We are children of our time and it is not always easy to break away from social conventions to see our culture in perspective. For example, it seems inconceivable to us that a man of the intellectual stature of Immanuel Kant would never leave his city in his lifetime. Konisberg was awesome, we’re sure of that, but…what about passion? We now live in the golden age of travel. No longer needing to be rich to traverse the world, we can live adventures without the risks taken by romantic explorers of the past. It can be said that the journey has become practical requiredAnd not just for leisure, but for status.
What’s more, the same current biases affect us when we think about other species. When we think about whether zoos are ethical, we often worry about how lions see the world. has been destroyed to seek Same square meters for life. Do they really need that travel? It is reasonable to wonder if they need more than just space to move and separate from other people. Let alone species Migrant. When people have enough space and food where they live, they usually don’t wonder what lies beyond the mountains that live on the horizon.. Or, at least, they don’t seem to ask what we know about their behavior. Because? How is it possible that we are the only animals that travel?
Our brains are more complex compared to most animals. Just as a big muscle needs exercise to stay healthy, a big brain needs constant stimulation. Going back Zoos, one of the ways to ensure animal welfare is to provide your facility with elements where they can play. simple puzzles, Food Hidden toys with sound… Some of us have taken this to extremes. We need to solve problems, discover new things, and be active. And, while we can do it by immersing ourselves in work, there is the concept of “leisure.” Gaming is not unique to our species, although we have developed an entire gaming culture where complex and artificial challenges are completely unrelated to survival.
Hitting a bouncy ball with tight strings doesn’t prepare us for battle, and knowing the tune of the latest Taylor Swift song doesn’t make us more adept at foraging. Tourism, in a sense, is somewhat similar. Most of the world’s population lives safely enough to break out of the norm. They don’t need to control everything because we’ve created safe and controlled experiences for living little adventures. This change will no longer bother you, because after moving to Marbella there will be no danger. So, in this sense, yes. As a species, we are the only animals that travel. This is because the motivations behind the migratory animal are different, more basic and now, related to survival.
We like to simplify things, it’s not our fault, it’s our brain, which doesn’t have infinitely powerful capabilities. You have to do the best you can with what you have, and the best way is to develop an innate tendency to simplify. That’s why concepts like the “traveling monkey” appeal to us, but there’s a problem. Two things must be fulfilled for this trait to define our race. First, it must certainly be confined to our race, and, as we have seen, it seems in one way. It depends on how sophisticated our concept of travel is, but we can accept this first part.
The second is paradoxical, because it is supposed to be exclusive to our species, but something that is highly invariant both over time and geographically among individuals of that species. This is the problem because we have enough historical records to know that the type of travel we understand in this article was not common in other historical periods.. Even from an anthropological point of view, we can verify that there are many human populations where travel is a peculiarity. And one need not travel far, the most rural villages of our geography are a prime example. So, while it sounds good and travel is unique to our species, it doesn’t seem defining enough. Or, at least, not much more than the tendency to play with video consoles. In short, tourism is not something typical of our species, but animals that need intellectual stimulation and live without enough care.
Don’t get it:
- Of course, we can take a broader definition of travel, not as an alternative to migration and nomadism, but as a kind of umbrella term that can group all activities that involve displacement. We can look for something intermediate between what the RAE proposes and the more restrictive definitions. “Voyage” means periodic movements by certain cetaceans, such as humpback whales. They travel thousands of kilometers to spawn in tropical or subtropical waters and return to cooler waters where they have more food. However, it doesn’t appear to be an absolutely necessary migration, and in fact, scientists still don’t know why it does it. This may be one of the closest events to our “journeys” into the animal kingdom.
Notes (MLA):
- E., SAR, Fryxell, JM and Milner-Gulland, EJ (2011) Animal migration: a synthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hiscock, B. (2013)
- ‘5 Early Old World Migrations of Homo Sapiens: Archaeology’, Encyclopedia of Global Human Migrations [Preprint]. doi:10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm806.
- McNeill, WH (1984) ‘Human migration in historical perspective’, Population and Development Review, 10(1), p. 1. doi:10.2307/1973159.
