Salt glands
Mario Petrinovich
Sorry for wasting your time, but I had problems finding reliable
info.
Last time we were talking about Aquatic Ape Theory. Well, I have
problems with those salt glands. Can somebody tell me - do we or don't we
have salt glands; and if we do, is some terrestrial mamma (primate?) having
something similar?
Why am I asking this? Because some guy (Jim Moore) who is attacking
AAT very much, wrote on his site that we have them.
Thanks in advance
Mario
J Moore
the salt to water balance is the kidneys, just as it is in all mammals.
This is the closest thing to a "salt gland" that humans have, unlike marine
and desert birds and reptiles. That is what I state on my site, as I also
have in close to a decade of newsgroup posting. It is various AAT
proponents who inaccurately claim that humans have a "salt gland" other than
the kidneys. Please do not say I said something on my site when I actually
said the exact opposite.
J Moore (www.aquaticape.org)
Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
news:btfuph$1br0$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
Mario Petrinovich
> You are mistaken. I clearly state that in humans the organ that regulates
> the salt to water balance is the kidneys, just as it is in all mammals.
> This is the closest thing to a "salt gland" that humans have, unlike
> marine and desert birds and reptiles.
Technically, yes. But, tried to prove that our tear glands aren't
salt glands by comparing them with "salt glands" of terrestrial birds and
reptils. You've said that our tear glands cannot be salt glands because they
are doing what salt glands are doing in terrestrial birds and reptils. Well,
if you ask me, by that you actaually said that we have salt glands, and not
v.v..
Then, at the end of article, you've said that glands of terrestrial
birds and reptiles evolved in amphibians. A reader could presume that you
don't know of any other way of evolution of salt glands (and, definitely you
didn't mention it). So, we didn't inherit our glands from reptiles, and the
only way of evolving the glands which are doing what salt glands are doing
in terrestrial birds and reptils, that you know of, is at the water edge.
I concluded (from your words only), we have glands like those of
terrestrial birds and reptils, which evolved at water edge. So, you stated
facts, and said that those facts present the proves that these aren't salt
glands, when they actually prove that they are. The only thing, in the whole
text, that "proves" that these aren't salt glands, is your renaming them
into "tear glands".
And so, I am poor with knowlage, I actually am happy that I could
read your article, which states a lot of facts, and this article is my main
source of infromation. And this article is saying tha we have salt glands.
So, I came here to clear this confusion. It has to be something that tells
that they aren't salt glands (since you are so sure about it), but all I
could read from your article (my main source of information), is that they
are salt glands.
And, yes. Marine iguana has salt glands that extract potassium. A
seaweed that it eats is reach with potassium. Which is classic AAT scenario.
Why I am so interested in those salt glands, to come here to bother
you with this, now?
Because, we at AAT community, just introduced new things that can
strenghted our theory. We found out that we have the adaptations of
plunge-divers: covered nostrils and straight posture. So, with added salt
glands this would be it. And if you add SC fat to this, this could be IT,
lol. Discussion about this you can find in sci.anthropology.paleo newsgroup,
as well as in Yahoo! group AAT. -- Mario
J Moore
now where you made your mistake. Although I think my page on tears is
pretty clear, you've made a fundamental error in assuming something that I
did say means something else. However, since I now can see where you made
your mistake, I'll explain further here.
First, I didn't try "to prove that our tear glands aren't salt glands by
comparing them with "salt glands" of terrestrial birds and reptils. (sic)"
I showed that they aren't because they are incapable of doing what a
regulatory organ like a salt gland must be capable of -- accurately regulate
the level of that mineral to water balance. In humans, as in all mammals,
this can only be done by the kidneys, which I am at pains to say in several
places on my site. This is true of all mammals -- every single mammal --
and humans are no exception to this, despite the AAT claim to the contrary.
You said:
"So, we didn't inherit our glands from reptiles, and the only way of
evolving the glands which are doing what salt glands are doing in
terrestrial birds and reptils, that you know of, is at the water edge. I
concluded (from your words only), we have glands like those of terrestrial
birds and reptils, which evolved at water edge."
This is wrong, and I didn't say that the potasium-secreting glands of
terrestrial birds and reptiles "evolved at water edge (sic.)"; I said they
evolved in very dry desert conditions. The salt-excreting glands of marine
birds and reptiles evolved in sea or shoreline dwelling birds and reptiles.
These are pretty darned different conditions, and frankly, that should be
pretty darned obvious. They do share one feature, that of a lack of fresh
water, which is why these animals have had to develop these organs to
conserve water while they expel salt (in the case of marine birds and
reptiles) or potassium (in the case of desert birds and reptiles).
There are, in birds and reptiles, glands which can regulate mineral to water
balances in the body. They are the same sort of gland, that is an active
excretion gland, but differ dramatically between marine birds and reptiles,
where they excrete salt, and terrestrial (specifically desert-dwelling)
birds and reptiles, whose glands excrete potassium. Because of this
difference, you could check the glands of these animals and tell what sort
of environment they evolved in. If they evolved in a marine environment,
their glands can hypertonically excrete salt. If they evolved in a very dry
terrestrial environment, their glands can hypertonically excrete potassium.
As I said on my site (and this is where you went astray) if the excretions
of human tear ducts (which can hypertonically excrete potassium but not
salt) indicate anything about our environmental background, it indicates a
dry terrestrial rather than an aquatic marine background. If our tears'
mineral composition arose as a result of environment, it would take only
that initial change to be from a terrestrial enviroment; but if it were as a
result of an aquatic marine environment it would take two dramatic changes,
the second change leaving no trace whatever.
However, the composition of our tears may not have arisen as a direct result
of environment, and even if they did, they still are not a regulatory gland
as are the glands in birds and reptiles. Let me explain that again a bit
further:
Salt glands, or the potassium-secreting glands of terrestrial
(desert-dwelling) birds and reptiles, always have the characterisitc that
they can secrete a solution of water and salts that is hypertonic, more
salty than body plasma. They must be able to do this to be a "salt" gland.
There is no way they can be a salt gland unless they can do this, and that's
a long-established basic physiological fact. Human tears and sweat cannot
produce a hypertonic salt solution; they can't even approach a hypertonic
solution. So humans do not have a salt gland; the regulation of our bodies'
water to mineral balance is handled by the kidneys, just as it is in every
single mammal. Human tears can produce a hypertonic potassium solution,
which strongly suggests that this function was possibly an adaptation to dry
terrestrial environments, but definitely not an adaptation to a marine or
aquatic environment. However, even this doesn't make them a salt gland in
the sense that the potassium-excreting glands of desert birds and reptiles
are often referred to as "salt glands". This is because the tear ducts are
not capable of regulating this potassium discharge, as the glands of desert
birds and reptiles are. In humans, only the kidneys are capable of this,
just as in all mammals, bar none. They are the equivalent (but actually a
massive improvement on) the reptile and bird system of salt glands.
I hope this has cleared up your misunderstanding.
J Moore
Marc Verhaegen
"J Moore" <anthro...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:btiptg$25es$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
This website is completely outdated, prejudiced and irrelevant: it is mostly
about Elaine Morgan's ideas on AAT, but it does not discuss AAT as most of
its proponents see it today. For a serious discussion of AAT come to our
discussion group http://www.onelist.com/community/AAT . We still need
biologists who know a lot of comparative anatomy, physiology & DNA.
Marc Verhaegen
TWINBLUE
don't we>have salt glands; and if we do, is some terrestrial mamma (primate?)
having
>something similar?
My thinking is that many are confused about human sweat being "salty". It
occures to me that I never thought to taste any horse sweat to see if it was
also. Since other primates don't sweat they have no
"salt glands". Of course neither do humans
per se... But humans do lose salt in persperation...
TWINBLUE
J Moore
losing salt through sweat isn't a good way of managing the necessary task of
balancing our salt to water balance, because sweat is never hypertonic to
body plasma and because it isn't a regulated way to get rid of salt (in
fact, researchers find that sweat glands in humans are set up more to
conserve salt than to get rid of it). If we sweat enough to lose much salt,
we lose much more water and have to replace it. If we replace the water, we
run the risk -- a very real risk -- of upsetting our salt to water balance.
This is called water intoxication, and causes cramps and nausea which can be
quite violent, and can even lead to death. Our bodies need, as all animals
need, a method of safely maintaining our salt to water balance (homeostasis)
and our sweat glands are not capable of doing this. The kidneys, on the
other hand, can and do accomplish the task of maintaining this balance, and
are the method of doing so in every mammal.
I'll ignore Marc Verhaegen's contention that the basic principles of
physiology and homeostasis have changed in the last several years since I
put my site online.
J Moore (www.aquaticape.org)
TWINBLUE <twin...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:btsccc$14fv$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> >Well, I have>problems with those salt glands. Can somebody tell me - do
we or
> don't we>have salt glands; and if we do, is some terrestrial mamma
(primate?)
> having
> >something similar?
>
r norman
wrote:
This has already been answered.
Every human secretion is salty because human body fluids are salty.
Horse sweat is also necessarily salty, as is every secretion of every
animal.
In order to be considered a "salt gland", a gland must be involved in
regulating the salt content and salt/water balance (osmotic pressure)
of the body fluids. That is, the secretion must be noticeably
different from the body fluids in composition and osmotic pressure,
and in sufficient quantity to inflence whole body salt content and
osmotic pressure. Further, the secretions of the gland must clearly
and primarily be related to imbalances in salt content or osmotic
pressure of the body fluids.
The secretion of tears and sweat fail to qualify as examples of salt
glands regardless of the fact that humans lose salt by tearing and
sweating.
Marc Verhaegen
> Thank you for giving some further details of your reading of my site
J Moore, you have to adapt your website, or else to withdraw it. It's
outdated & irrelevant to AAT scenarios.
The most recent paper on AAT is probably this:
M.Verhaegen, P-F.Puech & S.Munro 2002 "Aquarboreal ancestors?"
Trends in Ecology & Evolution 17:212-7
7_05
"Aquarboreal ancestors?"
Marc Verhaegen, Pierre-François Puech, Stephen Munro
New evidence confirms the idea that human ancestors were not
savannah-dwellers at all, but instead became bipedal in swampy forests, and
evolved during the Ice Ages into coastal omnivores along the Indian Ocean.
According to biomolecular data, the great apes split into Asian pongids
(orangutans) and African hominids (gorillas, chimpanzees and humans) 18-12
million years ago and hominids split into gorillas and humans-chimpanzees
10-6 Mya. Fossils with pongid features appear in Eurasia after about 15 Mya,
and fossils with hominid features appear in Africa after about 10 Mya.
Instead of the traditional savannah-dwelling hypothesis, we argue that a
combination of fossil (including the newly discovered Orrorin, Ardipithecus
and Kenyanthropus hominids) and comparative data now provides evidence
showing that (1) the earliest hominids waded and climbed in swampy or
coastal forests in Africa-Arabia and partly fed on hard-shelled fruits and
molluscs; (2) their australopith descendants in Africa had a comparable
locomotion but generally preferred a diet including wetland plants; (3) the
Homo descendants migrated to or remained near the Indian Ocean coasts, lost
most climbing abilities, and exploited waterside resources.
Marc Verhaegen http://www.onelist.com/community/AAT
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/Verhaegen.html
Mario Petrinovich
Thanks Jim (and TWINBLUE) very much. I do have further questions,
but I should clear them myself by trying to research the matter.
Unfortunatelly (or actually, fortunatelly) I don't have much time right now
because, as I said, we at AAT are now considering new things regarding our
straight posture, so, I will leave this for later.
Regarding this 'straight posture' thing, I would like to further
explain this to this list, and get your opinion. Forgive me if I don't use
all the terms correctly, I am still not quite familiar with most of them.
Straight posture would be posture in axial direction (if I am right
here), straight as a cigar. And we are also bipedal, as are the other
straight animal (penguins). How you become like that. Bipedal animals (which
are bipedal in rest) are all adapted to forces that are comming from that
direction. These are hopping animals. When they are hopping they sort of
propel their body with hind legs. I would presume that direction of that
force goes through centar of gravity. But, when they are landing, they are
also using their hind legs as a spring, for that. Here again, this legs are
adapted to cushion forces comming through center of gravity of the body (I
presume). Since they become so adapted to acquire forces from that direction
(and weight also is a force), it becomes more natural (easy) for them to
hold their body in this position. All muscles become excellently adapted for
this stance. So, were we a leapers?
Well, there are also other animals which are straight as cigar. One
of them are fish and aquatic mammals, reptiles, whoever is traveling through
water. They have to be like that because of streamlining. When you are
traveling through the water, you better be straight like cigar. There are
some other animals, too. A plunge-diving birds are like this when they are
in water. They need to be like this because they are (very fastly) traveling
through water. When you are plunging into water, first you need to overcome
a thing called 'surface tension' of water. This can be done with pointig
object, a bill in birds' case. To cushion the inpact of bill, those birds
use their neck as a spring (I presume, just like hopping animals are using
their legs). So, here we have spring after the bill. To cushion the impact
of the body, they are using air sacs. So, in their case forces are comming
from the direction of bill, through center of gravity of the body. They have
another problem. Because of high impact speed, there is a problem of water
rushing through their nostrils. So they have covered nostrils.
So, we are also straight like cigar. Are we hopping animal, or
plunge divers. Well, we do have covered nostrils, which prevents water to
rush through them. To explain of what forces we are talking about, I will
demonstrate a jump from 10 m hight into water. In that situation human
experience forces of 20-24 G. Completly is submerged within 128-140
milliseconds after impact, by which time there has been a 53% loss of
velocity. I think that we are talking about considerable forces, here,
comming through axial direction. If we did plunge diving often, we could
adapt our body to those forces. We could break 'surface tension' with our
hands. And look at that, our hands are also straight (not bended). To
cushion inpact of our head, we could break water with our noses. Paranasal
sinuses (all around nose) also can have function here.
How I came to this idea. I've read an article about the weight we
can carry on our head. Here is the link for it :
www.positivehealth.com/permit/Articles/Regular/joel78.htm
A few excerptions :
"The weight involved can be equally impressive. For example, 66
pounds is considered the standard weight for the Sherpas of Nepal, but some,
for economic reasons, can manage up to 198 pounds - a risky business, as it
is difficult to be surefooted on steep mountain tracks with such a weight
hanging from your forehead. In Africa, the women of the Kikuyu and Luo
tribes in Kenya can carry on their heads loads that weigh as much as 70% of
their body weight."
"According to Giovanni Cavagna, studying the mechanics of walking at
the University of Milan, it has to do with the way people walk when they
have something on the top of their head. Cavagna compares walking to the
swinging of a pendulum. A pendulum transforms kinetic energy into potential
energy and back again. If it were not for the small amount of energy lost
due to friction at its point of attachment and from movement through the
air, the conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy in an ideal
pendulum would be 100%. A push will transfer sufficient energy into the body
of the pendulum to cause it to swing freely for a very long time. During
walking, the body behaves like an upside-down pendulum, albeit an imperfect
one. Heglund says that we act as only 65% of a perfect pendulum, which means
that, for each step we take, 35% of the energy has to be obtained from the
calories we burn. Carrying a load on the head seems to trigger an
energy-saving mechanism in the gait. For example, when the Luo and Kikuyu
women carry 20% of their body weight, they act as more economic pendulums,
achieving an average of about 80% efficiency. In other words, with this
weight on their head they use no more energy in walking than is expended
without such an encumbrance. The change in their gait is so subtle that it
is not visible to the human eye and, unfortunately, the exact mechanism is
not yet fully understood."
Another link :
www.positivehealth.com/permit/Articles/Regular/joel79.htm
It became obvious that we are adapted to carry forces in this
direction.
I would like to hear what are you biologist thinking of all this. If
this is true (and I don't see why it wouldn't be), this could have great
impact on the way we are looking at human past. AAT could gain recognition.
And we would prove that our view is more credible than previously thought.
Those things are now disscused in Yahoo! group AAT, so anybody interested is
welcome. As Marc said, we need biologists there. AAT is fundamental biology
stuff. After all Hardy (founder) was a marine biologist. -- Mario
Marc Verhaegen
> I'll ignore Marc Verhaegen's contention that the basic principles of
physiology and homeostasis have changed in the last several years since I
put my site online.
A nice illustration of your ignorance & your biased & outdated ideas on AAT.
Whatever the possible or past functions of sweating, the most-sweating
mammals besides humans are sea-lions at the shore AFAWK: "sweat glands on
the flippers of otariids aid in heat transfer. On hot days sealions &
furseals can often be seen fanning their flippers & increasing evaporative
heat loss at these sites" p.87-88 in AR Hoelzel ed.2002 "Marine mammal
biology" Blackwell.
Trying to explain human sweat glands by ancestors running over the hot
African plains, as some traditional paleo-anthropologists still do, is
clearly ridiculous: salt & water are scarse there, and typical savanna
mammals use totally different ways of cooling. OTOH, salt & water are
abundant at the shores where sealions & early Homo lived: early Homo c 1.8
Ma is found from Algeria to Java (amid barnacles & shells in a former river
delta at Mojokerto). No doubt they spread over the warmer parts of the Old
World at the beginning of the Pleistocene along the coasts. It is here that
we have to situate Hardy's more-aquatic past (AC Hardy 1960 "Was Man more
aquatic in the past?" New Scientist 7:642-5). J.Moore has no
counter-argument to this. He can only ignore... Very wise, Jim, very wise...
:-D
BTW, in our discussion group http://www.onelist.com/community/AAT , we still
need biologists who know a lot about comparative anatomy & physiology of
diverse mammals.
Marc Verhaegen
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/Verhaegen.html
J Moore
some years now, because in my experience the proponents of the theory simply
repeat old info and ideas no matter how many times it's been discussed and
shown to have errors. It just takes far too much time and effort to go over
these things again and again. (We see this in Marc Verhaegen's insistence
that the laws of physiology and homeostasis have changed in the past few
years, rendering the information obsolete. Coupled with a link to one of
his articles which does not support this contention, that, from what I've
seen online, is the essense of his method.)
I posted here because you made some errors specifically regarding my web
site, and I wanted to correct your mistakes. However, I'll try to point you
toward the direction where you can see where you';re making mistakes, if
indeed you really want to try and correct them.
There are several problems with the ideas you're describing here. One is
talking about penguins being bipedal -- they are bipedal because they are
birds. All birds are bipedal. Really, I don't mean to be mean, but this
should really be awfully obvious, and I mean obvious to anyone with any
experience of the world, not just scientists.. The fact that it wasn't
obvious to you suggests you're not thinking as critically as you should when
confronted with these ideas from AAT proponents.
I know that AAT proponents like to point out that penguins are bipedal, and
that they talk about diving birds and other animals as being "straight" or
similar terms. They tend to avoid the fact that all primates use bipedality
as part of their locomotive repertoire, and that some, such as gibbons, use
it whenever they are on the ground (several other primates, such as spider
monkeys, also usually are bipedal on the ground). This isn't so strange
when you realise that all primates tend to use a lot of upright posture, not
only during their periods of bipedalism but during sitting. We are, as
primates, pre-adapted to use bipedalism; we just use it a lot more than
other primates and that has helped shape our physique. There is no
consensus on whether the last common ancestor was a brachiator such as
gibbons, a leaper/climber such as some lemurs, or a knuckwalker like our
closest relatives the chimps, bonobos, and gorillas (this last is still
argued as a possibility). In fact, it's quite possible, since whenever we
get an earlier hominid fossil they are bipedal, that the last common
ancestor was bipedal and it's our closest relatives who've changed most in
that regard. That's an interesting thing that will probably not get
resolved until we get a good line of fossils stretching back to 10 million
years ago and maybe before that. It is an example of many things which the
AAT, in various versions, says would be due to one cause at one period but
which are either known to be or strongly suspected to have arisen at wildly
different periods.
We don't seem well-adapted to diving -- we can do it if we practice a great
deal (although many people have severe physical problems with any sort of
diving, which you really wouldn't expect to see in an animal supposedly
strongly adapted to such behavior). But there are many things we CAN do
which we aren't really ADAPTED to do (some more thoughts on that below).
The example of the nostrils is often given, and many people also use the
example of proboscis monkeys along with that as evidence. But of course
when proboscis monkeys dive into the water, they actually jump feet first,
which if anything would drive water up the nose -- if this really were a
huge problem. (If it weren't a problem there would be no selection pressure
for it.) But in fact when you jump in the water feet first, you don't get
lots of water up your nose if you don't breath in. Ths is because it just
won't fit, because that space is full of air -- basics physics saves us
there, unless we breath in, which is a problem for untrained swimmers
(again, you wouldn't expect to find such a problem in an animal supposedly
long adapted to such a lifestyle).
I wouldn't say we are adapted to carrying great weights at all; sure we can
do it if we practice hard, just as we can leap and swim if we practice
(although we do all those things rather poorly compared to a great many
animals -- even the fastest Olympic swimmers are pitifully slow compared to
most aqauatic animals).
When you look at humans at their "core", really, you see a mammal that's
adapted toward walking a fair amount and sitting around most of the time,
much like our ape relatives. Not all that dramatic, and maybe not what we
want to put on our resumes, but that's the truth of it. :)
J Moore
Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
news:btup6s$1pf5$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
Mario Petrinovich
J Moore :
> There are several problems with the ideas you're describing here. One is
> talking about penguins being bipedal -- they are bipedal because they are
> birds. All birds are bipedal. Really, I don't mean to be mean, but this
> should really be awfully obvious, and I mean obvious to anyone with any
> experience of the world, not just scientists.. The fact that it wasn't
> obvious to you suggests you're not thinking as critically as you should
> when confronted with these ideas from AAT proponents.
When I was talking about bipedal animals, I was talking
predominantly about hopping animals (because of connection between their
bipedality - holding forces in axial direction - and ours.). I mentioned
only penguins of all birds because they are bipedal as well as straight
(vertical). Their legs are below their bodies. This is just like us, and not
like all the other birds. Is this called comparative evidence? They aren't
like other birds. They are SIMILAR to us. So, you could say that they aren't
like all the other birds, and they are similar to us because they accomodate
similar conditions. As I saw from pictures (I don't have info),
plunge-diving birds also tend to be more vertical in posture. And for them
you could also say that they aren't completly vertical because they are
birds.
When we get fossil we will know for sure. We don't need scientiests
for this. A little child will figure this out when it sees the evidence.
But, we still don't have evidence, and this is because we searched on wrong
places. Maybe rift valey has a good climate, and Leaky family doesn't want
to move from there for centuries but, if we don't start to think before we
dig, it would need another 10 million years for us to gain that knowlage,
lol.
> We don't seem well-adapted to diving -- we can do it if we practice a
> great
> deal (although many people have severe physical problems with any sort of
> diving, which you really wouldn't expect to see in an animal supposedly
> strongly adapted to such behavior). But there are many things we CAN do
> which we aren't really ADAPTED to do (some more thoughts on that below).
> The example of the nostrils is often given, and many people also use the
> example of proboscis monkeys along with that as evidence. But of course
> when proboscis monkeys dive into the water, they actually jump feet first,
> which if anything would drive water up the nose -- if this really were a
> huge problem. (If it weren't a problem there would be no selection
> pressure
> for it.) But in fact when you jump in the water feet first, you don't get
> lots of water up your nose if you don't breath in. Ths is because it just
> won't fit, because that space is full of air -- basics physics saves us
> there, unless we breath in, which is a problem for untrained swimmers
> (again, you wouldn't expect to find such a problem in an animal supposedly
> long adapted to such a lifestyle).
And we can jump legs first, no problem. But, if we jump head first,
we are safe. Why would we jump head first? In my scenario we were rocky
coast dwellers. We would jump head first to gain distance (just like
swimmers are jumping on competition). We need distance if we run from
predator. Another bipedal animal, a kangaroo, when it flees from dingos, run
into water whenever it can. There it drowns dingos. We need distance so that
we as apes (who are bipedal in water) can come to water depth where predator
cannot anchor itself at the bottom, anymore. In this situation we are
advantageous, and I bet, although on land we are much weaker, in water we
could drown a leopard. Even if it bites us, we could still keep it in water
until it loses air and dies, and we could keep our head out of water. We
would be wounded, but leopard would be dead. This is the basic idea of my
scenario. We also need distance if we feed on shellfish (the only meat we
can eat uncooked). It is advantageous if you can reach further shellfish
with least effort.
A proboscis monkey's nose? It is definitely sure that we have
similar noses. Our noses can serve two aquatic purposes. The other one is a
diving bell. Try to dive upside-down, and air will leak out of your nose. A
diving bell saves air in nose. Proboscis monkey, as far as I know, doesn't
have cartilage. A cartilage is good for braking water. And plunge diver
birds have covered nostrils, and they dive head first.
> I wouldn't say we are adapted to carrying great weights at all; sure we
> can
> do it if we practice hard, just as we can leap and swim if we practice
> (although we do all those things rather poorly compared to a great many
> animals -- even the fastest Olympic swimmers are pitifully slow compared
> to most aqauatic animals).
No, this is the point. Please read the links I've provided in
previous post. We can carry a lot of load without much practice. And more,
we are efficient in walking carrying load, than not carrying load. It was
mentioned in one of those two articles I provided.
Bottom divers doesn't have to be adapted for speed. Speed in water
is only needed if you are chasing fish.
> When you look at humans at their "core", really, you see a mammal that's
> adapted toward walking a fair amount and sitting around most of the time,
> much like our ape relatives. Not all that dramatic, and maybe not what we
> want to put on our resumes, but that's the truth of it. :) JMoore
Our speed is less than that of other, non-terrestrial apes. Our
speed is comparative to land speed of aquatic mammals, which is just enough
to be able to jump into water when it notices predator. This being
mentioned, it is probably that we lived closer to our sanctuary (water in
this case) than they lived to theirs (trees). Or that predatos were more
easy noticable in our case (or, possibly, less frequent).
All in all, I think that this scenario has enough elements (I
believe much more elements than any other) to become accepted as
legitimate. -- Mario
Marc Verhaegen
> We see this in Marc Verhaegen's insistence that the laws of physiology and
homeostasis have changed in the past few years, rendering the information
obsolete.
?? Lying & misrepresenting what we said is apparently the only "argument"
of people like you. I never said such a thing. Try to read. And be honest
before you "discuss" something. Bah! Disgusting.
The essence is this: you are incapable of explaining why humans & chimps
differ. A coastal past in our history (probably end-Plio-,
begin-Pleistocene, for some time) nicely explains a lot of these
differences. Alister Hardy in his paper "Was Man more aquatic in the past?"
(NS 1960) described how a sea-side life - beach-combing, wading, swimming,
collecting coconuts, fruits, shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs,
crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains many human traits (absent in our nearest
relatives the chimps) a lot better than dry savanna scenarios do: very large
brain (but reduced olfactory bulb - totally unexpected in the savanna),
excellent breath-hold control (up to minutes), greater diving skills,
well-developed vocality, extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing
skills, reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear
body build, high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
We now know Hardy was wrong in thinking his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma
(not his fault, but due to the general opinion of paleo-anthropologists at
the time). More likely the waterside phase (we don't know how long this (or
these) lasted) happened during the Ice Ages: early Pleistocene Homo fossils
or tools have been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java,
always near large bodies of water. When sea levels dropped, H.ergaster
apparently followed the Mediterranean (>antecessor>neandertals) & Indian
Ocean coasts (>erectus). Pleistocene coasts during the glacial periods were
some 120 m below the present sea level, so many fossil & archeological finds
show the inland Homo populations that entered the continents along the
rivers & wetlands. In spite of this, Homo remains (but not
australopithecine) have frequently been found amid shells, corals, barnacles
etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all over the Old World (eg,
Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on islands that could only
be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm ).
William Morse
news:bu17ch$2g6m$1...@darwin.ediacara.org:
>
> "J Moore" <anthro...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:btvpal$243l$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
>> We see this in Marc Verhaegen's insistence that the laws of
>> physiology and
> homeostasis have changed in the past few years, rendering the
> information obsolete.
(snip Marc's accusation)
> The essence is this: you are incapable of explaining why humans &
> chimps differ. A coastal past in our history (probably end-Plio-,
> begin-Pleistocene, for some time) nicely explains a lot of these
> differences. Alister Hardy in his paper "Was Man more aquatic in the
> past?" (NS 1960) described how a sea-side life - beach-combing,
> wading, swimming, collecting coconuts, fruits, shellfish, turtles &
> turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains many human
> traits (absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) a lot better than
> dry savanna scenarios do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory bulb
> - totally unexpected in the savanna), excellent breath-hold control
> (up to minutes), greater diving skills, well-developed vocality,
> extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing skills, reduction
> of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear body build,
> high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
One of the basic problems, as J. Moore pointed out, is that we are not in
fact particularly well adapted to a fully aquatic existence. Diving from a
height of 10 meters for humans is absurd (have you ever stood on a 10 meter
board and looked down?) Repeated diving in humans from even a low board
leads to sinus problems (as I have learned from experience). Our
subcutaneous fat is nowhere near enough to allow us to spend any
significant time in cold water (and water below the thermocline is always
cold). Even in warm water our skin rapidly swells and becomes easily
subject to abrasion and puncture. We are so poorly adapted to truly deep
diving that the well-developed vocality is unlikely to be due to the
development of conscious breathing control, as it may be in birds and truly
aquatic mammals. It is more likely that the breath-hold control is a
byproduct of speech.
