“I have given many talks at schools recently, and it’s very pleasing to see that children often ask questions that are radical — they get to the root of the issue. And so today I will start each section of information with a radical question or two that children have asked. Are cetaceans as old as dinosaurs, and are they as intelligent as humans? No, they are not quite as old, but they came relatively soon after dinosaurs, and before humans. About 70 million years ago, the terrestrial ancestors of whales and dolphins re-entered the ocean where life originally began. About 30 million years ago, cetaceans evolved brains the present size of the human brain, which we have had for only about 100 000 years. The main conditions for human intelligence — a large brain, a convoluted cerebral cortex, a complex system of social interaction and communication — may be greatly exceeded by cetaceans. How long do whales and dolphins live, do they have families and how do they talk to each other?
