so let's sort of flip that idea around and go back a bit. Because in the book you write about this idea of humans being superior to animals, kind of ended up spilling over into the notion that some humans were superior to other humans.

So, you know, where did that come from? What do we know about that? Yeah, I mean, this is the idea that we use our understanding of animals as inferior in the way we describe other groups of humans. And humans are very good at differentiating between groups, the in-group, the out-group, and often discriminating against people who are different. It doesn't take much to encourage those kind of prejudices.

And you get many examples of people being described as animals or is sort of brutes or actually described as certain types of vermin. And that's never a compliment. It's always an insult, the implication being not only are these people different, but they're subhuman. So those metaphors that we used to distinguish ourselves from animals are often used to distinguish ourselves from other groups of humans. There's also this idea that we are categorically different because of our rational thinking,

our intelligence, our communicative abilities. It all strikes me it doesn't really stand up, and that's not the real reason why we try and establish ourselves as superior, because you take that to its logical extent. There are plenty of humans who are born with developmental problems. whose cognitive capacities are less than some animals, we don't treat them with any less respect or compassion. So I think that the idea of treating animals as something different is really comes from this age-old inclination

to differentiate between different groups and discriminate against out-groups. So animals have become a sort of tool by which we do that within our own species. Having said that one really interesting thing, I'd heard of a couple of times before, but not so many examples. It's, you know, several hundred years ago, there are cases in Europe, etc. Of people taking animals, like even insects, to court for damaging their goods and property. You know, that's fascinating. You know, can you tell us about that?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good. example of just how conflicted we have been about the way we see animals. It was, as you say, it was actually quite common in the Middle Ages for animals to be tried, either in ecclesiastical courts or in criminal courts, because there was a sense, particularly among people who worked with animals, that they were in some ways responsible for their actions and therefore should face the consequences, should be treated as such. There's a famous case of a trial of a pig in France in the 15th century, and this pig was hung for the crime of killing and devouring a child. There's another case, a century later, of a colony of termites in Brazil, who had been eating away at the monastery, a Franciscan monastery.

And the monks complained that these termites had devastated their furniture and eaten their food. And so there was a court case, and the termites were appointed a lawyer. and this was customary, and the lawyer argued that the termites deserved access to food. They couldn't be blamed for eating the furniture. They had been present on this site long before the monks, and also they were more industrious than the monks in their work, so should be treated with some clemency. And the result is that, well, they were found guilty,

and they were moved, forced, forcibly moved from the monastery. So that's the sort of thing. They just demonstrates the strange relationship we've always had with animals. Yeah, so let's come up to the modern times then. And so I'd venture most people's relationship with animals these days,

it's probably with their pets. So we all know, like anyone who's had a pet dog, a pet cat, but I mean, a pet, anything, really, they know that, you know, you start to learn about them, you start to sort of, you know, build a bond with them. But like more than this now, you, you write about the use of pet therapists in different situations, you know, so can you, can you talk us through that? And, you know, how does that work and how effective is it?

This plays into the finding that people often respond to animals more easily than they do to humans. One of my sisters has a Labrador. She takes her into care homes where a lot of people are struggling. They struggle to communicate with those around them. And she brings her dog in and it has a sort of transformative effect. The dog somehow enables them to have access to some of those feelings, emotions, memories that they previously struggle with.

It's not clear why that happens. Equine therapy with horses is another very popular area. And this is where people often with PTSD or psychological problems who have had trouble relating to a counselor or therapist, they come to an equine therapy center just to be with the horses, not to ride them. And horses are extremely good at people. picking up on the emotion of humans or other animals, being prey animals.

They've always had to, you know, that's an evolved trait. And so something about being with an animal that instinctively knows what's going on in your mind. But in particular, whether or not it translates into your actual behavior. and it forces people to change their behavior in order to be friends with the horses. Again, it's not clear why that works, but it's a growing area. Yeah, so sort of by way of something up then, it's fairly obvious over, you know, tens of thousands of years. We've always had like this intimate, close bond with animals. So in the future, you know, we've got all sorts of technology.

I mean, we've even got robot dogs and cats on the market now, you know. Do you think anything is going to happen to? We cannot bond with animals, or is it just an absolutely natural thing that's going to persist indefinitely? Well, I hope that we come to understand that animals are not as different as we have imagined them to be and that our relationship with animals will more resemble our relationships with each other. and also that treating other beings with a level of compassion and respect simply because they are living beings with agency and intent, forgetting about how intelligent they might be, that that also feeds into the way we treat each other and that boundary between ourselves and other animals, which has been very stark through much of the last 2,000 years

will diminish and that that would feed into our own psychology and our sort of intergroup interactions. So it's really just, the point is just to try and get people to think about other beings as other beings rather than as objects of use. It's harder because we, apart from pets, as you mentioned, people have little interaction with wild animals. So that boundary in a way has become even stronger. But I'm hoping that as the more we learn through science

about how similar we are, that those boundaries will become less and less prominent. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC science focus. That was Michael Bond. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Animate, How Animals Shape the Human Mind. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius

on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus? The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music. as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.