We
> now know Hardy was wrong in thinking his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma
> (not his fault, but due to the general opinion of
> paleo-anthropologists at the time). More likely the waterside phase
> (we don't know how long this (or these) lasted) happened during the
> Ice Ages: early Pleistocene Homo fossils or tools have been found in
> Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java, always near large bodies
> of water. When sea levels dropped, H.ergaster apparently followed the
> Mediterranean (>antecessor>neandertals) & Indian Ocean coasts
> (>erectus). Pleistocene coasts during the glacial periods were some
> 120 m below the present sea level, so many fossil & archeological
> finds show the inland Homo populations that entered the continents
> along the rivers & wetlands. In spite of this, Homo remains (but not
> australopithecine) have frequently been found amid shells, corals,
> barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all over the Old
> World (eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on
> islands that could only be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma
> http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm ).
Having said the above, a quick look at real estate prices for waterfront
property makes a convincing case without any other evidence that we are
adapted to life _near_ the water. Given our relatively high behavioral
plasticity, even a relatively recent (0.8 ma would qualify as recent in my
book) period of development primarily in a coastal setting might well make
sense in explaining our love for water. However this will not account for
bipedalism, hairlessness (have you looked at otters and seals?), brain
size, control, long legs, vocality, or tool use. As for climbing ability,
AFAIK we are more adept at climbing than we are at swimming - but that
isn't saying much. On the whole I agree with Mr. Moore - what we are well
adapted for is walking and talking. And long walks along the beach - well
what could be more romantic than that?
Yours,
Bill Morse
Marc Verhaegen
"William Morse" <wdm...@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
news:bu3s7l$oeu$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > The essence is this: you are incapable of explaining why humans & chimps
differ. A coastal past in our history (probably end-Plio-,
begin-Pleistocene, for some time) nicely explains a lot of these
differences. Alister Hardy in his paper "Was Man more aquatic in the past?"
(NS 1960) described how a sea-side life - beach-combing, wading, swimming,
collecting coconuts, fruits, shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs,
crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains many human traits (absent in our nearest
relatives the chimps) a lot better than dry savanna scenarios do: very large
brain (but reduced olfactory bulb - totally unexpected in the savanna),
excellent breath-hold control (up to minutes), greater diving skills,
well-developed vocality, extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing
skills, reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear
body build, high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
> One of the basic problems, as J. Moore pointed out, is that we are not in
fact particularly well adapted to a fully aquatic existence.
Who speaks about fully aquatic?? Seaside. Hardy: "more aquatic."
> Diving from a height of 10 meters for humans is absurd (have you ever
stood on a 10 meter board and looked down?)
Possible. So?
> Repeated diving in humans from even a low board leads to sinus problems
(as I have learned from experience).
If so, so what? It's irrelevant to our scenario, see above.
> Our subcutaneous fat is nowhere near enough to allow us to spend any
significant time in cold water (and water below the thermocline is always
cold).
Whatever the function of SC fat, humans can stay all day in water of
tropical seas c 27°C without problems of onver- or underheating.
> Even in warm water our skin rapidly swells and becomes easily subject to
abrasion and puncture.
People in some tribes in Indonesia stay all day in the water.
> We are so poorly adapted to truly deep diving that the well-developed
vocality is unlikely to be due to the development of conscious breathing
control
1) I didn't say that, see the scenario above. There's no doubt IMO vocality
as in gibbons played an important role in the development of human vocality.
Otters (waterside) are more vocalic that weasels. Arboreal mammals are usu.
more vocalic than related species in more open milieus. Savanna mammals
generally have less variation in vocality.
>, as it may be in birds and truly aquatic mammals. It is more likely that
the breath-hold control is a byproduct of speech.
Then you can't explain speech. You can't explain why human can speak & why
chimps couldn't evolve this skill.
> > We now know Hardy was wrong in thinking his seaside phase happened ~10
Ma (not his fault, but due to the general opinion of paleo-anthropologists
at the time). More likely the waterside phase (we don't know how long this
(or these) lasted) happened during the Ice Ages: early Pleistocene Homo
fossils or tools have been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia,
Java, always near large bodies of water. When sea levels dropped, H.ergaster
apparently followed the Mediterranean (>antecessor>neandertals) & Indian
Ocean coasts (>erectus). Pleistocene coasts during the glacial periods were
some 120 m below the present sea level, so many fossil & archeological finds
show the inland Homo populations that entered the continents along the
rivers & wetlands. In spite of this, Homo remains (but not
australopithecine) have frequently been found amid shells, corals, barnacles
etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all over the Old World (eg,
Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on islands that could only
be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm ).
> Having said the above, a quick look at real estate prices for waterfront
property makes a convincing case without any other evidence that we are
adapted to life _near_ the water. Given our relatively high behavioral
plasticity, even a relatively recent (0.8 ma would qualify as recent in my
book) period of development primarily in a coastal setting might well make
sense in explaining our love for water. However this will not account for
bipedalism
Evolved gradually: first (hominoid) wading-climbing in swamp forests (short
legged bent-knees-bent-hips-bipedality, still partial suspensory), later
(seaside early Homo) loss of climbing & evolution of straight body (for
streamlining, regular swimming), still later (sapiens LCA) exclusively
walking.
>, hairlessness (have you looked at otters and seals?
These species are not tropical. The very large male elephant seals & Steller
sealions & walruses are furless in cold environments, but other pinnipeds &
also sea otters are too small to be hairless. A tropical middle-sized
semi-aquatic is the baburusa: furless.
> ), brain size, control, long legs, vocality, or tool use.
All not unexpected at the seaside (cf. tool using sea otters, long legs for
wading, etc.)
> As for climbing ability, AFAIK we are more adept at climbing than we are
at swimming - but that isn't saying much. On the whole I agree with
Mr.Moore - what we are well adapted for is walking and talking. And long
walks along the beach - well what could be more romantic than that? Yours,
Bill Morse
Yes: another indication of a seaside past.
What book have you written, Bill?
J Moore
> predominantly about hopping animals (because of connection between their
> bipedality - holding forces in axial direction - and ours.). I mentioned
> only penguins of all birds because they are bipedal as well as straight
> (vertical). Their legs are below their bodies. This is just like us, and
not
> like all the other birds. Is this called comparative evidence? They aren't
> like other birds. They are SIMILAR to us. So, you could say that they
aren't
> like all the other birds, and they are similar to us because they
accomodate
> similar conditions. As I saw from pictures (I don't have info),
> plunge-diving birds also tend to be more vertical in posture. And for them
> you could also say that they aren't completly vertical because they are
> birds.
No, penguins are NOT similar to us, and I'm not talking about the many ways
they are dissimilar other than their walking posture and their pelvis. They
do not hold their legs in a very straight line directly under them as they
walk, but rather more like most quadrupedal mammals do when they walk
bipedally (like monkeys for instance). From their hips, their upper leg is
generally held forward and bent a lot at the knee; so the lower part of
their legs are vertical -- to see this you have to look at a skeleton. When
you do, you also see that their pelvis is also extremely unlike ours; for
one thing, like most swimming animals, it's very narrow, while ours and that
of our hominid ancestors is rather wide. (In fact, the pelvis of a penguin
isn't all that different from that of a pigeon, although other parts -- esp.
the breastbone and wing/flippers are quite different due to the different
needs of flying and swimming creatures.) OTOH, we have near relatives we do
hold their legs in the manner you think penguins do (gibbons and siamangs,
and to an extent, orangs and spider monkeys). I'm not saying that we
necessarily had ancestors who behaved just like those apes and monkeys, but
doesn't that seem far more likely than us being like penguins, especially
when you consider that in reality, as opposed to the musings of AAT
proponents, penguins's pelvises and walking posture are very different from
ours?
You're making the mistake of taking what AAT proponents say as if it were
true, when frankly, you just can't rely on their research. I have to write
up a post now regarding Marc Verhaegen's "sweat and sea lions" claim, which
is phoney even though he claims to have researched it. Relying on people
like that for your information will leave you awash in "false facts" and the
poorer for it.
> advantageous, and I bet, although on land we are much weaker, in water we
> could drown a leopard. Even if it bites us, we could still keep it in
water
> until it loses air and dies, and we could keep our head out of water. We
> would be wounded, but leopard would be dead. This is the basic idea of my
> scenario. We also need distance if we feed on shellfish (the only meat we
> can eat uncooked).
Another wrong statement. Humans actually do eat various types of meat raw,
especially various internal organs, although as a rule, we eat most meats
cooked.
And don't try that with a leopard, really -- it's not a good plan, to say
the least. In fact, it's common for some predators, large cats among them,
to drive their prey into the water where the cat, because of the way it can
leap, has a big advantage. As a hominid, one would probably be far better
doing almost anything other than running into water to escape a terrestrial
predator.
> A proboscis monkey's nose? It is definitely sure that we have
> similar noses. Our noses can serve two aquatic purposes. The other one is
a
> diving bell. Try to dive upside-down, and air will leak out of your nose.
A
> diving bell saves air in nose.
No, proboscis monkey's nose are not the same as humans, although they have a
superficial resemblance. I know this has been pointed out in newsgroups you
frequent, so really you have no excuse for repeating this inaccurate
statement. And the proboscis monkey's nose does not act as a "diving bell",
no matter how many times AAT proponents repeat that inaccurate statement --
you need to learn for yourself, or you will continue to be taken in by
people repeating these "false facts". The nose of the proboscis monkey is
rather obviously a sexually selected feature. Further, if you look at how
probocis monkeys dive and swim, you'll see that the position their noses are
in as a rule would drive water up their noses, if that actually were a
problem. However, as I mentioned before, simply holding one's breath keeps
water out of primates' noses, no matter which way it's oriented. The
orientation of the nostrils is similar in all Old World monkeys, btw --
that's how they got their scientific name, in fact.
> Bottom divers doesn't have to be adapted for speed. Speed in water
> is only needed if you are chasing fish.
Or escaping aquatic predators, which even the fastest Olympic swimmers (in
the fastest events) would be utterly incapable of, even if they spotted them
before they attacked, which one usually doesn't.
> Our speed is less than that of other, non-terrestrial apes.
You know, it bothers me when I continually see statements like this from AAT
proponents with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Is it true? It
certainly would not be true of all but possibly chimpanzees and bonobos, but
even there -- do you have any evidence for this statement whatever?
--
For a scientific critque of the aquatic ape theory, go to www.aquatic.org
J Moore
> Whatever the possible or past functions of sweating, the most-sweating
> mammals besides humans are sea-lions at the shore AFAWK: "sweat glands on
> the flippers of otariids aid in heat transfer. On hot days sealions &
> furseals can often be seen fanning their flippers & increasing evaporative
> heat loss at these sites" p.87-88 in AR Hoelzel ed.2002 "Marine mammal
> biology" Blackwell.
> Trying to explain human sweat glands by ancestors running over the hot
> African plains, as some traditional paleo-anthropologists still do, is
> clearly ridiculous: salt & water are scarse there, and typical savanna
> mammals use totally different ways of cooling. OTOH, salt & water are
> abundant at the shores where sealions & early Homo lived: early Homo c 1.8
Actually, other primates sweat quite a lot, and in much the same way as
humans. Phil Nicholls has just recently reposted a lot of info on this (1
Jan 2004 in sci.anthropology.paleo) so I won't clutter the space here with
it. Other mammals, such as horses, are also rather well-known for sweating
a lot, although unlike primates, they don't sweat via eccrine glands. Sea
lions do indeed sweat, but not all that much or all that effectively. I dug
out that info by looking at the reference Marc gave here, and by, unlike
Marc, actually doing the work behind reading a couple of sentences in a
general reference. (Would-be paradigm smashers please note: you have to
look at primary references; grabbing a quote from the first book you see
just doesn't cut the mustard, it will lead you into error even if you;re not
inclined that way to start with.)
So here's the thing: first, the statement that Terrie Williams and Graham
Worthy (the authors of Chapter 3 in the book Marc references above) make
about seals flapping their flippers is "supported" by what can only be an
error, since the article they refer to makes no such claim and is in fact
only about how newborn harp seals manage to keep from freezing since they're
born on ice floes in the wintertime (short story on that: they shiver a
lot). But I know from actual sources that seals do in fact wave their
flippers when they get hot. Sweating? Partly; they also have some really
nifty blood vessels that shift warm blood out to the flippers when their
bodies are hot, where the flippers act as raditators. That has nothing to
do with sweating, except that it starts up for the same reason. Next it
seems Marc has pulled one of those "Duane Gish moments" (who famously said,
"After all, you have to stop quoting somewhere.") It seems the very next
section is very apropos to Marc's thesis, but he doesn't mention it. Are
you wondering why? It turns out that it directly contradicts his claim that
seals are among the premier sweaters of the mammalian kingdom. Allow me:
"Evaporative cooling resulting from both sweating and respiratory losses
accounts for less than 20% of heat production in California sea lions
studied under experimental conditions (Masuura & Whittow 1974; South et al.
1976)." This is exactly the sort of thing one needs to look at, especially
when it contradicts what you're claiming -- Marc. The two studies are
slightly different in their goals; the South et al. study was aimed at
finding out much of the heat that sea lions did lose was due to evaporative
cooling (not just sweating but panting, and other techniques I'll mention
later) and how much due to simple radiantion and conduction-convection. The
Matsuura and Whittow study was aimed at finding out how much of the heat the
animals needed to lose actually could be lost through evaporative cooling.
I'll start with the South et al. article: Sea lions, like other otariid
seals (eared seals) just can't get rid of the heat they produce and absorb
even through panting and sweating COMBINED -- under fairly typical
conditions of 15-20 degrees C (about 60-70 deg F) those two methods COMBINED
can only lose about 20% of what they do lose and in fact in really hot
conditions they do a sort of ersatz "sweating" by drooling all over
themselves and urinating on themselves (hey, it's not easy for other animals
to stay cool) and even with that to help out they can't do the job with
evaporative cooling (it can nudge them up toward 50% of the total they lose
but only under pretty hot conditions -- 28 degrees C, or about 80 deg F).
Even with all that -- panting, sweating, AND drooling and urinating on
themselves -- the test animals just can't lose enough heat (more on that in
the next article) and so had a "precipitous rise in body temperature" which
resulted in stopping the experiment. The seals were lying prone and panting
heavily -- they didn't want to kill them. By contrast, we see that
non-human primates, and horses (and certainly humans) certainly manage much
hotter conditions than that without taking to the water, which is ultimately
how sea lions and other seals ordinarily handle a high heat load -- they hit
the water before they hit the temperatures used in that test.
The other article referred to in the quote Marc gave also measured sea lion
evaporative cooling, in this case to see how much was due to panting and how
much to sweating and how much of the total they needed to lose could
actually be lost through this combined method. They measured the sea lions
at temperatures between 13 and 30 deg C (about 55-85 deg F) and found that
the heat loss due to evaporation (both panting and sweating) was a bit under
20% of the heat produced by metabolism, which they note was "relatively
ineffective" (The harbor seal they tested did even worse) The South et al.
article emphasized that this amount was at least SOMETHING, even if it
wasn't nearly enough. The Matsuura and Whittow study showed that about 16%
was due to sweating and about 2.5% due to panting. The conclusion has
several statements that are directly appropos to Marc's claim, which makes
it a pity he didn't look at either of these primary sources which would've
showed him his error. Let me quote:
"The total evaporative water loss from the sea lions in a warm environment
could account for the dissipation of less than 20 per cent of the heat that
the animals were producing. In contrast, many terrestrial mammals and birds
are able to lose heat equivalent to their entire heat production by
evaporation of moisture (Dawson & Hudson 1970; Hart 1971; Dawson 1973). If
the minor sweating responses of pinnipeds are the legacy of their carnivory
ancestry (see above), then the ineffectiveness of evaporative cooling
mechanisms largely represents the absence of panting or of saliva spreading,
in pinnipeds as opposed to terrestrial carnivores." (pp.18-19)
and:
"The absence of effective evaporative cooling mechanisms in sea lions has
been discussed elsewhere (Whittow et al. 1972; Whittow 1973). Teologically,
sea lions may attempt to conserve water rather than to maintain a constant
body temperature. In the course of their adaptation to the sea, dehydration
may have had a role in supressing the evaporative cooling mechanisms that
ancestral pinnipeds may have possessed." (pg. 19)
As for further arguments, I've already outlined in this thread the info
regarding the fact that in humans neither sweat glands or tear ducts can
have evolved to maintain homeostasis, and that this necessary job is handled
in humans by the kidneys, just as it is in every other mammal on earth. Let
me point out that in all marine mammals, such as the sea lions which Marc
refers to here, have very large and/or heavily lobulated kidneys to deal
with the salt load in that environment. Humans, of course, do not, which is
further evidence that they did not evolve in such an environment.
Refs:
"Evaporative heat loss in the California sea lion and harbor seal", D.T.
Matsuura and G.C. Whittow, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology 1974,
vol. 48A, pp. 9-20
"Air temperature and direct partitional calorimetry of the California sea
lion (Zalophus californianus)", Frank E. South, R.H. Luecke, M.L. Zatzman
and M.D. Shanklin, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, vol. 54A, pp.
27-30
"Some aspects of temperature regulation in newborn harp seal pups", Arnoldus
Schytte Blix, Hans J. Grav, and Keith Ronald, American Journal of Physiology
1979, vol. 236B (Jan-Jun) pp. R188-R197 (not apropos to this discussion as
it's about baby seals staying warm rather than anything about cooling)
Chapter 3: "Anatomy and Physiology: the Challenge of Aquatic Living", Terrie
M. Williams and Graham A.J. Worthy, (relevant pages, cited by Marc,
pp.87-88, In Marine Mammal Biology, A. Rus Hoelzel, ed., 2002 Blackwell
Publishing
J Moore
Mario Petrinovich
> One of the basic problems, as J. Moore pointed out, is that we are not in
> fact particularly well adapted to a fully aquatic existence. Diving from a
> height of 10 meters for humans is absurd (have you ever stood on a 10
> meter board and looked down?)
Whenever I am on some higher place, I am getting unexplainable wish
to jump down. I thought that something is wrong with me, until I heard that
other people have this, too. I would be very interested to know if other
animals can jump from that hight without consequences.
> Repeated diving in humans from even a low board
> leads to sinus problems (as I have learned from experience).
It is from infected water.
> Our
> subcutaneous fat is nowhere near enough to allow us to spend any
> significant time in cold water (and water below the thermocline is always
> cold).
Please take a look at people in Patagonia. There are two types.
Coastal ones and inland. The coastal ones feed on shelfish, and are naked. I
am talking about Patagonia. Inland ones need to be clothed. And they are
living one next to the other.
> Even in warm water our skin rapidly swells and becomes easily
> subject to abrasion and puncture. We are so poorly adapted to truly deep
> diving that the well-developed vocality is unlikely to be due to the
> development of conscious breathing control, as it may be in birds and
> truly
> aquatic mammals. It is more likely that the breath-hold control is a
> byproduct of speech.
Speach is communication. Communication is exchange of information.
On land you exchange information by the mean of smell, sound, and visualy.
Smell - you cannot do this living coastal life. Sound - the sound of sea is
covering all suptile noises. BTW, did you see a human/chimp gene comparation
data. There are four major differences : smell, hearing, digesting, disease.
I explained smell and hearing. Digesting and disease can be explained (IMO)
with separated environment containing different food (which you can say that
it is newer). Visualy - this is information transfered by looking someone's
posture. We are bad at this, we are looking at faces, not body talk that
much (AFAIK). Further, on land, when you see a predator, you can scream in
panic and run. There is not much time to talk. In water predator, although
seen at same distance, need to swim towards you. You have plenty of time to
exchange informations.
> Having said the above, a quick look at real estate prices for waterfront
> property makes a convincing case without any other evidence that we are
> adapted to life _near_ the water. Given our relatively high behavioral
> plasticity, even a relatively recent (0.8 ma would qualify as recent in my
> book) period of development primarily in a coastal setting might well make
> sense in explaining our love for water. However this will not account for
> bipedalism, hairlessness (have you looked at otters and seals?), brain
> size, control, long legs, vocality, or tool use. As for climbing ability,
> AFAIK we are more adept at climbing than we are at swimming - but that
> isn't saying much. On the whole I agree with Mr. Moore - what we are well
> adapted for is walking and talking. And long walks along the beach - well
> what could be more romantic than that? Bill Morse
We are walking, not running. We are slowest of them all. The more
animal is terrestrial the fastest it must be. Ostrich is bipedal, is heavier
than humans, and still is one of the fastest. OTOH, coast doesn't need
speed. On coast even animals with retarded limbs can live. This is our
speed. I've read somewhere that in some place where seals are living, people
are warned not to come close to them. Because even if they look retarded in
that regard, they can still be as fast as us. No way that we could escape on
land from anybody. -- Mario
Marc Verhaegen
> > Whatever the possible or past functions of sweating, the most-sweating
mammals besides humans are sea-lions at the shore AFAWK: "sweat glands on
the flippers of otariids aid in heat transfer. On hot days sealions &
furseals can often be seen fanning their flippers & increasing evaporative
heat loss at these sites" p.87-88 in AR Hoelzel ed.2002 "Marine mammal
biology" Blackwell. Trying to explain human sweat glands by ancestors
running over the hot African plains, as some traditional
paleo-anthropologists still do, is clearly ridiculous: salt & water are
scarse there, and typical savanna mammals use totally different ways of
cooling. OTOH, salt & water are abundant at the shores where sealions &
early Homo lived: early Homo c 1.8
> Actually, other primates sweat quite a lot, and in much the same way as
humans.
Don't you even know that sweat glands are a lot more abundant in human skin
than in other primates? Read, eg, Montagna on sweat glands.
> Phil Nicholls has just recently reposted a lot of info on this (1 Jan 2004
in sci.anthropology.paleo) so I won't clutter the space here with it.
Why don't you reproduce this nonsense here? Afraid?
> Other mammals, such as horses, are also rather well-known for sweating a
lot, although unlike primates, they don't sweat via eccrine glands. Sea
lions do indeed sweat, but not all that much or all that effectively. I dug
out that info by looking at the reference Marc gave here, and by, unlike
Marc, actually doing the work behind reading a couple of sentences in a
general reference. (Would-be paradigm smashers please note: you have to
look at primary references; grabbing a quote from the first book you see
just doesn't cut the mustard, it will lead you into error even if you;re not
inclined that way to start with.) So here's the thing: first, the
statement that Terrie Williams and Graham Worthy (the authors of Chapter 3
in the book Marc references above) make about seals flapping their flippers
is "supported" by what can only be an error, since the article they refer to
makes no such claim and is in fact only about how newborn harp seals manage
to keep from freezing since they're born on ice floes in the wintertime
(short story on that: they shiver a lot). But I know from actual sources
that seals do in fact wave their flippers when they get hot. Sweating?
Partly; they also have some really nifty blood vessels that shift warm blood
out to the flippers when their bodies are hot, where the flippers act as
raditators. That has nothing to do with sweating, except that it starts up
for the same reason.
A lot of blabla for nothing. Try to be concise. The facts in Hoelzel are
correct, it has everything to do with sweating, but as you say the ref is
apparently wrong. It should be GA Bartholomew & F Wilke 1956 "Body Tp in the
northern furseal" J.Mammal.37:327. This is not contradicted by anything that
follows. [snipped irrelevancies] The point you completely miss is not that
we sweat like sealions, but that it's stupid to believe that when forest
mammals go to the savanna they start sweating more: the opposite is true in
savanna mammals (see below).
> As for further arguments, I've already outlined in this thread the info
regarding the fact that in humans neither sweat glands or tear ducts can
have evolved to maintain homeostasis, and that this necessary job is handled
in humans by the kidneys, just as it is in every other mammal on earth. Let
me point out that in all marine mammals, such as the sea lions which Marc
refers to here, have very large and/or heavily lobulated kidneys to deal
with the salt load in that environment. Humans, of course, do not, which is
further evidence that they did not evolve in such an environment.
Again you miss the point. Most mammals, eg, most primates & rodents, many
carnivores, rabbit, horse, camel, giraffe & most ruminants except large
bovids, have 1 papilla in each kidney. Chimps have this papilla subdivided
into 6-7 smaller ones. Some populations of capuchin & spider monkeys have
multi-papillary kidneys. Humans have 10-12 papillae in every kidney, and
frequently an extra (third or fourth) kidney. If human ancestors had gone to
the savanna as your ridiculous alternative to our waterside scenario states,
humans would have had less papillae than chimps.
William Morse
>
> "William Morse" <wdm...@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:bu3s7l$oeu$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
>> > The essence is this: you are incapable of explaining why humans &
>> > chimps
> differ. A coastal past in our history (probably end-Plio-,
> begin-Pleistocene, for some time) nicely explains a lot of these
> differences. Alister Hardy in his paper "Was Man more aquatic in the
> past?" (NS 1960) described how a sea-side life - beach-combing,
> wading, swimming, collecting coconuts, fruits, shellfish, turtles &
> turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains many human
> traits (absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) a lot better than
> dry savanna scenarios do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory bulb
> - totally unexpected in the savanna), excellent breath-hold control
> (up to minutes), greater diving skills, well-developed vocality,
> extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing skills, reduction
> of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear body build,
> high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
>
>> One of the basic problems, as J. Moore pointed out, is that we are
>> not in
> fact particularly well adapted to a fully aquatic existence.
>
> Who speaks about fully aquatic?? Seaside. Hardy: "more aquatic."
As noted in my previous follow, I can agree with seaside - but that then
falls far short of explaining the wide range of features that AAT
purports to explain.
(snip stuff on fully aquatic existence)
>> We are so poorly adapted to truly deep diving that the well-developed
> vocality is unlikely to be due to the development of conscious
> breathing control
>
> 1) I didn't say that, see the scenario above. There's no doubt IMO
> vocality as in gibbons played an important role in the development of
> human vocality. Otters (waterside) are more vocalic that weasels.
> Arboreal mammals are usu. more vocalic than related species in more
> open milieus. Savanna mammals generally have less variation in
> vocality.
>
>>, as it may be in birds and truly aquatic mammals. It is more likely
>>that
> the breath-hold control is a byproduct of speech.
> Then you can't explain speech. You can't explain why human can speak &
> why chimps couldn't evolve this skill.
Chimps (or rather a very near relative) _did_ evolve this skill. We are
the result. Read "The Symbolic Species" for an excellent discussion of
this topic.
> Having said the above, a quick look at real estate prices for
>> waterfront
> property makes a convincing case without any other evidence that we
> are adapted to life _near_ the water. Given our relatively high
> behavioral plasticity, even a relatively recent (0.8 ma would qualify
> as recent in my book) period of development primarily in a coastal
> setting might well make sense in explaining our love for water.
> However this will not account for bipedalism
> Evolved gradually: first (hominoid) wading-climbing in swamp forests
> (short legged bent-knees-bent-hips-bipedality, still partial
> suspensory), later (seaside early Homo) loss of climbing & evolution
> of straight body (for streamlining, regular swimming), still later
> (sapiens LCA) exclusively walking.
I don't buy this, maybe partly because I don't like swamps, but it is at
least an interesting possibility for explaining the development of
bipedality in humans (at least until you get to the straight body part
which is hogwash since we are relatively bad at swimming).
>>, hairlessness (have you looked at otters and seals?
> These species are not tropical. The very large male elephant seals &
> Steller sealions & walruses are furless in cold environments, but
> other pinnipeds & also sea otters are too small to be hairless. A
> tropical middle-sized semi-aquatic is the baburusa: furless.
Sea lions (250 lb) too small to be hairless? How about the Hawaiian monk
seal - it is tropical. And the capybara is a tropical middle-sized semi-
aquatic, and it has lots of hair. Meanwhile elephants and rhinoceroses
are non-aquatic but hairless. The point is that an aquatic existence does
not necessarily lead to hairlessness, nor is hairlessness evidence for an
aquatic existence.
>> ), brain size, control, long legs, vocality, or tool use.
>
> All not unexpected at the seaside (cf. tool using sea otters, long
> legs for wading, etc.)
And how about those tool using seals, as opposed to the chimps that are
incapable of tool use. And how about those wading giraffes, not to
mention all those other mammals that have adopted bipedalism as a result
of their semi-aquatic existence - the babirusa, capybara, otters, water
buffalo, beaver ... oh darn, _none_ of them are bipedal.
As I said previously, humans show evidence of development in a shoreline
habitat - but it only explains a few of the differences that set us apart
from our nearest relatives.
Yours,
Bill Morse
Marc Verhaegen
> I have to write up a post now regarding Marc Verhaegen's "sweat and sea
lions" claim, which is phoney even though he claims to have researched it.
You are sick, Moore!
Where did I claim that??
Liar!
The most-themoregulatorily-sweating mammals besides humans are sea-lions at
the shore AFAWK: "sweat glands on the flippers of otariids aid in heat
transfer. On hot days sealions & furseals can often be seen fanning their
flippers & increasing evaporative heat loss at these sites" p.87-88 in AR
Hoelzel ed.2002 "Marine mammal biology" Blackwell.
Trying to explain human sweat glands by ancestors running over the hot
African plains, as some traditional paleo-anthropologists still do, is
clearly ridiculous: salt & water are scarse there, and typical savanna
mammals use totally different ways of cooling. OTOH, salt & water are
abundant at the shores where sealions & early Homo lived: early Homo c 1.8
Ma is found from Algeria to Java (amid barnacles & shells in a former river
delta at Mojokerto). No doubt they spread over the warmer parts of the Old
World at the beginning of the Pleistocene along the coasts. It is here that
we have to situate Hardy's more-aquatic past (AC Hardy 1960 "Was Man more
aquatic in the past?" New Scientist 7:642-5).
Moore has no counter-argument whatsoever to this.
Marc Verhaegen
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/Verhaegen.html
http://www.onelist.com/community/AAT
Mario Petrinovich
I didn't talk eaither of their walking posture, or their pelvises.
Yes, I've seen their skeleton before. Penguins are not like quadruped
mammals, nor like monkeys. It is obvious, they are bipedal fish (evolved
from birds).
And, although we do have near relatives who can hold their legs in
the manner you think could lead to obligate bipedalism, they are still very
far from bipedalism. And yet, some other animals are bipedal at rest, which,
BTW, as you've said yourself, don't have anything with gibbons, siamangs,
etc.. It is obvious that being able to stand occasionaly on hind legs (a
goat can do that too, and a lot of other animlas) isn't what is needed for
bipedalism. What is needed for bipedalism is what I described. Being adapted
to acquire forces in axial direction. That is it.
> You're making the mistake of taking what AAT proponents say as if it were
> true, when frankly, you just can't rely on their research. I have to
> write
> up a post now regarding Marc Verhaegen's "sweat and sea lions" claim,
> which
> is phoney even though he claims to have researched it. Relying on people
> like that for your information will leave you awash in "false facts" and
> the poorer for it.
Discussing with them is always very interesting. Yet, I am thinking
with my own head. I have Elaine's latest book at home, but I opened it only
once. I am afraid like hell to touch it, to not come under the influence
(although, I am clearly under the influence of some other AAT book that I've
read 12 years ago). As you've seen, I only used your article for 'salt
glands' thing. This is the way I am working. Never-the-less, AAT community
is full of smart people, and I am more than glad to be in their company.
> > I bet, although on land we are much weaker, in water we
> > could drown a leopard. Even if it bites us, we could still keep it in
> > water
> > until it loses air and dies, and we could keep our head out of water. We
> > would be wounded, but leopard would be dead. This is the basic idea of
> > my
> > scenario. We also need distance if we feed on shellfish (the only meat
> > we can eat uncooked).
>
> Another wrong statement. Humans actually do eat various types of meat
> raw,
> especially various internal organs, although as a rule, we eat most meats
> cooked.
I went through fierce discussion about this (in AAT community, as
well). Did some research, tried a lot of supposedly "raw" meat we are
eating. Internal organs are eaten after hunt, purely for ceremonlial
reasons, nothing else (you can eat your shoe for ceremonial reason). Inuits
are eating those parts also after hunting, probably because they are hungry,
and they don't have the means to set up fire.
> And don't try that with a leopard, really -- it's not a good plan, to say
> the least. In fact, it's common for some predators, large cats among
> them,
> to drive their prey into the water where the cat, because of the way it
> can
> leap, has a big advantage. As a hominid, one would probably be far better
> doing almost anything other than running into water to escape a
> terrestrial predator.
A kangaroo is doing this. It is suppose to know better than you. It
was in those situations. A leopard is just a floating meat if it cannot
reach bottom. Can it leap if it doesn't have something below its legs? Even
if it can, it is pale to what it can do on land. Actually, the main predator
I set for hominids, are sabre toothed cats. Anyway, they aren't adapted to
water. They even cannot bite, or tear properly in water. Compare teeth of
aquatic predators (crocs, sharks), and the way they are tearing flesh, to
teeth of terrestrial ones. They are completly different. Terrestrial
predators are adapted to do terrestrial hunting. Hunting in water is very
different.
I think you are wrong here. Lenghtening nose always helps in aquatic
situations. BTW, I was talking about female's nose. It wouldn't be strange
that respiratory organ is sexually dimorphed in aquatic situation. And they
are in aquatical environment (crocs are their only predator, this is pretty
aquatical. Predators shape you.). It could simply be that longer noses help
when they jump into water. Or whatever. A respiratory adaptation is logical
in aquatical environment.
> > Bottom divers doesn't have to be adapted for speed. Speed in
> > water is only needed if you are chasing fish.
>
> Or escaping aquatic predators, which even the fastest Olympic swimmers (in
> the fastest events) would be utterly incapable of, even if they spotted
> them before they attacked, which one usually doesn't.
We don't have sea predators. For us, sea is safe. Remember summer
days?
> > Our speed is less than that of other, non-terrestrial apes.
>
> You know, it bothers me when I continually see statements like this from
> AAT
> proponents with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Is it true? It
> certainly would not be true of all but possibly chimpanzees and bonobos,
> but
> even there -- do you have any evidence for this statement whatever?
No. I think I've read something, but I definitely wouldn't search
for it. Why? Because even you are mentioning chimps and bonobos. They are
our closest relatives. No way that we would become even slower than them in
terrestrial environment. Remember, a biped can be fast if it needs to. So,
the same as with straight posture. A straight bipeds are able to sustain
forces from axial direction. We should be the only exception. A primate
becomes faster in terrestrial environment. We should be the only exception.
Those two things are basic recquirements for those things. And we shouldn't
be able to accomodate this, and still be able to be straight terrestrial
bipedals. Why?
If you ask me, your book about dismissing AAT is becoming thicker
and thicker. Every new day brings another clue against savanna, and another
clue for AAT. You can try to dismiss AAT things one by one, but you cannot
do this with them all at once. I believe that it is time for YOU, to start
to accept that all those things that look so similar to aquatic adaptations,
really could arise from those same adaptations >2mya. -- Mario
J Moore
--
For a scientific critque of the aquatic ape theory, go to www.aquatic.org
Marc Verhaegen <fa20...@skynet.be> wrote in message
news:buc90a$9pa$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> "J Moore" <anthro...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:bu7bla$1r00$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> > I have to write up a post now regarding Marc Verhaegen's "sweat and sea
> lions" claim, which is phoney even though he claims to have researched it.
>
J Moore
> A lot of blabla for nothing. Try to be concise. The facts in Hoelzel are
> correct, it has everything to do with sweating, but as you say the ref is
> apparently wrong. It should be GA Bartholomew & F Wilke 1956 "Body Tp in
the
> northern furseal" J.Mammal.37:327. This is not contradicted by anything
that
> follows. [snipped irrelevancies] The point you completely miss is not
that
> we sweat like sealions, but that it's stupid to believe that when forest
> mammals go to the savanna they start sweating more: the opposite is true
in
> savanna mammals (see below).
In a way it is for nothing; that is it adds nothing to knowledge of human
evolution save to point out that the claim you've been making about sea
lions and sweat is wrong and is shown to be wrong using the sources you
claimed supported it. It's kind of sad that this has to be done (I'll never
get that afternoon back, but then I like libraries) but I had to point out
that your much repeated claim had no basis in fact, despite your offering a
citation which you claimed supported it. I've dealt with the Bartholomew
and Wilkie paper on my cite. They did say they saw the animals wave their
flippers but as evidence of sweat itself offered only an experiment with
frying a dead seal's flipper under a heat lamp until it blistered. These
other cites which I summarised show through actual measurements in
experiments that sea lions do indeed sweat, but ineffectively, which
directly contradicts your claim. (In fact most of a sea lion's heat loss
through the flippers is through radiation using the blood vessels that
adjust blood flow to the flippers according to heat load -- alas for the sea
lions, even this is not effective enough to get rid of the heat they need to
lose.)
I am not here making any claim for any "scenario", "alternative" or
otherwise. I am merely examining the evidence for your scenario to see if
it makes sense and is supported by evidence. It doesn't and it isn't. Even
if all of "conventional" paleoanthropology was shown to be in error -- even
if every single fact was shown to be wrong -- it wouldn't mean that your
theory was therefore right. It wouldn't even suggest that your theory was
likely to be right -- your theory has to stand on its own merits. All I'm
doing is looking at the evidence (doing work, btw, that you should've done
yourself) to see if your theory stands on its own merits, and it doesn't.
JMoore
***
For a scientific critique of the "aquatic ape" theory, go to
www.aquaticape.org
Marc Verhaegen
> >> > The essence is this: you are incapable of explaining why humans &
chimps differ. A coastal past in our history (probably end-Plio-,
begin-Pleistocene, for some time) nicely explains a lot of these
differences. Alister Hardy in his paper "Was Man more aquatic in the past?"
(NS 1960) described how a sea-side life - beach-combing, wading, swimming,
collecting coconuts, fruits, shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs,
crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains many human> traits (absent in our nearest
relatives the chimps) a lot better than dry savanna scenarios do: very large
brain (but reduced olfactory bulb - totally unexpected in the savanna),
excellent breath-hold control (up to minutes), greater diving skills,
well-developed vocality, extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing
skills, reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear
body build, high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
> As noted in my previous follow, I can agree with seaside - but that then
falls far short of explaining the wide range of features that AAT purports
to explain.
?? You are ill-informed: Hardy hypothesised a seaside past, see his paper
1960 "Was man more aquatic in the past?" New Sci.7:642-5.
> >> We are so poorly adapted to truly deep diving that the well-developed
vocality is unlikely to be due to the development of conscious breathing
control
> > 1) I didn't say that, see the scenario above. There's no doubt IMO
vocality as in gibbons played an important role in the development of human
vocality. Otters (waterside) are more vocalic that weasels. Arboreal mammals
are usu. more vocalic than related species in more open milieus. Savanna
mammals generally have less variation in vocality.
> >>, as it may be in birds and truly aquatic mammals. It is more likely
that the breath-hold control is a byproduct of speech.
> > Then you can't explain speech. You can't explain why human can speak &
why chimps couldn't evolve this skill.
> Chimps (or rather a very near relative) _did_ evolve this skill. We are
the result. Read "The Symbolic Species" for an excellent discussion of this
topic.
?? You don't claim chimps speak, I hope??
> > > ... However this will not account for bipedalism
> > Evolved gradually: first (hominoid) wading-climbing in swamp forests
(short legged bent-knees-bent-hips-bipedality, still partial suspensory),
later (seaside early Homo) loss of climbing & evolution of straight body
(for streamlining, regular swimming), still later (sapiens LCA) exclusively
walking.
> I don't buy this, maybe partly because I don't like swamps, but it is at
least an interesting possibility for explaining the development of
bipedality in humans (at least until you get to the straight body part which
is hogwash since we are relatively bad at swimming).
- Please note: wading-climbing in swamp forests is not about humans: it was
much earlier: it's about hominoids.
- What is "hogwash"? Not in my dictionary.
- Humans swim well enough to collect shellfish by diving, see Polynesians,
Japanese & Korean Ama etc. No doubt a straight posture is advantageous here.
Do you have a reason why sapiens ancestors would not have done this parttime
when they spread along the coasts?
> >>, hairlessness (have you looked at otters and seals?
> > These species are not tropical. The very large male elephant seals &
Steller sealions & walruses are furless in cold environments, but other
pinnipeds & also sea otters are too small to be hairless. A tropical
middle-sized semi-aquatic is the baburusa: furless.
> Sea lions (250 lb) too small to be hairless? How about the Hawaiian monk
seal - it is tropical.
Yes. Thanks for the example. I hadn't realised this. If Hawaiian monk seals
are exclusively tropical, my idea that humans & babirusas are naked because
they're semi-aquatic & tropical & medium-sized is wrong.
> And the capybara is a tropical middle-sized semi-aquatic, and it has lots
of hair.
Yes, but smaller than humans & babirusas. I thought c 50-100 kg was the
limit: humans & babirusas are partly haired.
> Meanwhile elephants and rhinoceroses are non-aquatic but hairless.
So?
> The point is that an aquatic existence does not necessarily lead to
hairlessness
Full aquaticism leads to furlessness (exception: sea otters).
>, nor is hairlessness evidence for an aquatic existence.
Nobody ever claimed this.
> >> ), brain size, control, long legs, vocality, or tool use.
> > All not unexpected at the seaside (cf. tool using sea otters, long legs
for wading, etc.)
> And how about those tool using seals, as opposed to the chimps that are
incapable of tool use.
Please no simplistinc thinking: if A leads to B, than doesn't mean that B
leads to A. Our scenario is not that our ancestors were seals, but that our
ancestors c 2 Ma spreadl along the coasts.
> And how about those wading giraffes, not to mention all those other
mammals that have adopted bipedalism as a result of their semi-aquatic
existence - the babirusa, capybara, otters, water buffalo, beaver ... oh
darn, _none_ of them are bipedal.
This is too stupid to answer. Again: for the Xth time: IMO our bipedalism
evolved gradually: first (hominoid) wading-climbing in swamp forests (short
legged bent-knees-bent-hips-bipedality, still partial suspensory), later
(seaside early Homo) loss of climbing & evolution of straight body (for
streamlining, regular swimming), still later (sapiens LCA) exclusively
walking.
Have you written a book, Bill? Which?
--Marc
Mario Petrinovich
> Marc Verhaegen :
> > William Morse :
> > Having said the above, a quick look at real estate prices for
> >> waterfront
> > property makes a convincing case without any other evidence that we
> > are adapted to life _near_ the water. Given our relatively high
> > behavioral plasticity, even a relatively recent (0.8 ma would qualify
> > as recent in my book) period of development primarily in a coastal
> > setting might well make sense in explaining our love for water.
> > However this will not account for bipedalism
>
> > Evolved gradually: first (hominoid) wading-climbing in swamp forests
> > (short legged bent-knees-bent-hips-bipedality, still partial
> > suspensory), later (seaside early Homo) loss of climbing & evolution
> > of straight body (for streamlining, regular swimming), still later
> > (sapiens LCA) exclusively walking.
>
> I don't buy this, maybe partly because I don't like swamps, but it is at
> least an interesting possibility for explaining the development of
> bipedality in humans (at least until you get to the straight body part
> which is hogwash since we are relatively bad at swimming).
My idea (which is the topic of this discussion) is saying that we
became streamlined because of plunge diving (just like plunge diving birds
are very straight when they are plunge diving).
> As I said previously, humans show evidence of development in a shoreline
> habitat - but it only explains a few of the differences that set us apart
> from our nearest relatives. Bill Morse
William Morse
> William Morse :
>> Marc Verhaegen :
>> > William Morse :
>> > Having said the above, a quick look at real estate prices for
>> >> waterfront
>> > property makes a convincing case without any other evidence that we
>> > are adapted to life _near_ the water. Given our relatively high
>> > behavioral plasticity, even a relatively recent (0.8 ma would
>> > qualify as recent in my book) period of development primarily in a
>> > coastal setting might well make sense in explaining our love for
>> > water. However this will not account for bipedalism
(snip)
> My idea (which is the topic of this discussion) is saying that
> we
> became streamlined because of plunge diving (just like plunge diving
> birds are very straight when they are plunge diving).
>> As I said previously, humans show evidence of development in a
>> shoreline habitat - but it only explains a few of the differences
>> that set us apart from our nearest relatives.
I don't know if you missed my earlier follow, in which I pointed out some
of our liabilities for plunge diving. And as you may not be aware, I have
often used penguins and seals as examples of convergent evolution. But
seals, even though they are streamlined, do not walk upright. Penguins do.
The difference is that penguins evolved from bipedal ancestors while seals
evolved from quadripedal ancestors.Since humans evolved from quadripedal
ancestors, the analogy to penguins doesn't hold. You might also note that
human legs are poorly adapted for swimming (if you look at the olympic
sprint swimming events you will note that they don't use their legs for
much.)
The other problem with plunge diving as an explanation is that there is
precious little habitat for a non-flying plunge diver to exploit - there
simply aren't that many locations where cliffs overlook deep clear water. I
am unaware of any mammal that makes its living by plunge diving. There are
fishing bats, but they catch their prey with their feet, probably because
they evolved from echo-locating ancestors and so use echo-location rather
than vision to spot fish and so cannot detect fish at any significant
depth.
Yours,
Bill Morse
J Moore
that this debate should be continued in the public forum it started in. In
case he hasn't posted his post to the newsgroupo yet, I've appended the
entire text of it at the bottom of my post here so people can check the
accuracy of my excerpts of his post:
> What relly is ridiculous, is you trying to ridiculing me on this.
> Claiming that penguins are birds is as much ridiculous as claiming that we
> are apes, although we are humans, and weren't apes for so long. Or, that
> dolphins aren't fish because they are flipping their tail upside-down
> instead of left-right. They are functionaly fish, and this is what we are
> talking about.
They are not "functionally fish", they are birds who are very adept at
swimming, to the point we would probably call them aquatic, certainly
semi-aquatic. Looking at only a few superficial features and behaviors (and
ignoring the majority of their features and behaviors) is the only way you
can even approach calling them fishlike (and even that is so far-fetched I
don't know how to point it out without insulting you, since you seem
insulted by my pointing it out already). They are far more like birds than
they are like fish, which is why they are classified as birds and why no one
disputes this classification (except, apparently, you).
>
> > > I didn't talk eaither of their walking posture, or their
> > > pelvises.
> > > Yes, I've seen their skeleton before. Penguins are not like quadruped
> > > mammals, nor like monkeys. It is obvious, they are bipedal fish
(evolved
> > > from birds).
They are birds, Mario; saying what you are here just makes your position
seem even sillier than it does already, and I would think you don't want to
do that.
> Interesting. You are saying that what we need in water is leaping?
No, what I said several times, and I thought pretty clearly, is that large
cats will commonly chase their prey into water to catch it, and that this wo
rks well for them because they leap through the water while the water slows
down their prey. This means that running into water isn't a good way to get
away from large cats, contrary to your statements. Your suggestion that we
always dived into deep water presupposes that we were always very near water
that is very deep at the shoreline, which rids the "aquatic ape" of the
ability to be the shoreline wader that most proponents now want it to be.
On proboscis monkeys and their noses:
> I was talking about jumping into water. When they are in panic
(and
> they are in panic in life threating situations, someone would presume)
they
> are jumping into water. Life threating situations shape you.
When they jump into the water they jump feet first with their heads held in
a position that would drive water up their nostrils if that actually were a
problem -- as I explained it isn't actually a problem if you hold your
breath -- but the actual behavior of proboscis monkeys jumping into water is
not what you imagine it to be; they don't dive or hold their heads down.
> When was that I claimed that we see predators? Certainly not in
the
> last year or so (but I think I never did this. I usually don't claim such
> uncertain things). I also never did mention crocs. And I am swimming safe
in
You said it in this newsgroup on the 15th of this month; that was 4 days
ago: "In water predator, although
seen at same distance, need to swim towards you. You have plenty of time to
exchange informations."
This is incorrect information; it's wrong. This is known stuff, well known,
and in fact I have many examples on my site with the references to the
literature that supports what I'm saying. Further, although on land some
predators no doubt attack without being seen first, or seen to late to do
anything about it, that is almost certainly not the approach that our
ancestors took with terrestrial predators, since they probably reacted to
them much as chimps do now. Again, my site has lots of info on this as
well, also supported by references to the relevant literature.
> Adriatic sea, no problem. Along with millions of others. Why, indeed,
South
> Africans are spending on shark nets. Didn't those mothers with their
> children heard about sharks? What is so much attracting them to put their
> beloved children in such a dangerous conditions? Listening to you, I would
> presume that they wouldn't go into sea even if this can save their lives.
You claimed that for humans there are no sea predators and that "for us, sea
is safe". I pointed out that even for us, with our advanced technology,
life guards, and having for several centuries decimated our predators with
guns and nets, we still get attacked by aquatic predators. And these
predators attack in both shallow and deep water, and we usually don't see
them before they attack, even when we are in groups. These predators also
don't respond to counter-attack as a rule, which makes them even more
dangerous and rather different from terrestrial predators. For our early
hominid ancestors, who were smaller and had no technology to speak of (rocks
and branches), and who weren't able to wipe huge numbers of their predators
from the face of the earth as we have, this would be even more dangerous.
This is no doubt why we see that animals (chimps) who are very like our
ancestors (ie., of medium size with slow reproductive rates) can exist as
terrestrial animals, but we see no such animal (ie., like us, of medium size
with slow reproductive rates) in an aquatic environment anywhere in the
world.
> > > clue for AAT. You can try to dismiss AAT things one by one, but you
> > > cannot
> > > do this with them all at once. I believe that it is time for YOU, to
> > > start
> > > to accept that all those things that look so similar to aquatic
> > > adaptations,
> > > really could arise from those same adaptations >2mya. -- Mario
One can only disprove individual points one by one, and as you go through
the AAT litany, each point falls apart when you look at the evidence. That
AAT list of "aquatic traits" has the rather large problem of containing
myriad items that are simply false. In science one cannot accept things
that are demonstrably false, so I decline your invitation to do so.
JMoore
--
For a scientific critque of the aquatic ape theory, go to www.aquatic.org
*********** appended entire post from Mario:
>
>
> > Mario, you really have to ... what can I say. Penguins are not fish,
they
> > are birds. Don't you see how ridiculous you sound when say they're
fish?
> > They aren't even like fish. I mean come on. Even allowing for
hyperbole
> > this is a ridiculous statement.
>
> What relly is ridiculous, is you trying to ridiculing me on this.
> Claiming that penguins are birds is as much ridiculous as claiming that we
> are apes, although we are humans, and weren't apes for so long. Or, that
> dolphins aren't fish because they are flipping their tail upside-down
> instead of left-right. They are functionaly fish, and this is what we are
> talking about.
>
> > > I didn't talk eaither of their walking posture, or their
> > > pelvises.
> > > Yes, I've seen their skeleton before. Penguins are not like quadruped
> > > mammals, nor like monkeys. It is obvious, they are bipedal fish
(evolved
> > > from birds).
> >
> > About killing large cats in water.
> >
> > > A kangaroo is doing this. It is suppose to know better than
you.
> > > It
> > > was in those situations. A leopard is just a floating meat if it
cannot
> >
> > Kangaroos do not live in places with leopards. Again,. this is common
> > knowledge, not arcane scienctific data. Don't you realise you sound
> > ridiculous when you state things that even grade school kids know is
> > wrong?
> > I really don't mean to be mean in pointing this out, but really. Also
> > note,
> > when you start talking about dingos rather than leopards, that kangaroos
> > move by leaping, which really helps in moving quickly through shallow
> > water.
>
> You mean from shallow into deeper. Well, by plunge diving into
water
> you also are fastly into deeper water. That way you can use your potential
> and kinetic energy to gain distance.
>
> > That's why big cats, which can attack with leaping bounds, often chase
> > their
> > prey into water to catch them. And it is a fact, which you can even see
> > from watching nature shows on TV, that large cats regularly attack and
> > kill
> > their prey by chasing them into water. I'll grant you that if we were
> > trying to get away from dingos (or possibly hunting dogs), and if we
could
> > leap like kangaroos or large cats, we might escape by going into
water --
> > but I shouldn't really have to point out that we can't do that.
>
> Interesting. You are saying that what we need in water is leaping?
>
> > > Lenghtening nose always helps in aquatic
> > > situations. BTW, I was talking about female's nose. It wouldn't be
> > > strange
> > > that respiratory organ is sexually dimorphed in aquatic situation. And
> > > they
> > > are in aquatical environment (crocs are their only predator, this is
> > > pretty
> > > aquatical. Predators shape you.). It could simply be that longer noses
> > > help
> > > when they jump into water. Or whatever. A respiratory adaptation is
> > > logical in aquatical environment.
> >
> > Female and young proboscis monkeys do not hold their noses in a position
> > that would tend to make water wash over it. That would be a face down
> > position, like the "crawl" position in human swimming; they hold their
> > noses
> > in the position we would a "dog paddle" which if you would look at
> > pictures
> > of them swimming you would see leaves their nostrils facing essentially
> > forward in the water, the opposite of what you are imagining them doing.
>
> I was talking about jumping into water. When they are in panic
(and
> they are in panic in life threating situations, someone would presume)
they
> are jumping into water. Life threating situations shape you.
>
> > > We don't have sea predators. For us, sea is safe. Remember
> > > summer days?
> >
> > Again, are you completely unaware that even modern day humans, with our
> > technology and our having nearly wiped out many large aquatic predators,
> > we
> > still have problems with aquatic predators? Why does the government of
> > South Africa spend all that money on shark nets around their swimming
> > beaches? Are they just crazy in your view? The fact is that even
today,
> > when we have far more effective anti-predator techniques at our disposal
> > than any of our past ancestors, we still get killed by crocs and sharks.
> > Further, contrary to your claim that we'd just see them coming from
afar,
> > most attacking aquatic predators aren't seen until they attack. For
> > instance (and this is typical) the boy who was attacked in Florida last
> > year
> > was in shallow water (about knee-deep) and the shark wasn't seen until
it
> > had atatcked him. Crocs do the same; I have a typical example on my
site
> > of
> > a woman in Australia who was standing, with two companions, in
ankle-deep
> > water who was atatcked and killed by a croc that none of them saw until
it
> > grabbed her. This is typical of these predators.
>
> When was that I claimed that we see predators? Certainly not in
the
> last year or so (but I think I never did this. I usually don't claim such
> uncertain things). I also never did mention crocs. And I am swimming safe
in
> Adriatic sea, no problem. Along with millions of others. Why, indeed,
South
> Africans are spending on shark nets. Didn't those mothers with their
> children heard about sharks? What is so much attracting them to put their
> beloved children in such a dangerous conditions? Listening to you, I would
> presume that they wouldn't go into sea even if this can save their lives.
>
> > > If you ask me, your book about dismissing AAT is becoming
> > > thicker
> > > and thicker. Every new day brings another clue against savanna, and
> > > another
> > > clue for AAT. You can try to dismiss AAT things one by one, but you
> > > cannot
> > > do this with them all at once. I believe that it is time for YOU, to
> > > start
> > > to accept that all those things that look so similar to aquatic
> > > adaptations,
> > > really could arise from those same adaptations >2mya. -- Mario
> >
> > First you have to have things that DO look like aquatic adaptations, and
> > the
> > things that AAT proponents point to just don't; I detail many of these
> > things on my site. And second you have to ask yourself why humans have
> > none
> > of the actual ubitquitous aquatic and/or marine traits (developed via
> > convergent evolution) found in mammals. NONE.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't have time, right now, to discuss anything
> except our straight posture thing. Sorry about this. -- Mario
>
>
William Morse
>
> "William Morse" <wdm...@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:buc90a$9q2$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>> >> We are so poorly adapted to truly deep diving that the
>> >> well-developed
> vocality is unlikely to be due to the development of conscious
> breathing control
>> > 1) I didn't say that, see the scenario above. There's no doubt IMO
> vocality as in gibbons played an important role in the development of
> human vocality. Otters (waterside) are more vocalic that weasels.
> Arboreal mammals are usu. more vocalic than related species in more
> open milieus. Savanna mammals generally have less variation in
> vocality.
>> >>, as it may be in birds and truly aquatic mammals. It is more
>> >>likely
> that the breath-hold control is a byproduct of speech.
>> > Then you can't explain speech. You can't explain why human can
>> > speak &
> why chimps couldn't evolve this skill.
>> Chimps (or rather a very near relative) _did_ evolve this skill. We
>> are
> the result. Read "The Symbolic Species" for an excellent discussion of
> this topic.
> ?? You don't claim chimps speak, I hope??
I think we have a semantic misunderstanding. What you may have meant to
say is that I can't explain why the lineage that led to chimps from our
last common ancestor _didn't_ evolve this skill (speech).My point was
that humans evolved from something very like chimps, which implies that
chimps _could_ evolve speech given the right conditions. Our contention
is over what conditions are required for chimp-like apes to evolve
speech. Deacon in the reference above discusses vocality in aquatic
mammals and birds, which he attributes (correctly IMHO) to their need for
conscious breath control. I simply don't think human ancestors were
sufficiently aquatic over a sufficiently long time for their aquatic
existence to have led to speech.
Yours,
Bill Morse
Philip Nicholls
<fa20...@skynet.be> wrote:
>> Phil Nicholls has just recently reposted a lot of info on this (1 Jan 2004
>in sci.anthropology.paleo) so I won't clutter the space here with it.
>
>Why don't you reproduce this nonsense here? Afraid?
I guess Marc defines nonsense as stuff based on articles he won't
read.
However, since you asked nicely:
(apologies to sci.bio.evolution folks who don't think this is the
place to discuss the AAH and I'm not, but I am providing some
information on sweating as it occurs in primates).
Proposition: Sweating in humans is an evolution anomaly that can only
be explained within the context of convergent evolution as put forth
by Morgan in her various books.
----------------------------------------
PRIMATE SWEATING
". . . the chief mystery does not lie in any one of these
ANOMALIES [emphasis added], not even the wonderful brain or the
dexterous hands or the miracle of speech. It lies in the
sheer number and variety of the ways in which we differ from
out closest relatives in the animal kingdom." (Morgan, 1990)
One of Morgan's anomalies is eccrine (as opposed to apocrine) gland
sweating. Eccrine glands are associated with hair follicles while
apocrine glands open directly onto the skin. There are other
differences as well.
Is eccrine sweat really anomalous?
In Prosimians and New World monkeys the apocrine glands are more
numerous. In Old World Monkeys the distribution is at a ratio of 1:1,
1:2 or 1:3 depending on the body region sampled (Sokolov,
1982:160-169). For the rhesus monkeys, Sokolov remarks that "Except
for the lips and ischila callosities the eccrine glands are
plentiful." (Sokolov, 1982, p.165). Johnson and Elozondo (1974) note
that the distribution of eccrine glands in the rhesus monkey is
identical to that observed in humans.
For the chimpanzee, Sokolov notes "All of the features of
chimpanzee eccrine glands are similar to those of humans. In
the immature female the apocrine sweat glands are much smaller
in size than in the male. These are fewer in number than the
eccrine glands." (Sokolov, 1982, p.169).
Any sweating that occurs in primates is eccrine sweat (see Robertshaw,
1985 for an overview of sweating in primates vs non-primates. For a
look at the research on sweating in primates, see Hiley, 1976; Johnson
and Elizondo, 1974 and Newman et. al., 1970). The first primates were
probably nocturnal, as are many of the living prosimians today.
Nocturnal primates do not really need to worry about overheating.
They discharge excess body heat by panting. As a result,
the apocrine glands in Prosimians did not develop a thermo-
regulatory role. As primates evolved and anthropoids appeared
and moved into diurnal niches, they continued to pant until two
evolutionary pressures forced a change -- increase in body size and
increase in relative brain size.
As body size increases the number of eccrine sweat glands also seems
to increase (Robertshaw, 1985). As brain size increases, the size of
the nasal sinuses is reduced. Since in closed-mouth panters this is
the place where most of the heat exchange takes place, the increase in
brain size produced a need for an alternative heat rejection system.
Why eccrine glands when apocrine glands are the gland of choice in
other mammals? The answer, I believe, lies in the neurophysiology of
sweating. Apocrine glands are controlled by the sympathetic nervous
system. The neurons which control apocrine glands use
noradrenline as their neurotransmitter. Eccrine glands are
also controlled by the sympathetic nervous system but unlike
apocrine glands they are cholinergic, i.e. use acetylcholine
as a neurotransmitter. The difference may be compared to
playing a piano. Noradrenline works like the pedals, affecting the
action of all the tones being played. Acetylcholine is like the
individual piano keys. Cholinergic neurons are employed where fine
control over the effector organs is required. Anthropoid primates
need a greater degree of control over their heat rejection systems
because of their larger brains, which are very sensative to
temperature changes.
This is particularly important in Homo sapiens. Apocrine sweat occurs
in bursts which saturate the skin quickly. The amount of sweat they
produce cannot be regulated nor can their action be sustained for any
period of time (Robertshaw, 1985). This is ideal for an animal that
needs to cool off quickly after a period of brief intense activity but
are not suited to the task of regulating body temperature over
an extended period of time.
To sum up, eccrine sweating is not anomalous. It is consistant with
the trend observed in anthropoids, established long before the the
hominid/pongid split. Apocrine sweat glands never developed a
thermoregulatory role in primates. Eccrine sweating makes makes
good sense of neurophysiological grounds.
-------------------------------
Bligh, J (1967) A thesis concerning the process of secretion
and discharge of sweat. Environmental Search 1:28-51.
Hiley DA (1976) The thermoregulatory responses of the galago
(Galago crassicaudatus), the baboon (Papio cynocephalus) and
the chimpanzee (Pan satyrus) to heat stress. Journal of
Physiology, 254:657-670.
Johnson, GS and Elizondo, R (1974) Eccrine sweat gland in
Macaca mulatta: physiology, histochemistry and distribution.
Journal of Applied Physiology 37:814-820
Morgan, E. (1990) Scars of Evolution. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Newman, CM; Cummings, EG; Miller; Wright, H (1970)
Thermoregulatory responses of the baboon to heat stress and
scopolamine. Physiologists 13:271-285.
Robertshaw, D (1985) Sweat and heat exchange in man and other
mammals. Journal of Human Evolution 14: 63-73.
Sokolov, VE (1982) Mammal Skin. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Now I want you to note that at no time did I mention sweating as an
adaptation to savannas. I said that it occurred in response to (1)
body size increase and (2) brain size increase. Thus sweating is
not tied to bipedalism but rather to brain expansion.
Dean Falk proposed an interesting idea concerning the connection
between brain size and bipedalism. She suggested that bipedalism
released a constraint on the evolution of brain size, changing the way
in which blood drains from the brain to a pattern that permits more
efficient heat removal.
This suggests a scenerio of bipedalism --> bigger brain--> more
efficient thermoregulatory sweating --> bigger brain -->loss of body
hair --> even bigger brains.
It is very likely that many of the so-called anomalous characterisitcs
of modern humans did not appear at the same time and some may have
appeared only in the last 100 000 years or so.
Marc Verhaegen
> Kinda answered your own question there, didn't you Marc?
?? Yet found an argument against our scenario, Moore? Alister Hardy ("Was
Man more aquatic in the past?" NS 1960) described how a sea-side life -
beach-combing, wading, swimming, collecting coconuts, shellfish, turtles &
turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains many human traits
(absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) a lot better than dry savanna
scenarios do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory bulb), greater
breathing control, greater diving skills, well-developed vocality, extreme
handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing skills, reduction of fur, more
subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear body build, high needs of
iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc. Hardy was wrong in
thinking his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma. More likely it happened during
the Ice Ages: early Pleistocene Homo fossils or tools have been found in
Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java. When sea levels dropped,
H.ergaster followed the Mediterranean (pre-antecessor-neandertals) & Indian
Ocean coasts (erectus). Pleistocene coasts during the glacial periods were
some 120 m below the present sea level, so many fossil & archeological finds
show the inland Homo populations that entered the continents along the
rivers & wetlands. In spite of this, Homo remains (but not
australopithecine) have frequently been found amid shells, corals, barnacles
etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all over the Old World (eg,
Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on islands that could only
be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma).
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich sent me his post via e-mail, but agreed to my suggestion
> that this debate should be continued in the public forum it started in.
> In
> case he hasn't posted his post to the newsgroupo yet, I've appended the
> entire text of it at the bottom of my post here so people can check the
> accuracy of my excerpts of his post:
Actually, I was replying to your post, received from you, by e-mail,
so I responded adequately. Just to put things in their real context.
> > Interesting. You are saying that what we need in water is
> > leaping?
>
> No, what I said several times, and I thought pretty clearly, is that large
> cats will commonly chase their prey into water to catch it, and that this
> wo
> rks well for them because they leap through the water while the water
> slows
> down their prey. This means that running into water isn't a good way to
> get
> away from large cats, contrary to your statements. Your suggestion that
> we
> always dived into deep water presupposes that we were always very near
> water
> that is very deep at the shoreline, which rids the "aquatic ape" of the
> ability to be the shoreline wader that most proponents now want it to be.
Actually, yes. You are perfectly right here. I never saw anything
interesting in wadding idea. My scenario doesn't include wadding as start of
bipedalism.
> On proboscis monkeys and their noses:
> > I was talking about jumping into water. When they are in panic
> > (and
> > they are in panic in life threating situations, someone would presume)
> > they
> > are jumping into water. Life threating situations shape you.
>
> When they jump into the water they jump feet first with their heads held
> in
> a position that would drive water up their nostrils if that actually were
> a
> problem -- as I explained it isn't actually a problem if you hold your
> breath -- but the actual behavior of proboscis monkeys jumping into water
> is
> not what you imagine it to be; they don't dive or hold their heads down.
As I said, we also can jump into water legs first. It is good to
close nostrils if you jump this way, if I remember correctly from when I was
at the sea. Anyway, it isn't a big problem. Problem for nostrils arise when
you are jumping head first (like plunge diving birds clearly show). Jumping
head first is recquired to gain distance. I don't know how Proboscis monkey
gain distance. Probably by leaping. I definitely would like to research this
more. I wonder where I can get more info.
Do Proboscis monkeys hold their nostrils like tapirs? Here is an
excerption from an animal encyclopedia which could answer a lot of questions
you are asking above :
"Instinctively, all tapirs take refugee in water when they are being
persueded by predators, which include jaguars, tigers, pumas, and Andean
bears - ingeniously, the Brazilian tapir of the Amazon may submerge itself
in deep water to force a jaguar clinging to its back to release the hold."
Why doesn't prey of large cats take a dive to get rid of its
predators? For tapirs, running into water is excellent way to get rid of
predators. Tapirs are an old family. Today's, more common, grazers are newer
thing. Before today's grass fields, a lot of world was rainy forest. Animals
adapted to running into water to find refugee would be more common. We are
adapted for this, as well as we are straight like kangaroos. I see no
problem for us. I don't know where are you seeing it.
> > When was that I claimed that we see predators? Certainly not in
> > the
> > last year or so (but I think I never did this. I usually don't claim
> > such
> > uncertain things). I also never did mention crocs. And I am swimming
> > safe in
>
> You said it in this newsgroup on the 15th of this month; that was 4 days
> ago: "In water predator, although
> seen at same distance, need to swim towards you. You have plenty of time
> to exchange informations."
>
> This is incorrect information; it's wrong. This is known stuff, well
> known,
> and in fact I have many examples on my site with the references to the
> literature that supports what I'm saying.
Oh. No problem. Mea culpa. I discussed a lot about how we don't have
aquatic predators, so I am keeping this in the back of my mind that
everybody thinks like that. In example above, I didn't talk about aquatic
predators at all, but about terrestrial predators going after us. Predators
like big cats we were talking about. I was comparing dealing with
terrestrial predators on land and in water.
> Further, although on land some
> predators no doubt attack without being seen first, or seen to late to do
> anything about it, that is almost certainly not the approach that our
> ancestors took with terrestrial predators, since they probably reacted to
> them much as chimps do now. Again, my site has lots of info on this as
> well, also supported by references to the relevant literature.
Will you, please, explain here, in short?
Firstly, do we see a diference, in that regard, between Old and New
(without human impact) world? That would need more thorough research, but I
think I could see a diference. Further, there is a national park in South
Africa, Cape Peninsula National Park. It is situated on the Cape of Good
Hope. There, chacma baboons are roaming beaches in the fashion similar to
what I had in mind. I did have in mind more rocky coast, but this place also
has a lot of steep hills. During low tide, those baboons are feeding on
shark eggs. Now, what sharks have to say on this, lol?
Why sharks don't attack us, I am not 100% sure. It could be that
they don't like animals with limbs. It could be that they can use us,
because we are scaring fish. Maybe this all has something to do with
dolphins. Shark experts usually like to say : If sharks would attack us, it
wouldn't be few isolated cases, that look more like mistakes. It would be a
real bloodshed. No way that we could go anywhere near sea, with all
protection you can find. In water, we are without rock or branches even
today. Today also we are unarmed.
> > > > clue for AAT. You can try to dismiss AAT things one by one, but you
> > > > cannot
> > > > do this with them all at once. I believe that it is time for YOU, to
> > > > start
> > > > to accept that all those things that look so similar to aquatic
> > > > adaptations,
> > > > really could arise from those same adaptations >2mya. -- Mario
>
> One can only disprove individual points one by one, and as you go through
> the AAT litany, each point falls apart when you look at the evidence.
> That
> AAT list of "aquatic traits" has the rather large problem of containing
> myriad items that are simply false. In science one cannot accept things
> that are demonstrably false, so I decline your invitation to do so. JMoore
In science one can accept things that are true, though. I don't have
time to discuss anything than plunge diving related things, right now. I
only could say, in general, that your interpretation looks to me like wrong
one. OTOH, by every day AAT is improving. -- Mario
Marc Verhaegen
> > A lot of blabla for nothing. Try to be concise. The facts in Hoelzel are
correct, it has everything to do with sweating, but as you say the ref is
apparently wrong. It should be GA Bartholomew & F Wilke 1956 "Body Tp in the
northern furseal" J.Mammal.37:327. This is not contradicted by anything that
follows. [snipped irrelevancies] The point you completely miss is not that
we sweat like sealions, but that it's stupid to believe that when forest
mammals go to the savanna they start sweating more: the opposite is true in
savanna mammals (see below).
> In a way it is for nothing; that is it adds nothing to knowledge of human
evolution save to point out that the claim you've been making about sea
lions and sweat is wrong
It's not: humans & sealions sweat abundantly thermoactively. These processes
need salt & water. It's ridiculous to believe sweating evolved for runnin
over the savanna as many PAs still believe: water & salt are scarse there.
> and is shown to be wrong using the sources you claimed supported it. It's
kind of sad that this has to be done (I'll never get that afternoon back,
but then I like libraries) but I had to point out that your much repeated
claim had no basis in fact, despite your offering a citation which you
claimed supported it. I've dealt with the Bartholomew and Wilkie paper on
my cite. They did say they saw the animals wave their flippers but as
evidence of sweat itself offered only an experiment with frying a dead
seal's flipper under a heat lamp until it blistered.
Man, you're raving. The evidence are the abundant sweat glands on the
flippers.
> These other cites which I summarised show through actual measurements in
experiments that sea lions do indeed sweat, but ineffectively
Sigh. Not ineffectively, but insufficiently - as to be expected in a
semi-aquatic mammal: it can go to the water if thermoregulation on land is
insufficient.
>, which directly contradicts your claim.
Too the contrary. But too difficult for you apparently.
> (In fact most of a sea lion's heat loss through the flippers is through
radiation using the blood vessels that adjust blood flow to the flippers
according to heat load
Yes. So?
1) What makes you believe that cooling through radiation doesn't allow
cooling through evaporation?
2) A lot better cooling device is of course conduction: vasodilation in
flippers in the water.
>-- alas for the sea lions, even this is not effective enough to get rid of
the heat they need to lose.)
See above. And think a bit.
> I am not here making any claim for any "scenario", "alternative" or
otherwise. I am merely examining the evidence for your scenario to see if
it makes sense and is supported by evidence. It doesn't and it isn't.
I'm not interested in your savanna & other biases. I'm interested in the
facts: why are you completely incapable of giving 1 serious argument against
our scenario??
M.Verhaegen, P-F.Puech & S.Munro 2002
"Aquarboreal ancestors?"
Trends in Ecology & Evolution 17, 212-217
7_05(If somebody is interested in reading our paper, I can send the pdf.)
Alister Hardy ("Was Man more aquatic in the past?" NS 1960): a sea-side
life - beach-combing, wading, swimming, collecting coconuts, shellfish,
turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains many human
traits (absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) many times better than
dry savanna scenarios do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory bulb!),
greater breathing control, greater diving skills, well-developed vocality,
extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing skills, reduction of
fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear body build, high
needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
(Hardy at the time was wrong of course in thinking his seaside phase
happened ~10 Ma. More likely it happened during the Ice Ages: early
Pleistocene Homo fossils or tools have been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran,
Kenya, Georgia, Java. When sea levels dropped, H.ergaster followed the
Mediterranean (pre-antecessor-neandertals) & Indian Ocean coasts (erectus).
Pleistocene coasts during the glacial periods were some 120 m below the
present sea level, so many fossil & archeological finds show the inland Homo
populations that entered the continents along the rivers & wetlands. In
spite of this, Homo remains (but not australopithecine) have frequently been
found amid shells, corals, barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in
coasts all over the Old World (eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay,
Eritrea), even on islands that could only be reached by sea: Flores 0.8 Ma.)
So far, no serious arguments against these ideas have been forwarded.
J Moore
this reply and sent it just to him when I meant to send it to the newsgroup.
Because some of these points were replied to, I thought it would be good to
have the post show up. :) It would've been in the thread a few days ago
though (around the 17th or 18th).
Jim
************
Mario, you really have to ... what can I say. Penguins are not fish, they
are birds. Don't you see how ridiculous you sound when say they're fish?
They aren't even like fish. I mean come on. Even allowing for hyperbole
this is a ridiculous statement.
> I didn't talk eaither of their walking posture, or their pelvises.
> Yes, I've seen their skeleton before. Penguins are not like quadruped
> mammals, nor like monkeys. It is obvious, they are bipedal fish (evolved
> from birds).
About killing large cats in water.
> A kangaroo is doing this. It is suppose to know better than you.
It
> was in those situations. A leopard is just a floating meat if it cannot
Kangaroos do not live in places with leopards. Again,. this is common
knowledge, not arcane scienctific data. Don't you realise you sound
ridiculous when you state things that even grade school kids know is wrong?
I really don't mean to be mean in pointing this out, but really. Also note,
when you start talking about dingos rather than leopards, that kangaroos
move by leaping, which really helps in moving quickly through shallow water.
That's why big cats, which can attack with leaping bounds, often chase their
prey into water to catch them. And it is a fact, which you can even see
from watching nature shows on TV, that large cats regularly attack and kill
their prey by chasing them into water. I'll grant you that if we were
trying to get away from dingos (or possibly hunting dogs), and if we could
leap like kangaroos or large cats, we might escape by going into water --
but I shouldn't really have to point out that we can't do that.
> > water out of primates' noses, no matter which way it's oriented. The
> > orientation of the nostrils is similar in all Old World monkeys, btw --
> > that's how they got their scientific name, in fact.
>
> I think you are wrong here. Lenghtening nose always helps in
aquatic
> situations. BTW, I was talking about female's nose. It wouldn't be strange
> that respiratory organ is sexually dimorphed in aquatic situation. And
they
> are in aquatical environment (crocs are their only predator, this is
pretty
> aquatical. Predators shape you.). It could simply be that longer noses
help
> when they jump into water. Or whatever. A respiratory adaptation is
logical
> in aquatical environment.
Female and young proboscis monkeys do not hold their noses in a position
that would tend to make water wash over it. That would be a face down
position, like the "crawl" position in human swimming; they hold their noses
in the position we would a "dog paddle" which if you would look at pictures
of them swimming you would see leaves their nostrils facing essentially
forward in the water, the opposite of what you are imagining them doing.
> We don't have sea predators. For us, sea is safe. Remember summer
> days?
Again, are you completely unaware that even modern day humans, with our
technology and our having nearly wiped out many large aquatic predators, we
still have problems with aquatic predators? Why does the government of
South Africa spend all that money on shark nets around their swimming
beaches? Are they just crazy in your view? The fact is that even today,
when we have far more effective anti-predator techniques at our disposal
than any of our past ancestors, we still get killed by crocs and sharks.
Further, contrary to your claim that we'd just see them coming from afar,
most attacking aquatic predators aren't seen until they attack. For
instance (and this is typical) the boy who was attacked in Florida last year
was in shallow water (about knee-deep) and the shark wasn't seen until it
had atatcked him. Crocs do the same; I have a typical example on my site of
a woman in Australia who was standing, with two companions, in ankle-deep
water who was atatcked and killed by a croc that none of them saw until it
grabbed her. This is typical of these predators.
> If you ask me, your book about dismissing AAT is becoming thicker
> and thicker. Every new day brings another clue against savanna, and
another
> clue for AAT. You can try to dismiss AAT things one by one, but you cannot
> do this with them all at once. I believe that it is time for YOU, to start
> to accept that all those things that look so similar to aquatic
adaptations,
> really could arise from those same adaptations >2mya. -- Mario
First you have to have things that DO look like aquatic adaptations, and the
things that AAT proponents point to just don't; I detail many of these
things on my site. And second you have to ask yourself why humans have none
of the actual ubitquitous aquatic and/or marine traits (developed via
convergent evolution) found in mammals. NONE.
J Moore
> Do Proboscis monkeys hold their nostrils like tapirs? Here is an
They neither hold their noses or close their nostrils as they jump feet
first into water.
> excerption from an animal encyclopedia which could answer a lot of
questions
> you are asking above :
> "Instinctively, all tapirs take refugee in water when they are
being
> persueded by predators, which include jaguars, tigers, pumas, and Andean
> bears - ingeniously, the Brazilian tapir of the Amazon may submerge itself
> in deep water to force a jaguar clinging to its back to release the hold."
> Why doesn't prey of large cats take a dive to get rid of its
> predators? For tapirs, running into water is excellent way to get rid of
> predators. Tapirs are an old family. Today's, more common, grazers are
newer
> thing. Before today's grass fields, a lot of world was rainy forest.
Animals
> adapted to running into water to find refugee would be more common. We are
> adapted for this, as well as we are straight like kangaroos. I see no
> problem for us. I don't know where are you seeing it.
Tapirs are large animals; adults are, on average at least as large as
jaguars, usually 50% or more bigger. They also have an extremely tough
skin. Both those features probably account for their being able to use a
technique that would leave a hominid in shreds or dangling from the mouth of
their attacker.
And again, running into water typically slows down the prey more than it
slows the cat, which is why, in the real world, large cats use that
technique. And we are not very much like kangaroos just as penguins are not
very much like fish.
> > Further, although on land some
> > predators no doubt attack without being seen first, or seen to late to
do
> > anything about it, that is almost certainly not the approach that our
> > ancestors took with terrestrial predators, since they probably reacted
to
> > them much as chimps do now. Again, my site has lots of info on this as
> > well, also supported by references to the relevant literature.
>
> Will you, please, explain here, in short?
You could go read it. In very short form then, chimps tend to be proactive
rather than reactive; they scream at large cats (leopards especially), throw
things at them, and will often drive them off. They have been observed
crawling into a leopard's den, and dragging out and killing one of the cubs
even though the female leopard was in the den. In experiments with a dummy
leopard in the 60s, Kortland found chimps to be extremely agressive; they
threw things and held their ground. Interestingly (considering the
attention AATers like to give savannah-dwellers) savannah chimps were much
better at this than forest dwelling chimps. The savannah chimps were much
more agressive and coordinated in their attacks, and Kortland also noted "A
side effect of the experiment was the observation that the savannah
chimpanzees more often walked erect than do the jungle chimpanzees."
Chimps have also been observed sleeping on the ground in leopard country;
they just don't seem to be as concerned about them as we would imagine (I'd
be concerned). Now they definitely do get caught by both leopards and lions
at times, but the rate of predation is obviously too low to be a problem for
the population -- obvious because otherwise they would not have survived as
a species in their environment. That's also why it's interesting to note
that no animal of small or medium size with a slow reproductive rate (such
as humans and chimps) can be found in any aquatic environment anywhere in
the world.
> Firstly, do we see a diference, in that regard, between Old and
New
> (without human impact) world? That would need more thorough research, but
I
> think I could see a diference. Further, there is a national park in South
> Africa, Cape Peninsula National Park. It is situated on the Cape of Good
> Hope. There, chacma baboons are roaming beaches in the fashion similar to
> what I had in mind. I did have in mind more rocky coast, but this place
also
> has a lot of steep hills. During low tide, those baboons are feeding on
> shark eggs. Now, what sharks have to say on this, lol?
Sharks (some give live birth, some lays eggs that drift with the currents
and sometimes drift ashore) do not hang around their eggs protecting them,
and they suffer enormous losses of eggs as a result, so the fact that
creatures eat the eggs when they drift to shore doesn't have anything to do
with shark attack, except that attacks can occur whenever an animal is in
the water. (BTW, I've seen video of a sharks attacking birds and seals that
actually made it to shore but were still being attacked with the shark about
a third of the way out of water -- tenacious creatures when they want to be,
sharks.) But this doesn't reduce their numbers because they have a lot of
offspring (crocs, and many other animals, have the same method of getting
young to adulthood -- just have lots and lots of them). As for "what sharks
have to say on this", just as with counterattacks on them, they, and crocs,
just don't seem to care. That's one part of what makes them so dangerous,
since they don't respond to counterattacks anywhere near as readily as
terrestrial predators tend to.
> Why sharks don't attack us, I am not 100% sure. It could be that
> they don't like animals with limbs. It could be that they can use us,
> because we are scaring fish. Maybe this all has something to do with
> dolphins. Shark experts usually like to say : If sharks would attack us,
it
> wouldn't be few isolated cases, that look more like mistakes. It would be
a
> real bloodshed. No way that we could go anywhere near sea, with all
> protection you can find. In water, we are without rock or branches even
> today. Today also we are unarmed.
"We", as a species, aren't spending a great deal of time in the water --
some few of "us" do. And we have decimated many of our predators, and those
predators have evolved alongside hominids who have been vastly better armed
than our earliest ancestors for a million years or more. That could all
have something to do with the fact that sharks don't attack us all the time.
That does not -- or should not -- become "sharks don't attack us". My point
is that we are vastly less likely to be attacked by aquatic predators than
our early ancestors, yet we still are attacked, and we rarely see it coming
and outside of avoiding the environment, fencing it off, or using
sophisticated weapons, there's not much we can do about it. This is very
different from the situation with terrestrial predators.
> > One can only disprove individual points one by one, and as you go
through
> > the AAT litany, each point falls apart when you look at the evidence.
> > That
> > AAT list of "aquatic traits" has the rather large problem of containing
> > myriad items that are simply false. In science one cannot accept things
> > that are demonstrably false, so I decline your invitation to do so.
JMoore
>
> In science one can accept things that are true, though. I don't
have
> time to discuss anything than plunge diving related things, right now. I
> only could say, in general, that your interpretation looks to me like
wrong
> one. OTOH, by every day AAT is improving. -- Mario
I used to hear this fairly often -- I would bring out some facts and point
out that the AAT proponent's "facts" were actually "false facts", and the
AAT proponent would say it was simply a matter of "interpretation". It's a
shame to see that the level of argument for the AAT hasn't grown at all in
the past decade.
JMoore
"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often
endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm,
for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness: and when
this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often
at the same time opened."
-- Charles Darwin, 1871 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,
Chapter 21, page 909.
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich :
> > William Morse :
> >> Marc Verhaegen :
> >> > William Morse :
> >> > Having said the above, a quick look at real estate prices for
> >> >> waterfront
> >> > property makes a convincing case without any other evidence that we
> >> > are adapted to life _near_ the water. Given our relatively high
> >> > behavioral plasticity, even a relatively recent (0.8 ma would
> >> > qualify as recent in my book) period of development primarily in a
> >> > coastal setting might well make sense in explaining our love for
> >> > water. However this will not account for bipedalism
>
> (snip)
>
> > My idea (which is the topic of this discussion) is saying that
> > we
> > became streamlined because of plunge diving (just like plunge diving
> > birds are very straight when they are plunge diving).
>
> >> As I said previously, humans show evidence of development in a
> >> shoreline habitat - but it only explains a few of the differences
> >> that set us apart from our nearest relatives.
>
>
>
> I don't know if you missed my earlier follow, in which I pointed out some
> of our liabilities for plunge diving.
Is this it :
"One of the basic problems, as J. Moore pointed out, is that we are
not in fact particularly well adapted to a fully aquatic existence. Diving
from a height of 10 meters for humans is absurd (have you ever stood on a 10
meter board and looked down?) Repeated diving in humans from even a low
board leads to sinus problems (as I have learned from experience). Our
subcutaneous fat is nowhere near enough to allow us to spend any significant
time in cold water (and water below the thermocline is always cold). Even in
warm water our skin rapidly swells and becomes easily subject to abrasion
and puncture. We are so poorly adapted to truly deep diving that the
well-developed vocality is unlikely to be due to the development of
conscious breathing control, as it may be in birds and truly aquatic
mammals. It is more likely that the breath-hold control is a byproduct of
speech."
I used a 10m example just to show the forces. They found out that we
are more adapted to walk with forces above our head that are equal to 20% of
our weight, than without this weight. This is the avarage force, if you turn
this into avarage hight, that I am having in mind. Possibly a little more,
since a lot of time passed from then. But also could be a little less since
we shuld be adapted to considerably higher foces, as well.
Regarding our thermo insulation. I have a book called "Encyclopedia
of Human Body" by Richard Walker. There, on page 63 (in edition from 2002),
you have shown a thermogram of human body, which reveals how body heat is
lost through the skin. It is, more or less, even (low) from sholders down.
Which is perfectly in tune with AAT. Only sholders and head are where we are
dissipate body heat through skin. Every summer we are going to the sea, for
the sole reason (especially children) to stay in sea how much we can. I
really don't know where you are getting ideas that we couldn't stand this.
I don't think any AATer is mentioning truly deep diving. But, I
wouldn't be surprised if you colud find some interesting things regarding
plunge diving and breath control. I'll try to research this more, sometime
in the future.
> And as you may not be aware, I have
> often used penguins and seals as examples of convergent evolution. But
> seals, even though they are streamlined, do not walk upright. Penguins do.
> The difference is that penguins evolved from bipedal ancestors while seals
> evolved from quadripedal ancestors.Since humans evolved from quadripedal
> ancestors, the analogy to penguins doesn't hold. You might also note that
> human legs are poorly adapted for swimming (if you look at the olympic
> sprint swimming events you will note that they don't use their legs for
> much.)
Well, this could, actually, prove what I am saying. Because seals
were quadrupedal, they aren't adapted to forces in axial direction, but
ruther to forces at right angle to that direction. This is why they are not
holding their body on land in axial direction to the force of gravity, but
to right angle to it. Penguines probably evolved from plunge diving birds. I
don't have the right info yet, but, from pictures, plunge diving birds look
much more vertical than other birds. The reason they aren't completly
vertical could be in their need to take off. Birds have horizontal trunk.
And penguins have stronger front limbs. Instead of putting my whole trunk
vertical and legs below it, I would ruther have right angle between trunk
and legs, which isn't at all that hard for a penguin, if you've seen
penguin's skeleton (somebody already mentioned that they have pelvises like
quadrupel mammals), and use front limbs just like seals. How come they are
able to put their trunk vertically. Birds don't have this. They have
horizontal trunk. No, they are adapted to sustain axial forces, not forces
in right angle to axial.
> The other problem with plunge diving as an explanation is that there is
> precious little habitat for a non-flying plunge diver to exploit - there
> simply aren't that many locations where cliffs overlook deep clear water.
Actually, I made my theory much before I made this 'plunge diving -
bipedality' connection. It is based on excellent conditions for us on a
Mediterranean rocky coast. Full of small tree fruits, cliff bird eggs. A
steep hill is going steeply into sea, so depth is reached very easy.
Wherever you have steep hills which are contacting sea, you have good
conditions for a tailless primate to live there. Look at tailless macaques.
They are all, either on islands without predators, or on hilly region.
Fruits need a lot of sunshine. Steep hills give conditions for a lot densier
growth of fruits (each tree gets more sunshine), which can attract a
primate. You have a lot of primates spending night on cliffs, as safe place
from predators. We can climb cliffs better than predators. Cats are climbing
trees by sticking their claws into tree and/or embracing tree trunk with
their powerfull limbs. They cannot do any of this with a cliff. Gelada
baboons, which are adapted to life on cliffs (they don't climbe trees even
in danger of predators) have very dexterous hands (don't give me that :
"This is becaus ethey have to CAREFULLY pick grass blades." thing). -- Mario
> I
> am unaware of any mammal that makes its living by plunge diving. There are
> fishing bats, but they catch their prey with their feet, probably because
> they evolved from echo-locating ancestors and so use echo-location rather
> than vision to spot fish and so cannot detect fish at any significant
> depth. Bill Morse
Mario Petrinovich
> As Mario mentioned, I goofed and hit the wrong button when I was sending
> this reply and sent it just to him when I meant to send it to the
> newsgroup.
> Because some of these points were replied to, I thought it would be good
> to
> have the post show up. :) It would've been in the thread a few days ago
> though (around the 17th or 18th). Jim
Thanks. This was my answer to you. -- Mario
*************
> Mario, you really have to ... what can I say. Penguins are not fish, they
> are birds. Don't you see how ridiculous you sound when say they're fish?
> They aren't even like fish. I mean come on. Even allowing for hyperbole
> this is a ridiculous statement.
What relly is ridiculous, is you trying to ridiculing me on this.
Claiming that penguins are birds is as much ridiculous as claiming that we
are apes, although we are humans, and weren't apes for so long. Or, that
dolphins aren't fish because they are flipping their tail upside-down
instead of left-right. They are functionaly fish, and this is what we are
talking about.
> > I didn't talk eaither of their walking posture, or their
> > pelvises.
> > Yes, I've seen their skeleton before. Penguins are not like quadruped
> > mammals, nor like monkeys. It is obvious, they are bipedal fish (evolved
> > from birds).
>
> About killing large cats in water.
>
> > A kangaroo is doing this. It is suppose to know better than you.
> > It
> > was in those situations. A leopard is just a floating meat if it cannot
>
> Kangaroos do not live in places with leopards. Again,. this is common
> knowledge, not arcane scienctific data. Don't you realise you sound
> ridiculous when you state things that even grade school kids know is
> wrong?
> I really don't mean to be mean in pointing this out, but really. Also
> note,
> when you start talking about dingos rather than leopards, that kangaroos
> move by leaping, which really helps in moving quickly through shallow
> water.
You mean from shallow into deeper. Well, by plunge diving into water
you also are fastly into deeper water. That way you can use your potential
and kinetic energy to gain distance.
> That's why big cats, which can attack with leaping bounds, often chase
> their
> prey into water to catch them. And it is a fact, which you can even see
> from watching nature shows on TV, that large cats regularly attack and
> kill
> their prey by chasing them into water. I'll grant you that if we were
> trying to get away from dingos (or possibly hunting dogs), and if we could
> leap like kangaroos or large cats, we might escape by going into water --
> but I shouldn't really have to point out that we can't do that.
Interesting. You are saying that what we need in water is leaping?
> > Lenghtening nose always helps in aquatic
> > situations. BTW, I was talking about female's nose. It wouldn't be
> > strange
> > that respiratory organ is sexually dimorphed in aquatic situation. And
> > they
> > are in aquatical environment (crocs are their only predator, this is
> > pretty
> > aquatical. Predators shape you.). It could simply be that longer noses
> > help
> > when they jump into water. Or whatever. A respiratory adaptation is
> > logical in aquatical environment.
>
> Female and young proboscis monkeys do not hold their noses in a position
> that would tend to make water wash over it. That would be a face down
> position, like the "crawl" position in human swimming; they hold their
> noses
> in the position we would a "dog paddle" which if you would look at
> pictures
> of them swimming you would see leaves their nostrils facing essentially
> forward in the water, the opposite of what you are imagining them doing.
I was talking about jumping into water. When they are in panic (and
they are in panic in life threating situations, someone would presume) they
are jumping into water. Life threating situations shape you.
> > We don't have sea predators. For us, sea is safe. Remember
> > summer days?
>
> Again, are you completely unaware that even modern day humans, with our
> technology and our having nearly wiped out many large aquatic predators,
> we
> still have problems with aquatic predators? Why does the government of
> South Africa spend all that money on shark nets around their swimming
> beaches? Are they just crazy in your view? The fact is that even today,
> when we have far more effective anti-predator techniques at our disposal
> than any of our past ancestors, we still get killed by crocs and sharks.
> Further, contrary to your claim that we'd just see them coming from afar,
> most attacking aquatic predators aren't seen until they attack. For
> instance (and this is typical) the boy who was attacked in Florida last
> year
> was in shallow water (about knee-deep) and the shark wasn't seen until it
> had atatcked him. Crocs do the same; I have a typical example on my site
> of
> a woman in Australia who was standing, with two companions, in ankle-deep
> water who was atatcked and killed by a croc that none of them saw until it
> grabbed her. This is typical of these predators.
When was that I claimed that we see predators? Certainly not in the
last year or so (but I think I never did this. I usually don't claim such
uncertain things). I also never did mention crocs. And I am swimming safe in
Adriatic sea, no problem. Along with millions of others. Why, indeed, South
Africans are spending on shark nets. Didn't those mothers with their
children heard about sharks? What is so much attracting them to put their
beloved children in such a dangerous conditions? Listening to you, I would
presume that they wouldn't go into sea even if this can save their lives.
> > If you ask me, your book about dismissing AAT is becoming
> > thicker
> > and thicker. Every new day brings another clue against savanna, and
> > another
> > clue for AAT. You can try to dismiss AAT things one by one, but you
> > cannot
> > do this with them all at once. I believe that it is time for YOU, to
> > start
> > to accept that all those things that look so similar to aquatic
> > adaptations,
> > really could arise from those same adaptations >2mya. -- Mario
>
> First you have to have things that DO look like aquatic adaptations, and
> the
> things that AAT proponents point to just don't; I detail many of these
> things on my site. And second you have to ask yourself why humans have
> none
> of the actual ubitquitous aquatic and/or marine traits (developed via
> convergent evolution) found in mammals. NONE.
Unfortunately, I don't have time, right now, to discuss anything
Mario Petrinovich
> > Do Proboscis monkeys hold their nostrils like tapirs? Here is an
>
> They neither hold their noses or close their nostrils as they jump feet
> first into water.
I was thinking, when they are swimming. Do they hold their noses in
the same fashion as tapirs? Regarding jumping, we have covered nostrils and
we are staright. Just like plunge diving birds.
Again, I don't see what is wrong with escaping predators by taking a
dive. We are exceptionaly good at this. What is wrong with drowning predator
in water by using your hands. And you are perfectly right here, we are
nothing like this, compared to kangaroos. We should be much much more
capable of doing this than kangaroos. We evolved from a primate with long,
strong hands. If predator is in the water we can do whatever we want. We
could dive, emerge wherever we want. We can emerge behind it, ride it, put
our hand around its neck, pull it below water, and keep it there until it
dies. We can do this even to very big predator. After all, we can ride a
horse.
We don't have to run into water, we can simply plunge into it.
Grazing animals are on plains. You don't have so much steep shores there.
And, there are not a lot of places with shallow shores anyway. Grazing
quadruped animals have trouble to find a good place to go across the river.
Oh, my god. I should have known this. I spent so much time in
sci.anthropology.paleo newsgroup to deal with this, and now I have to do all
this again. Whatever this Kortland is writing is pure bullshit. This guy is
so biased that this is unbelievable. He was very popular when savanna theory
was at its peak, by spreading this shit.
In short. (Forgive me for this. I am not very well organized person.
In fact I am not organized at all, and I don't keep notes, remarks, or
anything like that. You'll just have to deal with it, if you can.). Anyway,
I think that all monkeys of low canopy are doing the same. When they see
predator, they don't run away from it. Instead they keep staring at it, keep
it in its sight. This is very important for them, to not lose sight of it.
Until predator finaly decides that there is no point, and decides to leave.
They can do this because they are much better in their environment (trees)
than predator. For them, the only important thing is to not be cought by
surprise. It is interesting that the same attitude towards predators I am
having in my scenario. In my scenario, we too are much better in deep water
than predators. The only important thing is to not be cought by surprise.
Regarding Kortland's bullshit. He saw dead leopard cups, but he
never saw a mother near by. He only assumed that mother was there (because
he wanted her to be there, just like the people who are reading this BS).
Very scientific. The dummy experiments are the most stupid experiments that
I ever heard of, in my whole life. This thing can be bought only by the
strongest believer. A chimps saw a dummy of leopard. Just by seeing a plain
dummy, they went into panic. They started to throw things on it (they
actually behaved simialrly to how they would behave if they saw a leopard
from low canopy). The forest ones were so accurate that they didn't manage
to hit the dummy even once. A savanna ones managed to hit it twice, or
something, by accident. Lol. This was the big proof that chimps are
perfectly capable to attack leopard dummies, lol. I don't know if to cry or
to laugh. And even more, that we evolved just this way, because savanna ones
even managed to actually hit the dummy (which wasn't moving, or did anything
at all). My god. And look at this description : "Savanna ones were much
agressive (by Kortland's agrometer), and coordinated (by coordimeter)."
Once, I've read on Internet about one well-known female researcher
(I don't remember if this was Goodal or somebody else). When she was young,
just started researching, she researched baboons. Once she did one foolish
thing. She looked a female baboon in eyes. A baboon screamed in panic.
Baboons reacted and attacked researcher. They would kill her, if her guide
didn't save her from certain death. Only because of wrong look. My God. But,
hey. This isn't important at all. After all we didn't evolve from baboons,
so, who cares. OTOH, once some chimp played with some branch. Chimp
accidently droped that branch on Goodal's head. "Oh, my poor head. Oh, how
it hurts. Oh, you chimp almighty. How strong you are. Oh, you ruler of the
World. How mighty you are. You are perfectly capable of going wherever you
want, without fear. You can defeat anything. How smart and strong you are."
I went through all this, and I don't want to go again. There are a
lot accounts and research that are telling that leopard is the main cause of
chimp death. Chimps don't sleep on ground if they know leopard is around. I
even heard of one research which tracks leopard movement, and noticed that
it evades chimps. Of course it does. It doesn't want chimps to be alerted,
before it attacks. It has better sense of smell, and it manages to keep
stupid chimps unaware of its presence. But somebody concluded (or
'interpreted' this evidence, if you like) that it evades chimps because it
is afraid of chimps. Lol. There are no documented killings because it is
hard to document something like that in jungle. Poor visibility, it happens
at night. Next day you only count one chimp less. It is not like savanna,
where you have a line of sight of few hundred meters around you, and you can
shot anything without leaving your hide. In jungle you cannot take a hide,
expect that something happens a few meters infront of you, because every
animal that is close to you is aware of your presence And expect that that
something is a leopard killing a chimp. First of all, chimp wouldn't be near
you, and leopard would avoid you by far.
> Chimps have also been observed sleeping on the ground in leopard country;
> they just don't seem to be as concerned about them as we would imagine
> (I'd
> be concerned). Now they definitely do get caught by both leopards and
> lions
> at times, but the rate of predation is obviously too low to be a problem
> for
> the population -- obvious because otherwise they would not have survived
> as a species in their environment.
Is it so?
> That's also why it's interesting to note
> that no animal of small or medium size with a slow reproductive rate (such
> as humans and chimps) can be found in any aquatic environment anywhere in
> the world.
I explained similarities of aquatic and low canopy envirenments,
above. Humans are, even today, living very much on shores.
This with shark eggs was a little joke, of course (this is why I
placed a "lol"). The point is that you were wrong that this kind of
behaviour wasn't seen anywhere in the world. It is seen, and furthermore, it
is seen in roughly the same environment that I am proposing.
It was documented humans swimming amongst sharks, as well, very
often.
No, we are not avoiding the environment, or anything you've
mentioned. Actually we visit the environment with our little children.
Again, it is not me who sees things wrongly, IMO. It is a matter of
interpretation. And I think your interpretation is wrong. And you only think
it is right because more people thinks similarly. -- Mario
Marc Verhaegen
"Philip Nicholls" <pan...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:bukvpl$163u$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
Man, don't waste our time. All the irrelevant nonsense you're writing below
have nothing to do with the proposed scenario that our ancestors end
Pliocene or begin Pleistocene spread along the coasts (when early Homo
remains were "suddenly" found from Algeria in the W to Java in the E) where
they evolved more thermoactive sweat glands (salt & water is abundant at the
coast, you know).
Alister Hardy (Was Man more aquatic in the past? NS 1960) described how a
sea-side life - beach-combing, wading, swimming, collecting coconuts,
shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains
many human traits (absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) a lot better
than dry savanna scenarios do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory
bulb), greater breathing control, greater diving skills, well-developed
vocality, extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing skills,
reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear body
build, high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
Hardy was wrong in thinking his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma. More likely
it happened during the Ice Ages: early Pleistocene Homo fossils or tools
have been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java. When sea
levels dropped, H.ergaster followed the Mediterranean
(pre-antecessor-neandertals) & Indian Ocean coasts (erectus). Pleistocene
coasts during the glacial periods were some 120 m below the present sea
level, so many fossil & archeological finds show the inland Homo populations
that entered the continents along the rivers & wetlands. In spite of this,
Homo remains (but not australopithecine) have frequently been found amid
shells, corals, barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all
over the Old World (eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on
islands that could only be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma).
So far, no good arguments against these ideas have been forwarded.
Marc Verhaegen http://www.onelist.com/community/AAT
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/Verhaegen.html
________
Marc Verhaegen
> > ?? You don't claim chimps speak, I hope??
> I think we have a semantic misunderstanding. What you may have meant to
say is that I can't explain why the lineage that led to chimps from our
last common ancestor _didn't_ evolve this skill (speech). My point was that
humans evolved from something very like chimps, which implies that chimps
_could_ evolve speech given the right conditions. Our contention is over
what conditions are required for chimp-like apes to evolve speech. Deacon in
the reference above discusses vocality in aquatic mammals and birds, which
he attributes (correctly IMHO) to their need for conscious breath control.
You can compare gibbon song to bird song, but not bird song to human speech.
IOW, singing was probably a preadaptation to speech (as Darwin already
said), but it's not enough. Singing isn't enough (cf. birds & gibbons:
sounds, music, vowels - not really conscious), diving isn't enough (cf.
otters etc.: voluntary breath control, precentral areas), and even the
combination is probably not enough: we also needed a fine control of lips,
tongue & throat (eg, as seen in suction feeders, who also have descended
larynges).
--Marc
> ) I simply don't think human ancestors were sufficiently aquatic over a
Marc Verhaegen
> I don't know if you missed my earlier follow, in which I pointed out some
of our liabilities for plunge diving. And as you may not be aware, I have
often used penguins and seals as examples of convergent evolution. But
seals, even though they are streamlined, do not walk upright. Penguins do.
The difference is that penguins evolved from bipedal ancestors while seals
evolved from quadrupedal ancestors. Since humans evolved from quadrupedal
ancestors, the analogy to penguins doesn't hold.
Humans evolve from suspensory arboreals - a preadaptation to bipedality.
> You might also note that human legs are poorly adapted for swimming
So are frog legs.
> (if you look at the olympic sprint swimming events you will note that they
don't use their legs for much.)
Is this so?
> The other problem with plunge diving as an explanation is that there is
precious little habitat for a non-flying plunge diver to exploit - there
simply aren't that many locations where cliffs overlook deep clear water. I
am unaware of any mammal that makes its living by plunge diving. There are
fishing bats, but they catch their prey with their feet, probably because
they evolved from echo-locating ancestors and so use echo-location rather
than vision to spot fish and so cannot detect fish at any significant depth.
Yours, Bill Morse
Yes.
Marc Verhaegen
> One can only disprove individual points one by one, and as you go through
the AAT litany, each point falls apart when you look at the evidence.
Nothing falls apart. Every typically human trait is easily compatible with
the shoreline past envisioned by Hardy: beach-combing, wading & diving,
collecting coconuts, shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs,
seaweeds etc. This lifestyle explains many human traits (absent in our
nearest relatives the chimps) many times better than savanna scenarios do:
very large brain, reduced olfaction, greater breathing control, greater
diving skills, well-developed vocality, extreme handiness & tool use,
reduction of climbing skills, reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very
long legs, more linear body build, high needs of iodine, sodium &
poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc. (Hardy unfortunately followed the PAs at
the time and was wrong in thinking his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma. More
likely it happened late Plio- or/& early Pleistocene. Homo fossils or tools
~1.8 Ma have been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java. No
doubt, early Homo followed the Mediterranean & Indian Ocean coasts.
Pleistocene coasts during the glacial periods were some 120 m below the
present sea level, so many fossil & archeological finds show the inland Homo
populations that entered the continents along the rivers & wetlands. In
spite of this, Homo remains (but not australopithecine) have frequently been
found amid shells, corals, barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in
coasts all over the Old World (eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay,
Eritrea), even on islands that could only be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma).
So far, no reasonable arguments against Hardy's seaside view have been
forwarded.
Mario Petrinovich
> Again, I don't see what is wrong with escaping predators by taking
> a
> dive. We are exceptionaly good at this. What is wrong with drowning
> predator
> in water by using your hands. And you are perfectly right here, we are
> nothing like this, compared to kangaroos. We should be much much more
> capable of doing this than kangaroos. We evolved from a primate with long,
> strong hands. If predator is in the water we can do whatever we want. We
> could dive, emerge wherever we want. We can emerge behind it, ride it, put
> our hand around its neck, pull it below water, and keep it there until it
> dies. We can do this even to very big predator. After all, we can ride a
> horse.
Oh, yes. I can add here :
Somebody could ask, are you sure that you can put your arm around
cat's neck. While cat is swimming, it wants to keep mouth and nose above
water. I am not sure how much it can see what is happening in water below,
when it is swimming like this. Anyway, its neck is exposed from below, in
the best possible way to put your arm around it. I am not sure that this
strategy could be of use with sabre-toothed cats. I am placing sabre-toothed
cats as the main predators of hominids. -- Mario
From "-user news"@wards.plus.net.uk Sat Jan 24 02:45:26 2004
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Men have further evidence on thier polygamous genes in thier beards.
Many male animals who cannot guarantee the "fidelity" of thier female
mates will perform cunlingus to remove competitors semen prior to
cupulation. Obviously the beard develops in puberty, and serves the
same dual functions as the pubic hairs and the foreskin, making
copulation both more comfortable, and by reducing blood - blood contact,
safer.
Women do not require beards suggesting that lesbian cunlingus is
not physiologically catered for, except perhaps in post-menapausal
women. Interestingly in nature dominant males assert thier supremacy
through anal rape, accounting for pubic hairs extending to the anus
in males but not females. The hair here has been retained to a lesser
degree due to the lower breading rates of subordinate males.
Homosexuality in males has probably evolved as a rues to appear
abjectly submissive, whilst looking for opportunities to cuckold
the dominant male, more devious,rather than deviant.
Females however benefit from sharing dominant males, hence the
businessman enjoying the company of two or more ladies where
it is in womens interest biologically to obtain the dominance
gene. Women would be prepared were it not for the economic
advantages of monogamy to allow thier mate to propagate widely
provided the economic teritories of the families did not overlap.
Where there is surplus, infidelity is a better strategy for all
during impoverishment partnerships become more exclusive.
There is a clear case for Islamic family structures being closer to our
original psychology and biology, than monogamous arrangements elsewhere.
Of course this polygamy exists unofficially through the mistress
system, and the abuse of domestic staff by the ultra rich.
Life is not a bitch,
it's a bastard.
Philip Nicholls
<fa20...@skynet.be> wrote:
>
>"Philip Nicholls" <pan...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:bukvpl$163u$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
>Man, don't waste our time. All the irrelevant nonsense you're writing below
>have nothing to do with the proposed scenario that our ancestors end
>Pliocene or begin Pleistocene spread along the coasts (when early Homo
>remains were "suddenly" found from Algeria in the W to Java in the E) where
>they evolved more thermoactive sweat glands (salt & water is abundant at the
>coast, you know).
No, it doesn't. It's basically about how eccrine sweating is a form
of thermoregulation, that in modern primates it is physiologically
linked to the expansion of brain and body size and is consistant with
trends in primate evolution.
Not everything is about your ideas, Marc.
>Alister Hardy (Was Man more aquatic in the past? NS 1960) described how a
>sea-side life - beach-combing, wading, swimming, collecting coconuts,
>shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains
>many human traits (absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) a lot better
>than dry savanna scenarios do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory
>bulb), greater breathing control, greater diving skills, well-developed
>vocality, extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing skills,
>reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear body
>build, high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
It is one thing to claim that beaching-combing, wading and swimming
explain x, y and z features of modern human anatomy and quite another
to provide and test an explanation.
For example, very large brain size. We can pretty much document when
brain size began to increase. Exactly how does a sea-side life
explain large brains?
As for the rest of your traits, with the exception of the "long legs
and more linear body" which are associated with the aquistion of
striding bipedalism, we have no information as to when they became
part of the hominid character set.
>Hardy was wrong in thinking his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma. More likely
>it happened during the Ice Ages: early Pleistocene Homo fossils or tools
>have been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java. When sea
>levels dropped, H.ergaster followed the Mediterranean
>(pre-antecessor-neandertals) & Indian Ocean coasts (erectus). Pleistocene
>coasts during the glacial periods were some 120 m below the present sea
>level, so many fossil & archeological finds show the inland Homo populations
>that entered the continents along the rivers & wetlands. In spite of this,
>Homo remains (but not australopithecine) have frequently been found amid
>shells, corals, barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all
>over the Old World (eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on
>islands that could only be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma).
Archaeological evidence is also found in such places as Koobi Fora,
Olduvia Gorge, Renzidong, Zhoukoudian, Nariokotome and a host of other
sites that are far from a beach.
>So far, no good arguments against these ideas have been forwarded.
Let's say I believe that far out in space, cosmic bunnies control our
fate. No good argument against this idea has every been put forward.
TWINBLUE
>evolved from quadripedal ancestors.Since humans evolved from quadripedal
>ancestors, the analogy to penguins doesn't hold.
Ah... there appears to be some faulty
reasoning here. In a sense BOTH
penguins and humans evolved from
quadripeds but NEITHER of them had
very near ancestors on all fours.
TWINBLUE
firstjois
"TWINBLUE" <twin...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:bv23b4$25pe$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
: >The difference is that penguins evolved from bipedal ancestors while
Not "some" faulty reasoning! You have Marco and Mario here and you have
got tons and tons (or gallons and gallons) of faulty reasoning. They are
just trolling to hook a few new converts to their Aquatic Ape Religion.
Don't get all wet,
Jois
Marc Verhaegen
> >Man, don't waste our time. All the irrelevant nonsense you're writing
below have nothing to do with the proposed scenario that our ancestors end
Pliocene or begin Pleistocene spread along the coasts (when early Homo
remains were "suddenly" found from Algeria in the W to Java in the E) where
they evolved more thermoactive sweat glands (salt & water is abundant at the
coast, you know).
> No, it doesn't.
What is "it"?
> It's basically about how eccrine sweating is a form of thermoregulation,
that in modern primates it is physiologically linked to the expansion of
brain and body size
?? Where do you get this nonsense? I'm not interested in your fairy tales.
> and is consistant with trends in primate evolution.
Ah, teleological thinking. Never heard of Darwin?
> Not everything is about your ideas, Marc.
So?
> >Alister Hardy (Was Man more aquatic in the past? NS 1960) described how a
sea-side life - beach-combing, wading, swimming, collecting coconuts,
shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains
many human traits (absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) a lot better
than dry savanna scenarios do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory
bulb), greater breathing control, greater diving skills, well-developed
vocality, extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing skills,
reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs, more linear body
build, high needs of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
> It is one thing to claim that beaching-combing, wading and swimming
explain x, y and z features of modern human anatomy and quite another to
provide and test an explanation. For example, very large brain size. We
can pretty much document when brain size began to increase. Exactly how
does a sea-side life explain large brains?
Tell me.
> As for the rest of your traits, with the exception of the "long legs and
more linear body" which are associated with the aquistion of striding
bipedalism
Man, you're producing just-so stories. You don't have 1 indication for that
claim.
> , we have no information as to when they became part of the hominid
character set.
If so, so what?
> >Hardy was wrong in thinking his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma. More
likely it happened during the Ice Ages: early Pleistocene Homo fossils or
tools have been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java. When
sea levels dropped, H.ergaster followed the Mediterranean
(pre-antecessor-neandertals) & Indian Ocean coasts (erectus). Pleistocene
coasts during the glacial periods were some 120 m below the present sea
level, so many fossil & archeological finds show the inland Homo populations
that entered the continents along the rivers & wetlands. In spite of this,
Homo remains (but not australopithecine) have frequently been found amid
shells, corals, barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all
over the Old World (eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on
islands that could only be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma).
> Archaeological evidence is also found in such places as Koobi Fora,
Olduvia Gorge, Renzidong, Zhoukoudian, Nariokotome and a host of other sites
that are far from a beach.
So?
> >So far, no good arguments against these ideas have been forwarded.
> Let's say I believe that far out in space, cosmic bunnies control our
fate. No good argument against this idea has every been put forward.
So?
Mario Petrinovich
IMO, if they both had ancestors of different posture, in both cases
the reasons to become straight bipedals were strong. A quadruped/bird holds
its body horizontaly. If it tries to put it verticaly, it probably could. It
also probably could maintain balance, and could do this for long, if it is
trained to do this (has developed muscles needed for doing this). But, every
muscle in its body is already adapted to hold those forces while body is in
horizontal position. Every muscle of its body feels the best in this
position. Every other posititon induces fatigue. This theory could easily be
proved if you meassure net muscle activity of all muscles in body. But,
there is no need to do this. Theory is logical by itself. Whoever needs
proof of it, he has some problems with himself, : ). -- Mario
J Moore
BTW, I forgot to add that Kortland's observations and experiments also match
chimp behavior which has been observed in the wild since then, where they
show offensive rather than defensive behavior toward large cats.
JMoore
J Moore
Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
news:bup7kd$2f4s$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> J Moore :
> > > Do Proboscis monkeys hold their nostrils like tapirs? Here is
an
> >
> > They neither hold their noses or close their nostrils as they jump feet
> > first into water.
>
> I was thinking, when they are swimming. Do they hold their noses
in
> the same fashion as tapirs? Regarding jumping, we have covered nostrils
and
> we are staright. Just like plunge diving birds.
No, they just swim with their noses up out of the water. The nostrils of
females and juveniles face forward when they are swimming in this position.
So their noses don't have anything to do with their swimming, although the
position they hold them in would drive water up their nostrils if the water
splashed up. In other words, water doesn't wash over the tops of their
noses either when jumping into water or swimming, as AAT proponents
conitnually suggest.
> Again, I don't see what is wrong with escaping predators by taking
a
> dive. We are exceptionaly good at this. What is wrong with drowning
predator
> in water by using your hands. And you are perfectly right here, we are
> nothing like this, compared to kangaroos. We should be much much more
> capable of doing this than kangaroos. We evolved from a primate with long,
> strong hands. If predator is in the water we can do whatever we want. We
> could dive, emerge wherever we want. We can emerge behind it, ride it, put
> our hand around its neck, pull it below water, and keep it there until it
> dies. We can do this even to very big predator. After all, we can ride a
> horse.
> We don't have to run into water, we can simply plunge into it.
> Grazing animals are on plains. You don't have so much steep shores there.
> And, there are not a lot of places with shallow shores anyway. Grazing
> quadruped animals have trouble to find a good place to go across the
river.
You seem to be suggesting that hominids only lived in places with deep water
and steep banks, which doesn't seem to fit with the places they actually
lived, so doesn't that sort of put a damper on your idea right there? And
I'm afraid your claim that a hominid could drown or even sucessfully
counterattack a larger (much larger in some cases) predator just because
they were in water is getting silly. OTOH, we know that chimps, similar in
size, intelligence, and social structure to our ancestors, manage to deal
with predators on land. Suggesting that they couldn't while offering a
scenario that seems incredibly far-fetched just doesn't make sense. Even if
we managed to deter a large cat in the way you suggest, the hominid would
take a great deal of damage from close quarters fighting, and unlike tapirs,
we don't have a very thick, tough skin to withstand it.
> Oh, my god. I should have known this. I spent so much time in
> sci.anthropology.paleo newsgroup to deal with this, and now I have to do
all
> this again. Whatever this Kortland is writing is pure bullshit. This guy
is
> so biased that this is unbelievable. He was very popular when savanna
theory
> was at its peak, by spreading this shit.
He did the experiments and recorded the results. To you, this is bullshit.
I think that speaks volumes.
> Regarding Kortland's bullshit. He saw dead leopard cups, but he
> never saw a mother near by. He only assumed that mother was there (because
> he wanted her to be there, just like the people who are reading this BS).
> Very scientific. The dummy experiments are the most stupid experiments
that
> I ever heard of, in my whole life. This thing can be bought only by the
You are not only not a notetaker, you seem to have difficulty reading and
comprehending. Those are two different accounts. The researchers who saw
the chimps kill the leopard cub after they crawled into the den did just
that -- they saw them do it. The mother was in the den; they could hear her
screams (the screams of a large cat are very distinctive).
> > Chimps have also been observed sleeping on the ground in leopard
country;
> > they just don't seem to be as concerned about them as we would imagine
> > (I'd
> > be concerned). Now they definitely do get caught by both leopards and
> > lions
> > at times, but the rate of predation is obviously too low to be a problem
> > for
> > the population -- obvious because otherwise they would not have survived
> > as a species in their environment.
>
> Is it so?
They exist, therefore it must be so. This isn't clear? It's very easy to
see; if they exist today, they obviously have survived. Duh.
> This with shark eggs was a little joke, of course (this is why I
> placed a "lol"). The point is that you were wrong that this kind of
> behaviour wasn't seen anywhere in the world. It is seen, and furthermore,
it
> is seen in roughly the same environment that I am proposing.
I didn't say that no animals walk along shorelines, and even wade; of ocurse
they do. I did say that no animal of small or medium size with a slow
reproductive rate (such as humans and chimps) can be found in any aquatic
environment anywhere in the world. This is a fact.
> No, we are not avoiding the environment, or anything you've
> mentioned. Actually we visit the environment with our little children.
> Again, it is not me who sees things wrongly, IMO. It is a matter of
> interpretation. And I think your interpretation is wrong. And you only
think
> it is right because more people thinks similarly. -- Mario
You are avoiding the many facts I've mentioned along with my statements
about this. We have for several hundred years (and especially in the last
century or so) decimated our predators with weapons nto available until
recent years, and with habitat destruction as well, unfortunately. We, that
is the greater "we", our species, also spends, as a species, very little
time in the water compared to the time we spend elsewhere, unlike the
purported aquatic apes, who had to be spending an awful lot of their time in
the water for convergent evolution to have had the effects that AATers say
it did. Nevertheless, we still do get attacked by sharks, and by crocs, in
spite of our having nearly wiped them out, in spite of having shark nets,
etc. etc. etc.
Mario Petrinovich
> TWINBLUE :
> : >The difference is that penguins evolved from bipedal ancestors while
> : >seals
> : >evolved from quadripedal ancestors.Since humans evolved from
> : >quadripedal ancestors, the analogy to penguins doesn't hold.
> :
> : Ah... there appears to be some faulty
> : reasoning here. In a sense BOTH
> : penguins and humans evolved from
> : quadripeds but NEITHER of them had
> : very near ancestors on all fours.
> :
> : TWINBLUE
>
> Not "some" faulty reasoning! You have Marco and Mario here and you have
> got tons and tons (or gallons and gallons) of faulty reasoning. They are
> just trolling to hook a few new converts to their Aquatic Ape Religion.
> Don't get all wet, Jois
Listen, Jois. The posts like this, I am getting from you all the
time. They are meaningless, without any argument, or anything sensible
(please re-read it, and you'll see this by yourself). They are posts of
religious fanatic, mad because it sees other religion in its sight. It is
you who is looking on all of this through religion glasses. It is time for
you to visit your shrink, IMO. -- Mario
Michael Clark
Is that http://www.aquaticape.org ? :-)
--
Yada, yada, yada.
Marc Verhaegen
I had again a look at this website. A waste of time. The first sentence I
read: "One of the AAT's principle claims to fame is that it explains the
human hair pattern; it's generally at or near the top of their list of
"aquatic traits"."
Clearly a big lie: this "trait" is not necessary at all, eg, I never said 1
word on it.
The next sentence I read: "The AAT claims that humans lost their body hair
as a result of an aquatic phase in our past, claiming this is an aquatic
adaptation."
Another lie: All we say is that loss of fur is not unexpected in a seaside
tropical medium-sized mammal (eg, see babiruasas).
Obvously, the website is misleading & lying.
We have to abandon theoretical oppositions like terrestrial/aquatic. Perhaps
the word "aquatic" was unfortunate: some biased paleo-anthropologists begin
dreaming of mermaids etc. Nobody ever claimed human ancestors were fully
aquatic. Hardy believed human ancestors were waterside once ("Was Man more
aquatic in the past?" NS 1960). That's all. The man was clearly correct: a
sea-side life - beach-combing, wading, swimming, collecting coconuts,
shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc. - explains
many human traits (absent in our nearest relatives the chimps) many times
better than dry savanna scenarios do: very large brain, reduced olfaction,
breathing control, diving skills, varied vocality, extreme handiness & tool
use, reduction of climbing, reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very
long legs, straighter body build, late puberty, high needs of iodine, sodium
& poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
It's true that Hardy was wrong (following the PAs at the time!) in thinking
his seaside phase happened ~10 Ma. More likely it happened late Plio- or
early Pleistocene: Homo fossils or tools have "suddenly" been found in
Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia, Java ~1.8 Ma. Apparently, when sea
levels dropped, H.ergaster followed the Mediterranean & Indian Ocean coasts.
Pleistocene coasts during the glacial periods were some 120 m below the
present sea level, so many fossil & archeological finds show the inland Homo
populations that entered the continents along the rivers & wetlands. In
spite of this, Homo remains (but not australopithecine) have frequently been
found amid shells, corals, barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in
coasts all over the Old World (eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay,
Eritrea), even on islands that could only be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma).
So far, no good arguments against Hardy's seaside ideas have been forwarded.
Certainly not the outdated & irrelevant website of Moore.
Mario Petrinovich
> > Regarding Kortland's bullshit.
>
> BTW, I forgot to add that Kortland's observations and experiments also
> match
> chimp behavior which has been observed in the wild since then, where they
> show offensive rather than defensive behavior toward large cats. JMoore
Yeah, right. This is why they are building nests up in the trees,
every night. -- Mario
J Moore
typo. :)
JMoore
--
For a scientific critque of the aquaticape theory, go to www.aquaticape.org
Michael Clark <bit...@spammer.com> wrote in message
news:bvb5no$1pli$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> "J Moore" <anthro...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:bv8vf1$15ee$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > > Regarding Kortland's bullshit.
> >
> > BTW, I forgot to add that Kortland's observations and experiments also
> match
> > chimp behavior which has been observed in the wild since then, where
they
> > show offensive rather than defensive behavior toward large cats.
> >
> > JMoore
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
> news:bup7kd$2f4s$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > J Moore :
> > > > Do Proboscis monkeys hold their nostrils like tapirs? Here
> > > > is an
> > >
> > > They neither hold their noses or close their nostrils as they jump
> > > feet first into water.
> >
> > I was thinking, when they are swimming. Do they hold their noses
> > in
> > the same fashion as tapirs? Regarding jumping, we have covered nostrils
> > and we are staright. Just like plunge diving birds.
>
> No, they just swim with their noses up out of the water. The nostrils of
> females and juveniles face forward when they are swimming in this
> position.
> So their noses don't have anything to do with their swimming, although the
> position they hold them in would drive water up their nostrils if the
> water
> splashed up. In other words, water doesn't wash over the tops of their
> noses either when jumping into water or swimming, as AAT proponents
> conitnually suggest.
I wasn't suggesting this. I was suggesting that they perform sort
like a diving bell. And I was asking : "Do Proboscis monkeys hold their
nostrils like tapirs?" And you answered : "No,...". Ok.
No. I am suggesting that "missing link" lived at this kind of
places. A "missing link" was never found at the places where hominids were
found (or anywhere else).
> And
> I'm afraid your claim that a hominid could drown or even sucessfully
> counterattack a larger (much larger in some cases) predator just because
> they were in water is getting silly. OTOH, we know that chimps, similar
> in
> size, intelligence, and social structure to our ancestors, manage to deal
> with predators on land.
You read too much of the stuff that suits your opinion, and
interpret it the way that suits your opinion.
> Suggesting that they couldn't while offering a
> scenario that seems incredibly far-fetched just doesn't make sense. Even
> if
> we managed to deter a large cat in the way you suggest, the hominid would
> take a great deal of damage from close quarters fighting, and unlike
> tapirs, we don't have a very thick, tough skin to withstand it.
The hominid would survive. The hominid would deal with predator much
better in water than on land.
> > Oh, my god. I should have known this. I spent so much time in
> > sci.anthropology.paleo newsgroup to deal with this, and now I have to do
> > all
> > this again. Whatever this Kortland is writing is pure bullshit. This guy
> > is
> > so biased that this is unbelievable. He was very popular when savanna
> > theory was at its peak, by spreading this shit.
>
> He did the experiments and recorded the results. To you, this is
> bullshit. I think that speaks volumes.
Experiments on a dummy are experiments on a dummy. Is this
scientific? To you, it may be. Not to me. If he made a big cage, put inthere
10-15 chimps (with how many "weapons" you like, like stones of just the
right size, or branches of just the right dimensions) and a hungry leopard,
and see what happens. Now, this would be scientific. Or anything like that.
But he never came close to such a type of experiment, because it would be
quick end to savanna dreams, and nobody would allow the only theory that
they had, to die. Instead he did all the "tricks" to persuade whomever
wanted to be persuaded.
I've been in a zoo. I saw chimps and a leopard. Chimps are tiny
little creatures. Even funny. In your words they look like 10 feet tall. Are
they killers? Well, 5-6 of them can kill a small monkey. You can strech this
to one chimp killing a savanna predator, if you want. Leopard is a predator.
Leopard kills big hoofed animals (very dangerous, even deadly bussines) on a
daily basis. For living. Kortland never tried to confront any number of
chimps with a single leopard. This would be the end of the source of his
income.
> > Regarding Kortland's bullshit. He saw dead leopard cups, but he
> > never saw a mother near by. He only assumed that mother was there
> > (because
> > he wanted her to be there, just like the people who are reading this
> > BS).
> > Very scientific. The dummy experiments are the most stupid experiments
> > that
> > I ever heard of, in my whole life. This thing can be bought only by the
>
> You are not only not a notetaker, you seem to have difficulty reading and
> comprehending. Those are two different accounts. The researchers who saw
> the chimps kill the leopard cub after they crawled into the den did just
> that -- they saw them do it. The mother was in the den; they could hear
> her screams (the screams of a large cat are very distinctive).
Even if that was true (which very much I doubt), he didn't saw
mother comming in or out of the den, he didn't see if mother was maybe dying
or whatever. This story is so lousy, and there was so much weight being put
on this, that this is unbelievable. Is this really the only thing a savanna
theory is based on (along with dummy experiments)? This is sad. Basing your
view on such a biased data can lead you to waste a lot of time without a
reason.
> > > Chimps have also been observed sleeping on the ground in leopard
> > > country;
> > > they just don't seem to be as concerned about them as we would imagine
> > > (I'd
> > > be concerned). Now they definitely do get caught by both leopards and
> > > lions
> > > at times, but the rate of predation is obviously too low to be a
> > > problem for
> > > the population -- obvious because otherwise they would not have
> > > survived as a species in their environment.
> >
> > Is it so?
>
> They exist, therefore it must be so. This isn't clear? It's very easy to
> see; if they exist today, they obviously have survived. Duh.
Their environment isn't a savanna. They cannot survive where there
aren't a trees to climb on. Trees is their refugee. They sleep on a trees
when they now the leopard is around. When leopard comes close they climb
trees. It is simple as that. You can believe in whatever you want, but
you'll never come close to truth this way.
> > This with shark eggs was a little joke, of course (this is why I
> > placed a "lol"). The point is that you were wrong that this kind of
> > behaviour wasn't seen anywhere in the world. It is seen, and
> > furthermore, it
> > is seen in roughly the same environment that I am proposing.
>
> I didn't say that no animals walk along shorelines, and even wade; of
> course
> they do. I did say that no animal of small or medium size with a slow
> reproductive rate (such as humans and chimps) can be found in any aquatic
> environment anywhere in the world. This is a fact.
Aren't pinnipeds match this description?
> > No, we are not avoiding the environment, or anything you've
> > mentioned. Actually we visit the environment with our little children.
> > Again, it is not me who sees things wrongly, IMO. It is a matter of
> > interpretation. And I think your interpretation is wrong. And you only
> > think it is right because more people thinks similarly. -- Mario
>
> You are avoiding the many facts I've mentioned along with my statements
> about this. We have for several hundred years (and especially in the last
> century or so) decimated our predators with weapons not available until
> recent years, and with habitat destruction as well, unfortunately. We,
> that
> is the greater "we", our species, also spends, as a species, very little
> time in the water compared to the time we spend elsewhere, unlike the
> purported aquatic apes, who had to be spending an awful lot of their time
> in
> the water for convergent evolution to have had the effects that AATers say
> it did. Nevertheless, we still do get attacked by sharks, and by crocs,
> in
> spite of our having nearly wiped them out, in spite of having shark nets,
> etc. etc. etc. JMoore
Of course, I strongly disagree. We can spend in water the time we
need to feed from it. Actually, we do just that when we have vacation, when
we are going to sea to "charge our batteries". -- Mario
J Moore
Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
news:bveu8h$2vb2$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > And
> > I'm afraid your claim that a hominid could drown or even sucessfully
> > counterattack a larger (much larger in some cases) predator just because
> > they were in water is getting silly. OTOH, we know that chimps, similar
> > in
> > size, intelligence, and social structure to our ancestors, manage to
deal
> > with predators on land.
>
> You read too much of the stuff that suits your opinion, and
> interpret it the way that suits your opinion.
It cannot be denied that chimpanzees do manange to deal with predators on
land. Their observed behavior, and even just the fact of their continued
existence, proves it.
> Even if that was true (which very much I doubt), he didn't saw
> mother comming in or out of the den, he didn't see if mother was maybe
dying
> or whatever. This story is so lousy, and there was so much weight being
put
> on this, that this is unbelievable. Is this really the only thing a
savanna
> theory is based on (along with dummy experiments)? This is sad. Basing
your
> view on such a biased data can lead you to waste a lot of time without a
> reason.
You are still confusing Kortland with the primatologists who observed the
chimps who crawled into the leopard den at Mahale and pulled out and killed
the leopard cub. And you are ignoring the other observations by many
primatoloists in many areas who note that chimps display offensive rather
than defensive behavior toward predators, when they don't simply ignore them
when they encounter one. This is based on a great many observations of wild
chimpanzees. The bottom line is that Kortland's early observations and
experiments have been backed up with many observations over the 35+ years
since his studies, and they support his view of chimp behavior toward
predators.
> > They exist, therefore it must be so. This isn't clear? It's very easy
to
> > see; if they exist today, they obviously have survived.
>
> Their environment isn't a savanna. They cannot survive where there
> aren't a trees to climb on. Trees is their refugee. They sleep on a trees
> when they now the leopard is around. When leopard comes close they climb
> trees. It is simple as that. You can believe in whatever you want, but
> you'll never come close to truth this way.
There are chimps which live in savannah environments (Kortland studied them,
and if you really dislike Kortland, note that many other primatologists have
studied them as well. You seem to be equating "savannah" and treeless",
which is a common (and wrong) AAT idea that was started by Elaine Morgan
many years ago. Savannah (for the past 100+ years) refers to a mixed
environment of grasslands and trees; I also have a section about this on my
site. You are also assuming that paleoanthropologists insist that early
hominids must have lived exclusively on savannahs, and this assumption is
also incorrect.
> > I didn't say that no animals walk along shorelines, and even wade; of
> > course
> > they do. I did say that no animal of small or medium size with a slow
> > reproductive rate (such as humans and chimps) can be found in any
aquatic
> > environment anywhere in the world. This is a fact.
>
> Aren't pinnipeds match this description?
No. Pinnipeds do not have anywhere near as slow a reproductive rate as
humans, chimps, and bonobos. Many (but not all) pinnipeds are also larger
than humnas, and of course they are all superb swimmers and divers, while
humans are pathetic swimmers compared to even the slower aquatic predators
such as crocodiles.
> >> > You are avoiding the many facts I've mentioned along with my
statements
> > about this. We have for several hundred years (and especially in the
last
> > century or so) decimated our predators with weapons not available until
> > recent years, and with habitat destruction as well, unfortunately. We,
> > that
> > is the greater "we", our species, also spends, as a species, very little
> > time in the water compared to the time we spend elsewhere, unlike the
> > purported aquatic apes, who had to be spending an awful lot of their
time
> > in
> > the water for convergent evolution to have had the effects that AATers
say
> > it did. Nevertheless, we still do get attacked by sharks, and by crocs,
> > in
> > spite of our having nearly wiped them out, in spite of having shark
nets,
> > etc. etc. etc. JMoore
>
> Of course, I strongly disagree. We can spend in water the time we
> need to feed from it. Actually, we do just that when we have vacation,
when
> we are going to sea to "charge our batteries". -- Mario
You disagree that we have decimated our predators over the past couple
hundred years? or that we have had, for a couple hundred years, weapons far
beyond any our ancestors had? or that the majority of humans don't spend a
considerable portion of their time in water? These are all incontestable
facts, yet you strongly disagree with them? Given the moderator's recent
entreaty to be cordial. I don't know what I can say to that.
Marc Verhaegen
A biased & irrelevant website; not 1 argument against Hardy's theory that a
sea-side life (beach-combing, wading, swimming, collecting coconuts,
shellfish, turtles & turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc.) explains
many human traits (absent in chimps) much better than dry savanna scenarios
do: very large brain (but reduced olfactory bulb), breathing control, diving
skills, varied vocality, extreme handiness & tool use, reduction of
climbing, reduction of fur, more subcutaneous fat, very long legs,
straighter body build, reduction of sense of smell, late puberty, high needs
of iodine, sodium & poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
Probably this happened late Plio- or early Pleistocene when early Homo
followed the Mediterranean & Indian Ocean coasts (Homo fossils or tools ~1.8
Ma have "suddenly" been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya, Georgia,
Java...). In spite of sea level changes (Ice Ages), Homo (but not apith)
remains have frequently been found amid shells, corals, barnacles etc.,
throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all over the Old World (eg, Mojokerto,
Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on islands that could only be reached
by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm ).
J Moore
been observed to have slept on the ground in leopard country, which was a
bit of a surprise.
JMoore
--
For a scientific critque of the aquaticape theory, go to www.aquaticape.org
Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
news:bveu8i$2vbu$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> J Moore :
> > > Regarding Kortland's bullshit.
> >
> > BTW, I forgot to add that Kortland's observations and experiments also
> > match
> > chimp behavior which has been observed in the wild since then, where
they
J Moore
folks) is that early hominids could certainly climb trees, and their fossils
show indications that they were better adapted to doing so than we are now.
And of course humans today can climb trees as well. It's also true that
leopards are pretty good at climbing trees (lions are not as proficient at
it but they're not totally hopeless). The bottom line is that animals with
much the same range of capabilities as our early ancestors (chimps) manage
to deal with terrestrial predators -- both in dense forest and in
savannahs -- and have done so for millions of years, so it's stretching
things to an amazing degree to say that our ancestors couldn't have done so
as well, and probably in much the same ways.
JMoore
--
For a scientific critque of the aquaticape theory, go to www.aquaticape.org
J Moore <anthro...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:bvhe2j$nab$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
Marc Verhaegen
Not scientific at all. Misleading, outdated, irrelevant...
For a serious discussion of AAT (pro & contra) see
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/Symposium.html
At some time after the human/chimp split (~6-4 Ma), human ancestors were
seaside omnivores: this lifestyle (collecting coconuts, shellfish, turtles &
turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc., beach-combing, wading
bipedally, swimming) explains many human traits (absent in chimps) much
better than dry savanna scenarios do: brain enlargement (but olfactory bulb
reduction), improved breathing control & diving skills, varied vocality,
handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing, reduction of fur, more
subcutaneous fat, very long legs & straight body build, reduction of sense
of smell, late puberty, high needs of water, iodine, sodium &
poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
Probably this seaside episode happened late Plio- or early Pleistocene when
early Homo followed the Mediterranean & Indian Ocean coasts: Homo fossils or
tools ~1.8 Ma have "suddenly" been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya,
Georgia, Java... In spite of sea level changes (Ice Ages), Homo (but not
australopith) remains have frequently been found amid shells, corals,
Mario Petrinovich
> Actually, although they usually build nest in trees, even lone chimps have
> been observed to have slept on the ground in leopard country, which was a
> bit of a surprise. JMoore
Of course. Was it ill? Surprising and illogical. "Leopard country",
lol. What a definition. Is this how they are proving our savanna past?
-- Mario
Mario Petrinovich
> Another point which I forgot to mention (and should be obvious to most
> folks) is that early hominids could certainly climb trees, and their
> fossils
> show indications that they were better adapted to doing so than we are
> now.
> And of course humans today can climb trees as well. It's also true that
> leopards are pretty good at climbing trees (lions are not as proficient at
> it but they're not totally hopeless). The bottom line is that animals
> with
> much the same range of capabilities as our early ancestors (chimps) manage
> to deal with terrestrial predators -- both in dense forest and in
> savannahs -- and have done so for millions of years, so it's stretching
> things to an amazing degree to say that our ancestors couldn't have done
> so as well, and probably in much the same ways. JMoore
To deal with terrestrial predators you've got to have speed. Chimps
are fast quadrupeds for the same reason. You are mixing two things. We can
climb trees like any other animal (once I saw 10 goats on a single tree.
Feeding. Pictured in India, IIRC.). The bottom line is that, because of our
slower speed, we should live much closer to trees. Take a look at baboons,
patas monkey. The bottom line is that chimps are much better adapted to live
in savanna than us. Better adapted to terrestrial living. If we lived at the
places chimps are living we should have comparative speed. Bipedalism
wouldn't hinder us in developing speed (take a look at ostriches). You say
chimps can live in savanna, so can we. No. They are better adapted for this.
IOW, we could have the same range of capabilities to live on a tree,
but not to live on land. And we cannot live in tree either, because chimps
are better at this. The only thing we are better is water. And cliffs, if
you ask me. -- Mario
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
> news:bveu8h$2vb2$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> land. Their observed behavior, and even just the fact of their continued
> existence, proves it.
The observed behavior is that they are building nests in tree. Just
for fun of doing it?
> You are still confusing Kortland with the primatologists who observed the
> chimps who crawled into the leopard den at Mahale and pulled out and
> killed
> the leopard cub. And you are ignoring the other observations by many
> primatoloists in many areas who note that chimps display offensive rather
> than defensive behavior toward predators, when they don't simply ignore
> them
> when they encounter one. This is based on a great many observations of
> wild
> chimpanzees. The bottom line is that Kortland's early observations and
> experiments have been backed up with many observations over the 35+ years
> since his studies, and they support his view of chimp behavior toward
> predators.
There are a lot of people who want to find connection with our
supposed evolution in savanna. There is no real evidence that chimps can
fight hungry predator without trees. Leopard won't attack if it isn't hungry
(although chimps are killing its cubs, lol).
Yesterday I watched "The Crocodile Hunter". A two humans (male and
female), and probably a camera man, were traveling the 'dingo fence'. There
I saw three things relevant to our discussion.
1) I saw a 10-inch lizard surrounded by two adult humans (6 feet/70
inches) showing very offensive behavior toward humans.
2) I saw a 2 feet lizard surrounded by two adult humans showing
offensive behavior toward humans (even managed to bite one human by its
nose, because human teased it). It was even showed in slow motion, so that
everybody can see it clearly. Just one human doing trip around, and managed
to film slow motion attack of 2 feet lizard on a human. A chimp behavior is
supposedly crutial to our past, yet I never saw a slow motion behaving of
chimps in presence of leopard. And I saw a lot of documetaries. Watching
documentaries is my hobby.
3) I saw adult male human and his dog chasing warthog (inported into
Australia). Mostly the dog was doing the job, human simply followed them.
Dog managed to chase warthog into some lake. Followed warthog into lake,
biting its ear and doesn't letting go. Than human came into scene. Managed
to catch them in lake (because he is faster there), took warthog aside by
two right legs and simply turn it over, lol. You should see the ease with
which he did this. Warthog simply turned over, like it is some peace of
wood, without any resistance. Then human bent warthogs legs, and pulled it
out of the lake. His comment was : "Good that I know how to deal with large
animals in water." Lol. That was it. Barehanded. Hey guy. Can you deal with
large animals on land, barehanded. You even cannot deal with 10 inch
lizards.
> There are chimps which live in savannah environments (Kortland studied
> them,
> and if you really dislike Kortland, note that many other primatologists
> have
> studied them as well. You seem to be equating "savannah" and treeless",
> which is a common (and wrong) AAT idea that was started by Elaine Morgan
> many years ago. Savannah (for the past 100+ years) refers to a mixed
> environment of grasslands and trees; I also have a section about this on
> my
> site. You are also assuming that paleoanthropologists insist that early
> hominids must have lived exclusively on savannahs, and this assumption is
> also incorrect.
The bottom line is that they need trees as refugee. They cannot live
where they don't have refugee. It is as simple as that. Animal which is safe
from predators doesn't need refugee. Can chimps live in a places where you
only have small tree fruits? BTW, leopard also doesn't like too much open
spaces. It attacks from ambush. You are claiming that chimps can deal with
leopard. Than prove it. Their supposed "behavior", and even "behavior toward
dummy" isn't any scientific proof. And I really don't know why somebody
doesn't prove this. It is so easy. Put both of them into ring and watch. And
film this. End of story. Everything else is just biased interpretation.
> > We can spend in water the time we
> > need to feed from it. Actually, we do just that when we have vacation,
> > when we are going to sea to "charge our batteries". -- Mario
>
> You disagree that we have decimated our predators over the past couple
> hundred years? or that we have had, for a couple hundred years, weapons
> far
> beyond any our ancestors had? or that the majority of humans don't spend
> a
> considerable portion of their time in water? These are all incontestable
> facts, yet you strongly disagree with them? Given the moderator's recent
> entreaty to be cordial. I don't know what I can say to that. JMoore
Please, just say what you think, lol.
I just saw a documentary where they are saying that divers for
shells in Pacific are 4500 years old. A Pacific migrations are 30 000 years
old. We are attacked by crocs, but not by sharks. Wether you want to accept
this or not. Give lion a chance, or to leopard, or to tiger, it will kill
you, although they are much smarter than fish, and although they have longer
history of being killed by humans. When you go into water, a shark can kill
you if it wants to. But they are not doing this.
Majority of humans cannot leave land because they are working there.
When they retire they are going to Florida. Not to middle-west plains. Even
during their working days, when they get vacation, majority of humans are
going to sea. Not to some other places where they can do whatever they are
doing on a sea. -- Mario
J Moore
Note the plural. Leopard country is country in which leopards are found.
You are using the "savannah" strawman again, forgetting that we're talking
about early hominids who may not have been in dense forest rather than on
savannahs, and probably also forgetting that savannahs typically have trees.
In these cases, the interesting thing is that while they had trees to take
refuge in for the night, they didn't always use them, even when they were
alone and in areas where leopards are known to be. This, even without the
many other observations over the years, indicates that they don't fear
leopards as much as you'd think they would. Mind you, it doesn't always
work out for the best -- chimps are sometimes killed by both leopards and by
lions -- but obviously not at a high enough rate to make it a problem for
maintaining their population.
> > It cannot be denied that chimpanzees do manange to deal with predators
on
> > land. Their observed behavior, and even just the fact of their
continued
> > existence, proves it.
>
> The observed behavior is that they are building nests in tree.
Just
> for fun of doing it?
Yes, they often do, but not always, as many observations have shown.
> There are a lot of people who want to find connection with our
> supposed evolution in savanna. There is no real evidence that chimps can
> fight hungry predator without trees. Leopard won't attack if it isn't
hungry
> (although chimps are killing its cubs, lol).
Again you are assuming that a savannah is without trees, which is an AAT
strawman rather than the accepted definition of savannah for the past 100+
years.
> The bottom line is that they need trees as refugee. They cannot
live
> where they don't have refugee. It is as simple as that. Animal which is
safe
> from predators doesn't need refugee. Can chimps live in a places where you
> only have small tree fruits? BTW, leopard also doesn't like too much open
> spaces. It attacks from ambush. You are claiming that chimps can deal with
> leopard. Than prove it. Their supposed "behavior", and even "behavior
toward
> dummy" isn't any scientific proof. And I really don't know why somebody
> doesn't prove this. It is so easy. Put both of them into ring and watch.
And
> film this. End of story. Everything else is just biased interpretation.
The fact that they don't take to the trees every time they see a leopard,
and that they sometimes sleep on the ground while alone in leopard country,
shows that they don't need trees (they may like to use them sometimes, and
of course our hominid ancestors could use them as well). This, and the
observations of many chimps on encountering leopards over many years of
observations by many primatologists in many areas, shows that they can
indeed deal with leopards, and that they don't necessarily do so by taking
to the trees. Calling years of observations by respected primatologists
"behavior" in quotes as though they're suspect really doesn't do your case
any good.
BTW, the fact that most predators like to attack from ambush rather than
very open areas would seem to be a powerful benefit for early hominds to be
in more open savannah woodlands, wouldn't it? Areas where upright posture
would also be a real benefit for spotting predators, thereby encouraging
even more upright posture and bipedalism.
> old. We are attacked by crocs, but not by sharks. Wether you want to
accept
> this or not.
This is another thing which you are stating as fact but which is well known,
and widely known, to be untrue. This does not do your case any good.
> > The bottom line is that animals with
> > much the same range of capabilities as our early ancestors (chimps)
manage
> > to deal with terrestrial predators -- both in dense forest and in
> > savannahs -- and have done so for millions of years, so it's stretching
> > things to an amazing degree to say that our ancestors couldn't have done
> > so as well, and probably in much the same ways. JMoore
>
> To deal with terrestrial predators you've got to have speed.
Chimps
> are fast quadrupeds for the same reason. You are mixing two things. We can
You are here making the case, common in AAT arguments, that the only way to
deal with terrestrial predators is to run fast, and you further state that
this is how chimps deal with them. But in fact a great many observations by
a great many primatologists over rather a large number of years in many
areas has shown that this is not how chimps deal with predators. I have
gone over the facts about how they do, and those facts are also on my
website. For you to simply keep denying these facts and these many
observations by many primatologists for many years in many areas and attempt
to replace these actual facts with your feelings about what you think chimps
should have been doing all these years is not really a sensible argument.
It really doesn't do your case any good to continue to deny observed facts.
Speaking of observed, measured facts, do you have any source for your claims
about the running speed of chimpanzees? Although it's not apropos to how
they actually deal with predators, I'd love to know the numbers and the
source of the claim.
JMoore
--
Marc Verhaegen
> Another point which I forgot to mention (and should be obvious to most
folks) is that early hominids could certainly climb trees, and their fossils
show indications that they were better adapted to doing so than we are now.
So?
I guess Moore is talking about australopiths??
These have of course nothing to do with AAT:
For a scientific discussion of AAT (pro & contra) see
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich :
> > J Moore :
> > > Actually, although they usually build nest in trees, even lone chimps
> > > have
> > > been observed to have slept on the ground in leopard country, which
> > > was a bit of a surprise. JMoore
> >
> > Of course. Was it ill? Surprising and illogical. "Leopard
> > country",
> > lol. What a definition. Is this how they are proving our savanna past?
>
Ok. One thing in time. I am living in Croatia. This is
ex-Yugoslavia. This was, and by all merrits still is, a communist country.
What communists are doing, is twisting the truth, all the time. I am 42
years old, and I saw a lot of this, during my lifetime. So :
You can say that lone chimps have been observed, even if you saw
only one chimp. If this quote is all the data you have, you cannot know if
they possibly saw it only once, in rare occasions, or very often. In all
those cases the quote is grammatically correct.
A "leopard country" is the whole Africa, except Sahara.
> You are using the "savannah" strawman again, forgetting that we're talking
> about early hominids who may not have been in dense forest rather than on
> savannahs, and probably also forgetting that savannahs typically have
> trees.
> In these cases, the interesting thing is that while they had trees to take
> refuge in for the night, they didn't always use them, even when they were
> alone and in areas where leopards are known to be. This, even without the
> many other observations over the years, indicates that they don't fear
> leopards as much as you'd think they would. Mind you, it doesn't always
> work out for the best -- chimps are sometimes killed by both leopards and
> by
> lions -- but obviously not at a high enough rate to make it a problem for
> maintaining their population.
Because they know what they are doing. It is known thing with other
animals, as well. I saw a lot of documentaries. When predator is sated,
animal can do what otherwise wouldn't. A leopard has its range. If chimps
know that leopard has been eating, and where leopard is ("Vocal
advertisement by rasping is also frequent in areas with many leopards." -
Kingdom), there is no problem for them. The bottom line is, can they deal
with hungry leopard. As I said, if you are using such things, this simply
isn't enough to convince anybody knowlagable in animal behavior, that chimps
doesn't have problems with predators, and that they can deal with them. When
it is also well known that predators can do a havoc to chimps. And it isn't
known at all that chimps can do anything to a predator. If researcher, when
he sees a lone chimp (in a "leopard country"), immediately jumps with
conclusion that chimps can deal with predators, he is very biased, IMO.
> > There are a lot of people who want to find connection with our
> > supposed evolution in savanna. There is no real evidence that chimps can
> > fight hungry predator without trees. Leopard won't attack if it isn't
> > hungry (although chimps are killing its cubs, lol).
>
> Again you are assuming that a savannah is without trees, which is an AAT
> strawman rather than the accepted definition of savannah for the past 100+
> years.
Please, don't say that. I know what savanna is, just like everybody.
I am not stupid. The savanna idea is the move away from trees, the move to
region with less trees, the living conditions that include trees, less nad
less. Further, savanna theory is including feeding on animal meat. That
animal meat is, again, in a region with very sparse trees. Even baboons use
trees, so they are living in regions with trees. There are no treeless
environment in savanna.
Further still, the AAT is not my only theory (the theory I believe
in). The other theory is my own "fire theory". Which says that hominids not
only lived in savanna (after the aquatic phase), but that they themselves
actually created savanna. So, I have nothing against hominids living in
savanna. Only, we didn't become bipedal in savanna, which is clearly seen
from the latest findings of bipedals, which are older than savanna. So, you
can say that I have also a savanna theory, in which hominids are the main
participants. If you are interested, I can tell you a few words about this
theory.
Now they "sleep on the ground while alone". I can buy that they can
be found alone, I can buy that they could sleep on the ground, sometimes.
But, are you sure that they "sometimes sleep on the ground while alone"?
Now, was that chimp ill? Given the fact that they cannot do anything to
predator, and that predator can kill them easily (even if they are not
alone), are they mad? Or, who is mad here?
Further, if they don't need trees, why don't they spread on baboon
theritory. Now, this would be logical, and in accordance with biological
rules. Further, why would they need to become bipedal? And further, in what
way would becomming bipedal (but slower) allow them to be even more
treeless? Because they can see predator earlier? Why is that important if
predator cannot do anything to them? Or, maybe so that they can see predator
earlier, so that they can run away to the tree (so because of this they
don't need to be so close to tree)? But whay then, they became slower? This
theory is hollow as Bible.
> BTW, the fact that most predators like to attack from ambush rather than
> very open areas would seem to be a powerful benefit for early hominds to
> be
> in more open savannah woodlands, wouldn't it? Areas where upright posture
> would also be a real benefit for spotting predators, thereby encouraging
> even more upright posture and bipedalism.
>
> > We are attacked by crocs, but not by sharks. Wether you want to
> > accept this or not.
>
> This is another thing which you are stating as fact but which is well
> known,
> and widely known, to be untrue. This does not do your case any good.
No, this does not do any good to you. This is well known only to
people who doesn't know anything about this. To shark researchers, it is
well known that almost every case of shark attack was actually a mistake. A
lot of attacks were on a surfers laying on a surfboard. From bellow this
looks just like a seal. As soon as shark realizes that it isn't seal, it let
it go. Every researcher would tell you just this, if sharks want to kill
humans, there wouldn't be a few isolated cases, there would be a real
bloodbath.
Actually, just the other day I watched another documentary about
humans and sharks. In it I saw humans do whatever they want to sharks, even
barehanded. The author of documentary was very concerned about sharks,
fearing for their future. At the end he said something like this
(philosophically), that he would like to people continue to fear of sharks,
because this could possibly save sharks.
> > To deal with terrestrial predators you've got to have speed.
> > Chimps are fast quadrupeds for the same reason.
>
> You are here making the case, common in AAT arguments, that the only way
> to
> deal with terrestrial predators is to run fast, and you further state that
> this is how chimps deal with them. But in fact a great many observations
> by
> a great many primatologists over rather a large number of years in many
> areas has shown that this is not how chimps deal with predators. I have
> gone over the facts about how they do, and those facts are also on my
> website. For you to simply keep denying these facts and these many
> observations by many primatologists for many years in many areas and
> attempt
> to replace these actual facts with your feelings about what you think
> chimps
> should have been doing all these years is not really a sensible argument.
> It really doesn't do your case any good to continue to deny observed
> facts.
For solving this puzzle, you first have to have knowlage of humans.
This behavior of humans is well known. When a sailor approaches land from
sea, he is hopping that his navigation was right, and that he is approaching
a port he was going to. How to know if this is true? He is using landmarks,
a big tree, a church tower, a tall chimney. And always, the landmarks are
just right. Really, the chimney is where it is supposed to be, a church
tower too. Only when he comes really close, he starts to realize that he was
completly wrong. Humans like to interpret things to their likings.
Especially if they are rewarded for this. And, if your opinion is in tune
with prevailing opinion, be sure that you will go higher than if it isn't.
But, logic is simple. Predators can do havoc to chimps. Chimps
cannot do anything to predators. If you take a second look at those
researchers of yours, you could easily see that their views are stretched
(interpreted) to match the prevailing opinion, and has nothing with real
truth.
> Speaking of observed, measured facts, do you have any source for your
> claims
> about the running speed of chimpanzees? Although it's not apropos to how
> they actually deal with predators, I'd love to know the numbers and the
> source of the claim. JMoore
Kingdom "African Mammals" edition 2001, page 14. "Chimpanzee anatomy
shows a fine balance between fast quadrupedal activity on the ground and the
need to manoeuvre a large, heavy body through different levels of the forest
on very variably sized supports."
-- Mario
Mario Petrinovich
> J Moore :
> > Another point which I forgot to mention (and should be obvious to most
> folks) is that early hominids could certainly climb trees, and their
> fossils
> show indications that they were better adapted to doing so than we are
> now.
>
> So?
> I guess Moore is talking about australopiths??
> These have of course nothing to do with AAT:
A tree kangaroo is better in climbing trees than other kangaroos.
-- Mario
Marc Verhaegen
> You are using the "savannah" strawman again, forgetting that we're talking
about early hominids who may not have been in dense forest rather than on
savannahs, and probably also forgetting that savannahs typically have trees.
Whatever, there is not the slightest indication human ancestors were ever
savanna dwellers: humans are the opposites of typical savanna dwellers: we
are slow & fat, easily overheated, we need a lot of water & sodium (both
scarse at the savanna). We have a poor sense of smell. Savanna dwellers
don't have varied vocalisations. They grow up fast & die early. Running
upright is the stupidest thing you can do in the savanna: predators as well
as your prey see you from far; it is slower than running on all fours. Etc.
Believing that human ancestors were savanna dwellers is ridiculous.
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm
J Moore
> J Moore :
> > Mario Petrinovich :
> > > J Moore :
> > > > Actually, although they usually build nest in trees, even lone
chimps
> > > > have
> > > > been observed to have slept on the ground in leopard country, which
> > > > was a bit of a surprise. JMoore
> > >
> > > Of course. Was it ill? Surprising and illogical. "Leopard
I repeat: Note the plural.
> Ok. One thing in time. I am living in Croatia. This is
> ex-Yugoslavia. This was, and by all merrits still is, a communist country.
> What communists are doing, is twisting the truth, all the time. I am 42
> years old, and I saw a lot of this, during my lifetime. So :
> You can say that lone chimps have been observed, even if you saw
> only one chimp. If this quote is all the data you have, you cannot know if
> they possibly saw it only once, in rare occasions, or very often. In all
> those cases the quote is grammatically correct.
> A "leopard country" is the whole Africa, except Sahara.
No no, Mario. You're supposed to compare me to Nazis, not communists. :)
I'm afraid that in English, contrary to your belief, there is a difference
between singular and plural forms of nouns. "Chimps" is not "chimp seen
twice". (Also note that researchers learn, as the first part of their
research, to distinguish the various chimps in their study groups.)
Absolutely, they do know what they're doing, as our ancestors would as well.
After all, even our earliest hominid ancestors were about the size of chimps
and at least as intelligent.
> Please, don't say that. I know what savanna is, just like
everybody.
> I am not stupid. The savanna idea is the move away from trees, the move to
> region with less trees, the living conditions that include trees, less nad
> less. Further, savanna theory is including feeding on animal meat. That
> animal meat is, again, in a region with very sparse trees. Even baboons
use
> trees, so they are living in regions with trees. There are no treeless
> environment in savanna.
Keep in mind that "savannah theory" is an AAT construct; actual researchers,
even when they refer to living on savannahs, are constructing theories based
on such things as likely behavior and social organization in which
environment can be a factor, but they don't posit environment as the driving
force that the typcial AAT does. Meat is available in forests as well as
savannahs; meat is available whereever animals live -- this really should
not have to be pointed out.
> Further still, the AAT is not my only theory (the theory I believe
> in). The other theory is my own "fire theory". Which says that hominids
not
> only lived in savanna (after the aquatic phase), but that they themselves
> actually created savanna. So, I have nothing against hominids living in
> savanna. Only, we didn't become bipedal in savanna, which is clearly seen
> from the latest findings of bipedals, which are older than savanna. So,
you
> can say that I have also a savanna theory, in which hominids are the main
> participants. If you are interested, I can tell you a few words about this
> theory.
This has already been put forward by Lee Talbot, but he is talking about the
period about 2 million years ago and this doesn't really tally up with
either known controlled use of fire (possibly about 1.3 mya) or the spread
of savannahs in Africa, which was earlier. With some study you may find
some things in paleoanthrology that really interest you -- I would recommend
you take a look, as you obviously have an interest, and reality is far more
fascinating than fantasies, although admittedly often more challenging.
Here's a quote on the savannah:
"How long has this characteristic savanna mosaic of grasslands, shrubs, and
forested areas been in existence? Recent pollen studies inidicate that
grasslands have existed in Ethiopia for over 2.5 million years (Bonnefille,
1976a). This suggest that, contrary to common assumptions, eastern African
grasslands are not necessarily recent or entirely the result of human
burning activities. Even prior to these new data, the relative antiquity of
savannas in Africa should have been obvious from the range of fauna
primarily adapted to such grasslands. Mio-Pliocene deposits
further indicate that the mosaic quality of this area was present at that
time (Butzer, 1978)" (Nancy Tanner 1981: 136, *On Becoming Human*. New York
and London: Cambridge University Press.)
The refs from the quoted section of *On Becoming Human* are:
Bonnefille, Raymonde
1976 "Palnyological Evidence for an Important Change in the
Vegetation of the Omo Basin between 2.5 and 2 Million Years Ago".
In *Earliest Man and Environments in the Lake Rudolf Basin*, Yves
Coppens, F. Clark Howell, Glynn Ll. Isaac, and Richard E.F. Leakey
(eds.), pp. 421-431. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Butzer, Karl W.
1978 "Geo-ecological Perspectives on Early Hominid Evolution".
In *Early Hominids of Africa*, C.J. Jolly (ed.), pp. 191-217.
London: Duckworth.
Certainly later humans created, or helped along, open spaces using fire.
This was common, for instance, in North America. In fact, the ridge I lived
on north of Santa Cruz, like most all of those coastal ridges, was kept
relatively free of trees by deliberate burning in the Native American days.
But it doesn't seem to be part of early hominid behavior, either deliberate
or accidental, and doesn't seem to be connected with the early spread of
savannahs in Africa.
> Further, if they don't need trees, why don't they spread on baboon
> theritory. Now, this would be logical, and in accordance with biological
> rules. Further, why would they need to become bipedal? And further, in
what
> way would becomming bipedal (but slower) allow them to be even more
> treeless? Because they can see predator earlier? Why is that important if
> predator cannot do anything to them? Or, maybe so that they can see
predator
> earlier, so that they can run away to the tree (so because of this they
> don't need to be so close to tree)? But whay then, they became slower?
This
> theory is hollow as Bible.
Well, until you offer some actual proof that humans are slower than chimps,
that particular statement is a bit hollow.
But running away (and I'm sorry to have to repeat myself so often) is not
the way we would have likely most often dealt with predators, as we can see
by the ways that we've seen chimps deal with predators. Now we see that
even lone chimps don't seem to be especially afraid of predators such as
leopards, but keep in mind that most of the time what a predators faces with
chimps (and with our early ancestors) would be a pack of animals, animals
which typically scream and throw things. Being pelted with objects by an
opponent when you're nowhere near striking distance would be a bizarre thing
from the predators' viewpoint, since they simply can't do anything like
that. And we see that in reality this behavior is effective. Being able to
see predators earlier negates the likelihood of an ambush, and increases the
likelihood of a sucessful defense. It also allows adults to gather up
children and keep them safe within ranks.
> > > We are attacked by crocs, but not by sharks. Wether you want to
> > > accept this or not.
> >
> > This is another thing which you are stating as fact but which is well
> > known,
> > and widely known, to be untrue. This does not do your case any good.
>
> No, this does not do any good to you. This is well known only to
> people who doesn't know anything about this. To shark researchers, it is
> well known that almost every case of shark attack was actually a mistake.
A
> lot of attacks were on a surfers laying on a surfboard. From bellow this
> looks just like a seal. As soon as shark realizes that it isn't seal, it
let
> it go. Every researcher would tell you just this, if sharks want to kill
> humans, there wouldn't be a few isolated cases, there would be a real
> bloodbath.
First you say that sharks don't attack us, then I point out that they do.
Then you tell me that I'm wrong when I say they do... and then you describe
shark attacks. That's frankly a bit odd. And your last point is a good
one; I think it's highly likely that if our ancestors had spent a great deal
of time in waters where sharks (or crocs) roamed there would've indeed been
a bloodbath. We avoid this because, as a species, relatively few of us
spend very much time in such waters and we have much better tools and
weapons to deal with them. Nevertheless, we still are attacked at times --
since we aren't a commonly available food (as our supposed aquatic ancestors
would've been) sharks haven't learned to go after us so diligently. Let me
point out that even if a large bite is all that's taken out of a hominid
which of course doesn't have much in the way of medical care available :),
they would tend to die. However, if groups of hominids (and we seem likely
to have always been a group-living species) were spending a lot of time
wading and/or swimming in waters where sharks (and crocs) roam, those
predators would be highly likely to see these common and relatively
defenseless hominids as food. Keep in mind that the defenses we likely used
against terrestrial predators (as seen with chimps) don't work against
sharks and crocs -- I have info on this aspect of predation on my site as
well.
> > It really doesn't do your case any good to continue to deny observed
> > facts.
>
> But, logic is simple. Predators can do havoc to chimps. Chimps
> cannot do anything to predators. If you take a second look at those
> researchers of yours, you could easily see that their views are stretched
> (interpreted) to match the prevailing opinion, and has nothing with real
> truth.
It is a given that terrestrial predators can kill chimps at times, but it is
also a given that they cannot "do havoc" in terms of populations. If they
could chimps would not exist; the fact that they do demonstrates tat they
can and do deal effectively with terrestrial predators, and there have been
many observations that show how they do so. That you choose not to believe
these facts is not good for your argument. Logic is indeed simple, and
logic requires that observed facts be incorporated into any logical
argument.
> > Speaking of observed, measured facts, do you have any source for your
> > claims
> > about the running speed of chimpanzees? Although it's not apropos to
how
> > they actually deal with predators, I'd love to know the numbers and the
> > source of the claim. JMoore
>
> Kingdom "African Mammals" edition 2001, page 14. "Chimpanzee
anatomy
> shows a fine balance between fast quadrupedal activity on the ground and
the
> need to manoeuvre a large, heavy body through different levels of the
forest
> on very variably sized supports."
> -- Mario
I didn't see any part in that quote that mentioned any specific speed or any
mention of the relative speed of chimps and humans, which you seemed to be
claiming to have some knowledge of. If you do actually have some knowledge
on that subject, some info you've found, could you please post it -- it
would be both helpful and interesting.
and
Marc Verhaegen <fa20...@skynet.be> wrote in message
news:bvnj9t$2jdv$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> > Another point which I forgot to mention (and should be obvious to most
> folks) is that early hominids could certainly climb trees, and their
fossils
> show indications that they were better adapted to doing so than we are
now.
>
> So?
> I guess Moore is talking about australopiths??
> These have of course nothing to do with AAT
Most interations of the AAT refer to the population at the time of
divergence from the last common ancestor with apes, so autralopithecines are
apropos to that discussion. At later times, of course, terrestrial
predators were even less of a problem because our ancestors in the time of
Homo erectus and later had relatively sophisticated weaponry as well as the
use of fire. And of course they could still climb trees, as we can today.
Marc Verhaegen
> Keep in mind that "savannah theory" is an AAT construct
You're a liar, Moore:
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm
Prof.Tobias:
The Savannah Hypothesis
From 1925 to 1995 almost everyone grew up on the "received wisdom" that the
Hominidae (the family of mankind) was born on the savannah, believed to have
been the ideal crucible in which the strange form of locomotion known as
bipedalism came into being. The idea is an old one. Robert Broom, in his
1933 book The Coming of Man: was it Accident or Design? stated: "Before
Australopithecus was discovered some of us believed that the ancestor of man
would be found in an anthropoid ape which had left the forest and taken to
living on the plains and among the rocks; and here (in Australopithecus, the
Taung child) we have just such a form."
Raymond Dart's 1925 paper, that announced the features of the little fossil
child from Taung, included this passage: "For the production of man a
different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the
higher manifestations of intellect a more open veldt country where
competition was keener between swiftness and stealth, and where adroitness
of thinking and movement played a preponderating role in the preservation of
the species... in my opinion, Southern Africa, by providing a vast open
country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water,
together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a
laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human
evolution." (Emphasis mine)
>From the animal remains found with the Australopithecus child, Broom (1933)
wrote, "... we can safely infer that the rainfall was then, as now, scanty,
and that there were no forests in that region, only grassy and bushy plains
from which the hills and krantzes arose."
My generation grew up steeped in what more recently has been called the
Savannah Hypothesis. As Elaine Morgan has chronicled in her book, The
Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (1997), this view was supported, directly or
indirectly, by numerous scholars, including Sherwood Washburn, Kenneth
Oakley, Richard Leakey, Peter Wheeler, Alan Walker. It was a paradigm that
lasted for about 70 years of this century.
In 1980, the Africanist archaeologist J. Desmond Clark put forward a
modified version of SH which favoured a mixed ecology. He said "there is
little doubt that proto-hominids (ancestors of hominids) were widely
distributed throughout the tropical savannahs. It seems certain that it was
within habitats consisting of mosaics of grassland, woodland, and forest
that the hominid line first became differentiated from that of the pongids
(the apes)." Clark singled out not only the great richness and diversity of
plant and animal resources in the savannahs compared with the forest, and
the fragmentation of the forest cover during the later Miocene-early
Pliocene, which isolated some hominid populations, but also the progressive
expansion of grasslands from that time onward, which made available "empty
niches" into which hominids could expand. These factors, he believed, "can
be expected to have led to a number of adaptations".
In 1985, Elisabeth Vrba suggested that the family of man was probably a
"founder member" of the African savannah fauna! That year, I published a
chapter called "The conquest of the savannah and the attaining of erect
bipedalism" in which I expressed the old idea: "The living apes of Africa
are to be found exclusively in the wet forest of the middle reaches of the
continent. It is likely that ancestral apes, too, were forest-dwelling
creatures...The spread of lighter woodland and savannah and the retreat of
the margins of the primaeval forests could well have created conditions in
which the tendency to uprightness and bipedalism was favoured. The ability
to run across the high grass cover of the savannah, perhaps from one
woodland-girt stream to another, might have held advantages for those apes
which could 'walk tall'. Uprightness gave its possessors a chance to see
over the tall grass and to watch out for predatory enemies like the lions
and sabre-toothed big cats. Seemingly it was under just such a set of
conditions that the Hominidae made their appearance upon the face of the
earth."
That statement may well be the quintessence of the SH - and I believe it was
my last statement in support of it. By 1995, when I gave the Daryll Forde
Memorial Lecture at University College, London, I stated of the SH, "We were
all profoundly and unutterably wrong!"
Repudiation of the Savannah Hypothesis
My disavowal of SH was based in the first place on evidence which had been
coming forth from excavations in South and East Africa. From Sterkfontein,
suggestions of greater woodland cover at the time when Australopithecus was
deposited in Member 4, had emerged from studies on fossil pollen, but these
were not compelling. Then Wits team member Marian Bamford identified fossil
vines or lianas of Dichapetalum in the same Member 4: such vines hang from
forest trees and would not be expected in open savannah. The team at
Makapansgat found floral and faunal evidence that the layers containing
Australopithecus reflected forest or forest margin conditions. From Hadar,
in Ethiopia, where "Lucy" was found, and from Aramis in Ethiopia, where Tim
White's team found Ardipithecus ramidus, possibly the oldest hominid ever
discovered, well-wooded and even forested conditions were inferred from the
fauna accompanying the hominid fossils.
All the fossil evidence adds up to the small-brained, bipedal hominids of
four to 2.5 million years ago having lived in a woodland or forest niche,
not savannah. The evidence for the presence of big forest trees supports the
idea we had gleaned from the bones of "Little Foot" that tree-climbing had
been a part of the lifeways of these early African hominids. At least, one
could conclude, there had been trees big enough to bear the weight of the
Australopithecines (for which stunted acacias of the savannah would have
been unsuitable).
To a large London audience in 1995 I said: "All the former savannah
supporters (including myself) must now swallow our earlier words in the
light of the new results from the early hominid deposits... Of course, if
savannah is eliminated as a primary cause, or selective advantage of
bipedalism, then we are back to square one."
Humans are not savannah-adapted animals
In rejecting the SH, I was moved primarily by the evidence unearthed in
South Africa and East Africa. Meanwhile, Elaine Morgan had been piecing
together a number of other arguments against the SH, based on some
anatomical, biochemical and physiological data of modern humans, much of
which was collected by Belgium's Dr Marc Verhaegen, which contrast sharply
with the traits in present-day animals that are truly adapted to savannah
life.
As examples, modern humans lack sun-reflecting fur and are virtually
hairless. The cooling system in our skin is quite unfit for hot, dry,
exposed environments: we have numerous sweat glands and we waste water and
sodium - not very suitable for life on the savannah. Our ability to
concentrate our urine is poor and too low and if ever our earliest ancestors
were savannah dwellers, we must have been the worst, the most profligate
urinators there.
Adapted savannah-dwellers need to drink more water at a time, but most
humans are not able to drink much at a time. The quantity of our
subcutaneous fat, which would insulate us against heat loss, is never found
in truly savannah-adapted animals.
In our bodily functions, chemistry and microscopical anatomy, we should be
hopeless as savannah-dwellers. So Marc Verhaegen and Elaine Morgan, in her
remarkable book, The Scars of Evolution, came to the same conclusion that we
had reached from quite different lines of evidence: the old Savannah
Hypothesis was not tenable. All former savannah supporters must recant and
this I did in London. It was an exciting moment - living through a change of
paradigm.
Max Planck, the German physicist and Nobel laureate, once wrote these words
on the replacement of an outworn paradigm: "A new scientific truth does not
triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but
rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows that
is familiar with it."
That must be one of the masterpieces of cynicism on the scientific process.
Paradigm changes, I like to think, flow overwhelmingly from new evidence
and, where the evidence is sound and even irresistible, they should be
embraced just as lief by the old as by the young. It was three weeks after
my 71th birthday and I went on to declare, "A change of paradigm shakes us
up; it rejuvenates us; and, this above all, it prevents mental
fossilisation - and that is good for all of us."
Mario Petrinovich
metastasized to s.b.e., when there's a perfectly adequate forum
for such discussion in sci.anthro.paleontology -- indeed, one could
argue that since the AAT is explicitly about human evolution, that
s.a.p. is the single most appropriate forum. Why bring it over to
our nice quiet backwater? - JAH]
J Moore :
> Mario Petrinovich :
> > J Moore :
> > > Mario Petrinovich :
> > Ok. One thing in time. I am living in Croatia. This is
> > ex-Yugoslavia. This was, and by all merrits still is, a communist
> > country.
> > What communists are doing, is twisting the truth, all the time. I am 42
> > years old, and I saw a lot of this, during my lifetime. So :
> > You can say that lone chimps have been observed, even if you saw
> > only one chimp. If this quote is all the data you have, you cannot know
> > if
> > they possibly saw it only once, in rare occasions, or very often. In all
> > those cases the quote is grammatically correct.
> > A "leopard country" is the whole Africa, except Sahara.
>
> No no, Mario. You're supposed to compare me to Nazis, not communists. :)
Oh, I forgot about those. They have been long time ago. But those
commys in my country, simply refuse to disappear.
> I'm afraid that in English, contrary to your belief, there is a difference
> between singular and plural forms of nouns. "Chimps" is not "chimp seen
> twice". (Also note that researchers learn, as the first part of their
> research, to distinguish the various chimps in their study groups.)
Who knows. Maybe it was one chimp, and maybe it wasn't seen by an
Englishman, : ). But, I still believe that if somebody see a wolf in London,
you can say that wolfs can be seen in London (or have been seen, or
something like that. I am not very good at English). Whoever wants to
stretch this one apperance, can do it this way.
Every animal behaves this way. Chimps are not living where we were
supposed to live. We split on the basis of environment, by "savanna theory",
as far as I know.
> > Further, savanna theory is including feeding on animal meat. That
> > animal meat is, again, in a region with very sparse trees. Even baboons
> > use
> > trees, so they are living in regions with trees. There are no treeless
> > environment in savanna.
>
> Meat is available in forests as well as
> savannahs; meat is available whereever animals live -- this really should
> not have to be pointed out.
We were supposed to be scavengers. For scavengers, the density of
dead animals is crutial. Grazers tend to be where grass is. Grazers live ih
herds. Grazers don't like spaces good for ambush, like wood.
Regarding "fire hypo", I decided to put it in another thread. This
is a biology ng, after all, and it would be interesting to present it here.
Alister Hardy was marine biologist. Was Lee Talbot, too, a biologist?
Fairy tale, if you ask me. Firstly, there are not enough objects
which could serve this purpose, at the places where scavenging would take
place (if you want to find rocks, go to rocky places). Secondly, where herds
of grazers are living, there are also living prides of lions and hyenas.
One amateur movie was popular, some 10 years ago. On it, it was
shoot how lion is eating one unwary tourist. The tourist came too close to
lion pride, shooting with his camera. Lion came from behind. It just put its
pawn on tourists shoulder. Tourist simply colapsed. I still remember the
ease with which it was done. I couldn't believe my eyes. It took no effort
by lion, at all. And then lion simply started to eat tourist stomach. Lion
even didn't bother to strangle its prey. There was apsolutely nothing a
tourist could do, except watching how lion is eating him. The tourist wasn't
alone. This whole scene was shoot by another tourist. All tourists quickly
went into their vehicles. There were something like 5 vehicles, maybe more.
They startet to hit their horns. Lion didn't even move. Then they tried to
push lion with its front bumpers. Pushing lion with front bumpers of a car
didn't help at all. This whole scene didn't bother lion pride the tinniest
bit. What do you think a 20 (or how many more you like) humans could do to a
pride of lion. Apsolutely nothing. A pure fairy tale. Even if they are twice
as tall as they are.
And these were calm lions. What if lions got mad? They would tear
apart every bloody human in their vicinity (along with their vehicles).
> > > > We are attacked by crocs, but not by sharks. Wether you want to
> > > > accept this or not.
> > >
> > > This is another thing which you are stating as fact but which is well
> > > known,
> > > and widely known, to be untrue. This does not do your case any good.
> >
> > No, this does not do any good to you. This is well known only to
> > people who doesn't know anything about this. To shark researchers, it is
> > well known that almost every case of shark attack was actually a
> > mistake.
> > A
> > lot of attacks were on a surfers laying on a surfboard. From bellow this
> > looks just like a seal. As soon as shark realizes that it isn't seal, it
> > let
> > it go. Every researcher would tell you just this, if sharks want to kill
> > humans, there wouldn't be a few isolated cases, there would be a real
> > bloodbath.
>
> First you say that sharks don't attack us, then I point out that they do.
> Then you tell me that I'm wrong when I say they do... and then you
> describe shark attacks. That's frankly a bit odd.
Lol. See how you are twisting. It is obvious that I said that sharks
are actually thinking that they are attacking seals, not us.
> And your last point is a good
> one; I think it's highly likely that if our ancestors had spent a great
> deal
> of time in waters where sharks (or crocs) roamed there would've indeed
> been
> a bloodbath. We avoid this because, as a species, relatively few of us
> spend very much time in such waters and we have much better tools and
> weapons to deal with them.
I wouldn't say this, at all. Remember summer days?
> Nevertheless, we still are attacked at
> times --
> since we aren't a commonly available food (as our supposed aquatic
> ancestors
> would've been) sharks haven't learned to go after us so diligently. Let
> me
> point out that even if a large bite is all that's taken out of a hominid
> which of course doesn't have much in the way of medical care available :),
> they would tend to die.
I have to comment on this. People stay alive after such attacks. I
don't think medical care has something to do with this. Medicine men
persuaded you that they are much more important than they actually are (this
is why they are so rich). I've read somewhere that healing of white man in
USA costs 10 times more than healing black man (per person), and yet, black
men exit those same hospitals healtier.
> However, if groups of hominids (and we seem likely
> to have always been a group-living species) were spending a lot of time
> wading and/or swimming in waters where sharks (and crocs) roam, those
> predators would be highly likely to see these common and relatively
> defenseless hominids as food. Keep in mind that the defenses we likely
> used
> against terrestrial predators (as seen with chimps) don't work against
> sharks and crocs -- I have info on this aspect of predation on my site as
> well.
I'll take a look at this, some day. Humans are in water for much
more than you think (as I said in previous post).
> > > It really doesn't do your case any good to continue to deny observed
> > > facts.
> >
> > But, logic is simple. Predators can do havoc to chimps. Chimps
> > cannot do anything to predators. If you take a second look at those
> > researchers of yours, you could easily see that their views are
> > stretched
> > (interpreted) to match the prevailing opinion, and has nothing with real
> > truth.
>
> It is a given that terrestrial predators can kill chimps at times, but it
> is
> also a given that they cannot "do havoc" in terms of populations. If they
> could chimps would not exist; the fact that they do demonstrates tat they
> can and do deal effectively with terrestrial predators, and there have
> been many observations that show how they do so.
Of course they cannot do havoc to population. A chimps climb trees.
If they are living the way you are proposing for us, they would fastly be
extinct.
> That you choose not to believe
> these facts is not good for your argument. Logic is indeed simple, and
> logic requires that observed facts be incorporated into any logical
> argument.
>
> > > Speaking of observed, measured facts, do you have any source for your
> > > claims
> > > about the running speed of chimpanzees? Although it's not apropos to
> > > how
> > > they actually deal with predators, I'd love to know the numbers and
> > > the source of the claim. JMoore
> >
> > Kingdom "African Mammals" edition 2001, page 14. "Chimpanzee
> > anatomy
> > shows a fine balance between fast quadrupedal activity on the ground and
> > the
> > need to manoeuvre a large, heavy body through different levels of the
> > forest on very variably sized supports."
> > -- Mario
>
> I didn't see any part in that quote that mentioned any specific speed or
> any
> mention of the relative speed of chimps and humans, which you seemed to be
> claiming to have some knowledge of. If you do actually have some
> knowledge
> on that subject, some info you've found, could you please post it -- it
> would be both helpful and interesting.
If I find it, I'll post it. -- Mario
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich :
Ok. Thanks Jim, very much.
90% of things I am talking about, I developed alone, under presure
of discussing these things with a friend of mine, who actually was
scientiest, but historian, and a strong believer (catholic). I started
slowly, but because he had scientific kind of thinking, he always asked
tricky questions. I came home and had to think about how to answer him. As
soon as I found all the answers, he kept asking new questions. And so on,
lol. This was going on for about two months. When I finally answered all his
questions, he asked somebody in Craotian academy (where he was working)
about all this, and that man noticed a lot of aquatic things, so he
recommended me some AAT book. Then I acquired more water in this theory, and
continued to develop this. After few more months all the major elements were
here. This was 12 years ago. This is why I tend to call all of this, mine.
After few more years, I remember that I've read somewhere (I
believe, in newspapers) about that Talbot's claim. Which was in tune with
what I thought. Last year when I wrote in sci.anthropology.paleo about this,
somebody mentioned his professor Talbot. I didn't know how significant he
is. I found somewhere his adress (it could be that this poster provided me
with his adress), and dropped him a post, but he didn't reply. Today I
examined thoroughly who Talbot is (since you also know about him), and I
found out that he is a credible man.
Of course, he probably got this idea more than 12 years ago. But, I
still like to call it mine, since (as far as I know) he is only talking
about human impact on savanna. OTOH, I am connecting a sheer hominid
terrestrial existence, diet, to existence of grassland environment, grazing
heards, and everything connected with this (predators). You have this things
only in Old World. The latest findings, that grasslands in New World are
much newer, are in tume with my position.
Well, here it is : I didn't come to this idea the Talbot's way, by
examining savanna. I was contemplanting human's diet. I was asking myself
why we started to cook food. There is no logical reason for this. It can
even be dangerous, and it is a lot of hustle. The most puzzling was, why we
don't eat raw meat anymore, at all. I concluded that there is no logic in
this, and that the only logical explaination is that we never ate raw meat,
at all. This is why we are "forced" to eat it cooked.
Here is the theory : We lived as primates at rocky coast, feeding on
small tree fruits, cliff bird's eggs, aquatic meat. If you take a look,
these are the only things that we are eating raw. Becomming bipedal. This
was more than 10mya. Then we started to live in environment with
Mediterranean plants. Mediterranean plants are using fire for getting rid of
surrounding plants. They are producing flamable oils, but they themselves
are fire resisting. We liked those places. Mediterranean shrub is good femce
from larger predators (African tribes are using shrub fence, around their
villages). But even when shrub is burned, it gives you open view. And also
it can give you food, burned small animals. Then we started to eat other
primates, birds eggs, by burning a tree (apes like orangutan cannot jump
from tree to tree). This caused deforestation, and grasslands.
I still remember my friend's face, all those years ago, when I told
him that we actually caused the "Ice Age". He took a good look at me,
doesn't beliving what he heard, and told me that I am crazy. Lol. I am still
laughing.
Deforestation came before a change of climate, before Ice Age. Not
after. Water vapor is the main Green House gas. Amazon basin is producing
50% of its preticipation, itself. Only 50% is comming from the ocean. If you
have deforestation on a large scale, you are getting rid the Earth of lot of
water vapor. Which can change a climate.
When he heard this, Marc (Verhaegen) also told me that I am crazy,
lol. I am still laughing at that, too. -- Mario
J Moore
> Well, here it is : I didn't come to this idea the Talbot's way, by
> examining savanna. I was contemplanting human's diet. I was asking myself
> why we started to cook food. There is no logical reason for this. It can
> even be dangerous, and it is a lot of hustle. The most puzzling was, why
we
> don't eat raw meat anymore, at all. I concluded that there is no logic in
> this, and that the only logical explaination is that we never ate raw
meat,
> at all. This is why we are "forced" to eat it cooked.
You have to remember that we're not talking about "us" when you're talking
about the beginnings of fire, you're talking about earlier ancestors of
"us". They very likely ate meat raw just as chimps do (when they could get
it). I've always thought that the most likely start of cooking food was
that it was an accident -- keep in mind that this is mere speculation --
perhaps from a fire accidentally started when chipping stone tools. Now the
problem with this is that the most common stones in stone tools don't give
off a very intense spark when struck, but I've wondered whether or not it
might, under some circumstances, have started a fire. (I have intended to
test this but have never gotten around to doing it, so it's an unsupported
idea at this point and could well be not possible.) The idea was that
they'd accidentally start this fire and come back for the meat in the
aftermath and find out it was not only edible, but actually easier to eat.
It's also possible that early hominids have some experience of eating cooked
food from scavenging after wildfires, and that's possible long before they
were able to use fire in a controlled manner.
So this particular idea of mine is speculation at this point. However. we
can be pretty certain that our early ancestors did eat raw meat; the fact
that all our ape relatives do so occasionally makes it overwhelmingly likely
that our early ancestors did so as well.
JMoore
Mario Petrinovich
With all respect, I think that my idea of acquiring fire is by far
the most probable (of any that I ever heard of). Firstly, chimps maybe do
hunt little monkeys, but females don't get anything from this. Secondly,
they are not eating it, all they can do is chewing it, and then spin it out,
as far as I know. Why they are doing this, who knows. If they ate it before,
they could eat it now as well. No, I don't think that this way has anything
with reality. Again, I think that this is stretching half-true facts, to be
in tune with savanna idea.
OTOH, the best place to acquire cooked meat eating is where fire is.
Either vulcanos, or Mediterranean environment. Dmanisi had Mediterranean
climate at that time. -- Mario
Dan Bolser
You forgot to add improved ballance to the list!
I am a fan of AAT.
J Moore
Mario Petrinovich <mario.pe...@zg.tel.hr> wrote in message
news:bvtvkm$1ej8$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> With all respect, I think that my idea of acquiring fire is by far
> the most probable (of any that I ever heard of). Firstly, chimps maybe do
> hunt little monkeys, but females don't get anything from this. Secondly,
> they are not eating it, all they can do is chewing it, and then spin it
out,
> as far as I know. Why they are doing this, who knows. If they ate it
before,
> they could eat it now as well. No, I don't think that this way has
anything
> with reality. Again, I think that this is stretching half-true facts, to
be
> in tune with savanna idea.
Meat is widely shared among the troop, although pretty darned reluctantly.
:)
Females do get some and I've never heard that they spit it out rather than
eat it. This has nothing whatever to do with savannahs, so it would be
better if you didn't try dragging in at every occasion. And calling
observations by primatologists "stretching half-true facts" is an insult to
a lot of dedicated and very professional people. Do you really imagine
hundreds of these people would go around lying all their lives about what
they've seen when reputations are generally made by seeing and reporting new
things?
It is quite possible that early fires were acquired rather than started,
although lightning would be a far more common firestarter than volcanic
eruption or flows.
JMoore
J Moore
Dan Bolser <d...@mail.mrc-dunn.cam.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:bvtvkl$1ehq$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> You forgot to add improved ballance to the list!
>
> I am a fan of AAT.
Improved balance? Improved over tree-dwelling ancestors? It's a lot worse
falling from a tree than falling over in even knee-deep water. For that
matter it's worse falling over on land than in water, except for the crocs.
:)
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich :
> > With all respect, I think that my idea of acquiring fire is by
> > far
> > the most probable (of any that I ever heard of). Firstly, chimps maybe
> > do
> > hunt little monkeys, but females don't get anything from this. Secondly,
> > they are not eating it, all they can do is chewing it, and then spin it
> > out,
> > as far as I know. Why they are doing this, who knows. If they ate it
> > before,
> > they could eat it now as well. No, I don't think that this way has
> > anything
> > with reality. Again, I think that this is stretching half-true facts, to
> > be in tune with savanna idea.
>
> Meat is widely shared among the troop, although pretty darned reluctantly.
> :)
>
> Females do get some and I've never heard that they spit it out rather than
> eat it.
This is what I heard.
> This has nothing whatever to do with savannahs, so it would be
> better if you didn't try dragging in at every occasion.
Meat eating (by scavenging) has.
> And calling
> observations by primatologists "stretching half-true facts" is an insult
> to
> a lot of dedicated and very professional people. Do you really imagine
> hundreds of these people would go around lying all their lives about what
> they've seen when reputations are generally made by seeing and reporting
> new things?
Firstly, you are saying that "hundrets" were seeing this. I wouldn't
say so. Then, the ones that saw this, was sent there to find connection with
our closest realtives, by researching their behavior. Well, if they stretch
a little, they fulfiled their mission. Humans are intelligent creatures. It
isn't hard for them to find connection where there isn't one. It isn't hard
for them to be wrong. Very small number of people believe in savanna theory.
The others are believing in God. Are they going around and lying? Are they
all mean liars? They simply made a wrong connection. Chewing is similar to
eating.
> It is quite possible that early fires were acquired rather than started,
> although lightning would be a far more common firestarter than volcanic
> eruption or flows. JMoore
BTW, I am glad to inform you about new book. Please take a look at
this :
www.naturalhistorymag.com/0204/0204_feature.html
So, we have streamlined body, covered nostrils, and thick calotte.
Just like gannets. Plus, our body is adapted for carrying forces of 20% of
our body weight, through axil direction, from atop of our head. I think I
have my case done. -- Mario
J Moore
You heard wrong. Females do get meat (and occasionally catch it to start
with, although most animals are caught by males) and the meat is eaten raw
and not spit out. In fact, they eat the whole thing, including skin and
small bones. This isn't surprising to researchers because meat is hard to
come by and there's a powerful incentive to eat any part of the animal
that's nutritious, which is to say every part of it (bone marrow, for
instance, is a great energy source -- analysis of chimp feces often shows
fragments of bones).
> BTW, I am glad to inform you about new book. Please take a look at
> this :
> www.naturalhistorymag.com/0204/0204_feature.html
> So, we have streamlined body, covered nostrils, and thick calotte.
> Just like gannets. Plus, our body is adapted for carrying forces of 20% of
> our body weight, through axil direction, from atop of our head. I think I
> have my case done. -- Mario
Yes, I know about the Boaz and Ciochon book and their championing of the old
idea that fighting is a root cause of the shape of *Homo erectus* skulls. I
see you picked up on the word "streamlined" apparently alone in all that
article, which I'm sad to note is typical of AAT "research" (and altogether
too close to creationist "research" as well). You should note that they are
talking about the top and sides of the skull only, and only when viewed from
the front, when they use the word "streamlined" to describe it. This does
not indicate streamlining of *Homo erectus* in any way helpful for the AAT.
As well you should note that when you use this article as evidence of the
"thick calotte" you say "we" have -- they are talking about *Homo erectus*
and how the tops of their skulls are radically different from ours.
Note too that even if the entire skull was "streamlined" in this way (and
need I point out that it isn't? just look at the picture that accompanies
the article), from the front, they'd have to be holding their heads facing
forward as they swam (and most people do watch where they're going when they
swim). But this would require an uncomfortable method of holding the head,
because our spine exits from the bottom of our skulls, rather than from the
rear as we see in animals which typically hold their heads this way (aquatic
animals, for instance). As an example, look at the bird you mention, the
gannet, which not only has a long and flexible neck (very unlike ours but
like many aquatic mammals such as seals and polar bears) but which has a
spine which exits from the rear of the skull (again very unlike ours but
like many aquatic mammals). Try holding your head in this position for even
a short time -- look straight up at the ceiling for 5 minutes for
instance -- and feel the neck strain. We are not adapted for that position.
Finally, I have to find it amusing that it seems whenever a scientist says
something you feel supports your position (even when it actually doesn't
support it) you feel they are entirely trustworthy, but whenever they say
something which opposes it, they are mistaken (if not lying) for some
reason. Why are these people so reliable when you like what they say and so
incredibly unreliable when you don't like what they say? (Again, this is
strikingly, and alarmingly, similar to what we see from creationists --
those are people whose tactics you definitely should not be copying.)
JMoore
--
For a scientific critique of the aquaticape theory, go to www.aquaticape.org
Mario Petrinovich
> Mario Petrinovich :
No. I don't remember that I saw a word "streamlined" anywhere in
that article (for which I provided link). The only thing that I took from
this article is that we are adapted for taking blows from atop of our head.
I said that we have major adaptations, that a main plunge diving animal has
(gannets). Strong skull, covered nostrils, streamlining. Plus, we are the
most efficient when we are carrying forces of 20% of our body weight, atop
of our head. This makes my case clear. -- Mario
[moderator's note: It certainly does. - JAH]
William Morse
I have an open mind on the importance of savanna habitat on our
development, especially as to bipedalisim. I would note that there are no
other bipedal savanna dwelling mammals. Of course there are no other
bipedal coast dwelling mammals. Bipedalism may well be a result of our
ancestors descent from the trees to dwell on the ground, but it is
probably not a result of the specific habitat in which they dwelled. I
would note that crab-eating macaques are primates who make extensive use
of seaside resources - but they are not bipedal. Baboons are savanna
dwelling primates with considerable social interaction - but they are not
bipedal.
However I object to several of the statements that you present above as
facts. We are on the slow side in terms of sprint speed, but are one of
the better mammals at long distance running. Our heat regulation is in
fact excellent - we are capable of sustained exertion for hours at
temperatures of 90 degrees F. I agree that this requires water - but then
I readily concede that behaviorally we are very attached to water.
Savanna dwellers include elephants, who do not grow up fast, who do not
die early, and who exhibit varied vocalisations. And if you are a good
long distance runner but a poor sprinter, you want to see everything from
afar - because you can only outrun it if you get a good head start, and
it can't outrun you as long as you can keep it in your sights.
Now as to _believing_ that human ancestors were savanna dwellers - well,
humans are very good at coming up with rational sounding explanations for
almost anything. This is one reason why many longtimers on sbe are
dubious of Just So Stories. I think we need more paleontological evidence
- which admittedly may be hard to come by for seaside sites. But I would
not characterize the belief in savanna dwelling as _ridiculous_.
Yours,
Bill Morse
Marc Verhaegen
"Dan Bolser" <d...@mail.mrc-dunn.cam.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:bvtvkl$1ehq$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> You forgot to add improved ballance to the list! I am a fan of AAT.
Sorry I forgot to answer. I don't think we (I at least) have improved
balance as compared to chimps, at least not on branches. Or perhaps you
meant something else?
--Marc
_______
Mario Petrinovich
> I have an open mind on the importance of savanna habitat on our
> development, especially as to bipedalisim. I would note that there are no
> other bipedal savanna dwelling mammals. Of course there are no other
> bipedal coast dwelling mammals. Bipedalism may well be a result of our
> ancestors descent from the trees to dwell on the ground, but it is
> probably not a result of the specific habitat in which they dwelled. I
> would note that crab-eating macaques are primates who make extensive use
> of seaside resources - but they are not bipedal. Baboons are savanna
> dwelling primates with considerable social interaction - but they are not
> bipedal.
And you forgot the most important. Chimps and gorillas are ground
dwelling APES, and they are not bipedal. Although they can clearly have
bipedal posture if they want it (during wading, while carrying things, while
suspensing from branch they are stretched). -- Mario
Marc Verhaegen
"William Morse" <wdm...@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
news:c07am7$1744$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > ... Whatever, there is not the slightest indication human ancestors were
ever savanna dwellers: humans are the opposites of typical savanna dwellers:
we are slow & fat, easily overheated, we need a lot of water & sodium (both
scarse at the savanna). We have a poor sense of smell. Savanna dwellers
don't have varied vocalisations. They grow up fast & die early. Running
upright is the stupidest thing you can do in the savanna: predators as well
as your prey see you from far; it is slower than running on all fours. Etc.
Believing that human ancestors were savanna dwellers is ridiculous.
> I have an open mind on the importance of savanna habitat on our
development
That's fine, but realise that this whole savanna idea has not the slightest
basis. It goes back to Dart's 1925 paper after the discovery of the skull of
Taung in the treeless grasslands of S.Africa: "South Africa, by providing a
vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relatively scarcity of
water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a
laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human
evolution." And: "It will appear to many a remarkable fact that an
ultra-simian and pre-human stock should be discovered, in the first place,
at this extreme southern point in Africa, and, secondly, in Bechuanaland,
for one does not associate with the present fringe of the Kalahari desert an
environment favourable to higher primate life. It is generally believed by
geologists (vide A. W. Rogers, "Post-Cretaceous Climates of South Africa,"
African Journal of Science, vol. xix., 1922) that the climate has fluctuated
within exceedingly narrow limits in this country since Cretaceous times."
We now known that the S.African climate did change a lot since the time of
Taung (eg, Partridge 1985), but Dart was convinced that the present & the
ancient environment did not differ significantly & that the Taung child had
lived in such open grasslands. Dart only got recognition a few decades
later. Piltdown Man (big brain & big teeth) was unmasked as a fraud, so
anthropologists accepted the Taung fossil (small brain & small teeth) as a
more likely link between apes (small brain & big teeth) & humans (big brain
& small teeth). But they not only accepted Dart's view on Taung's affinity,
but also his view on Taung's lifestyle in a dry & open country. Many
anthropologists today no longer automatically follow the savanna hypothesis
(eg, Tobias http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm ), but the idea
remains unquestioned in most popular books.
> , especially as to bipedalism. I would note that there are no other
bipedal savanna dwelling mammals. Of course there are no other bipedal coast
dwelling mammals.
I agree (but see penguins), but we don't say bipedalism is due to
coast-dwelling. We say: bipedalism is more likely at the waterside (where
you can wade, esp. if you're arboreal) than in the savanna (where you have
to be fast, hence run on 4 legs).
> Bipedalism may well be a result of our ancestors descent from the trees to
dwell on the ground, but it is probably not a result of the specific habitat
in which they dwelled. I would note that crab-eating macaques are primates
who make extensive use of seaside resources - but they are not bipedal.
Baboons are savanna dwelling primates with considerable social interaction -
but they are not bipedal.
Yes. My idea on human bipedalism: IMO we have to discern different aspects:
- locomotion on 2 legs (bird, kangaroo, hopping mice...),
- truncal erectness (gibbon, indri...- climbing),
- straight build (aquatics...- swimming),
- long legs (flamingo, stork...).
Probably truncal erectness & (partial) 2-legged locomotion evolved long
before straight build & long legs.
> However I object to several of the statements that you present above as
facts. We are on the slow side in terms of sprint speed, but are one of the
better mammals at long distance running.
Perhaps you are. I am not. This statement if often repeated without refs.
Humans are slow. Not specifically suited for open terrain. The first man who
ran the marathon dropped dead.
> Our heat regulation is in fact excellent - we are capable of sustained
exertion for hours at temperatures of 90 degrees F.
No nonsense please. Our heat regulation is extremely poor. From one of my
contributions to Roede ed.1991: "In an endothermic species the normal
temperature represents a compromise between the advantages and disadvantages
of high body temperature in relation to its particular habitat and
behaviour. One of the advantages of high body temperatures - especially
the higher nervous tissue and muscle temperature - is the facilitation of
faster reactions (McFarland et al., p. 651). For every rise of 10°C the
velocity of the biochemical processes is more than doubled (compare the
warming-up of athletes). Fast reactions are important in predators and their
prey, in intra-species conflicts, and for birds, in flight. For these
purposes, generally speaking, the higher the nerve and muscle temperature,
the better. The disadvantage lies in the high energy expenditure needed to
sustain the temperature: the cost of keeping body tissues at about 38-42°C,
as in most mammals and birds during the day, is enormous (Else and Hulbert,
1987). High temperatures may also incur other disadvantages - for example,
problems of lipid and protein solubility and protein denaturation. If the
processes of thermoregulation in humans had evolved in response to a move
from the trees to savannah, we would expect them to be characterised by a
high normal temperature because of the need for speed, whether in flight or
in pursuit, and a capacity to tolerate periods of higher temperature because
of exposure to the tropical heat. Most hunted or hunting animals have a body
temperature of at least 38°C. While the average rectal temperature in man is
37°C, in horses it is 38°C, in cattle and guinea pigs 38.5°C, in rabbits,
sheep, dogs and cats 39°C, in goats 39.5°C (Slijper, 1958; Calloway, 1976).
By contrast, animals which do not defend themselves by running away - such
as hedgehogs, mole- rats, armadillos, monotremes, pottos and sloths - may
have body temperatures lower than 35°C, and consequently incur much lower
energy costs than other animals of the same size (Wilson, 1979, p. 747;
McFarland et al., 1979, p. 652; Calloway, 1976; Goffart, 1978). If we
exclude the group of slow-moving mammals listed above, a normal temperature
as low as man's is found chiefly among the larger aquatic mammals. Hunting
and hunted pinnipeds have a body temperature like ours or slightly higher -
for instance, 37.5°C in fur seals and 36.5°C in sea-elephants. But aquatic
mammals that can afford to move slowly often have lower temperatures, which
saves energy and allows longer submersion. Hippopotamuses and many cetaceans
have body temperatures of about 35.5°C, sea-cows probably even lower
(Slijper, 1958, p. 359). In other words, humans have a normal temperature
resembling that of sea mammals, lower than most terrestrial ones, and
markedly lower than that of any active savannah species. As well as
possessing such a high basic temperature, animals living in exposed habitats
evolve the capacity to survive periods when the diurnal air temperature is
very high. The oryx, for example, can sustain a rectal temperature of 45°C
and Grant's gazelle of 46.5°C for many hours, whereas humans feel ill if
their rectal temperature rises to 38°C. Different mechanisms have been
developed in warm-blooded animals for selectively keeping their brain
temperature lower than the body temperature (Taylor and Lyman, 1972). These
mechanisms, well developed in savannah dwellers, are poorly developed in
humans (Cabanac, 1986), so that in man a rectal temperature of 41°C may
result in permanent brain damage (Cabanac, 1986; Krupp and Chatton, 1981,
pp. 1, 939). In a savannah-type environment there is an unusually wide
difference between day and night temperatures. Consequently, one final
characteristic of thermoregulation in animals living in this environment is
that they have evolved a wide range of body temperatures. Many show a
fluctuation of more than 6°C between day and night temperatures: the oryx,
for example, ranges between 38°C and 45°C, and the gazelle's rectal
temperature may increase by 5 or 6°C during a single run, which - through
muscular warming-up - has the advantage of enhancing its speed (Taylor,
1970; Taylor and Rowntree, 1973). At the other extreme are the medium-sized
and large aquatic mammals which display almost no body temperature
fluctuations. For instance, the core temperature of the East Siberian
dolphin shows fluctuations of less than 0.5°C (Slijper, 1958, p. 205). ..."
> I agree that this requires water - but then I readily concede that
behaviorally we are very attached to water. Savanna dwellers include
elephants
Well, of 3 or 4 elephant spp, only 1 spends a lot of time in savannas.
>, who do not grow up fast, who do not die early, and who exhibit varied
vocalisations.
Yes, it's generally agreed elephants had more aquatic ancestors. Just like
us.
> And if you are a good long distance runner but a poor sprinter, you want
to see everything from afar - because you can only outrun it if you get a
good head start, and it can't outrun you as long as you can keep it in your
sights.
By that time you're eaten by lions. We need lots of water on the savanna. We
sweat too much. We are too fat. We are everything but a savanna dweller.
> Now as to _believing_ that human ancestors were savanna dwellers - well,
humans are very good at coming up with rational sounding explanations for
almost anything. This is one reason why many longtimers on sbe are dubious
of Just So Stories. I think we need more paleontological evidence
I don't think so: this says only something on the fossils (often of unknown
relation to living hominids: Pan, Homo & Gorilla). Here we are talking about
our ancestors.
>- which admittedly may be hard to come by for seaside sites.
Well, in spite of this, a lot of Homo fossils or tools come from seaside
sites (australopith OTOH don't: they have nothing to do with Homo IMO),
throughout the Pleistocene, all over the warm parts of the Old World, eg,
Mojokerto, Gibraltar, Flores, Terra Amata, Boxgrove, etc.etc.
> But I would not characterize the belief in savanna dwelling as
_ridiculous_. Yours, Bill Morse
I would: I can't find a better word: IMO it's ridiculous nonsense that
should be forgotten as soon as possible.
J Moore
newsgroup; I have snipped some bits to shorten the post:
Marc Verhaegen <fa20...@skynet.be> wrote in message
news:c097pq$1pcr$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> "William Morse" <wdm...@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:c07am7$1744$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> > Our heat regulation is in fact excellent - we are capable of sustained
> exertion for hours at temperatures of 90 degrees F.
>
> No nonsense please. Our heat regulation is extremely poor. From one of my
<snipped bits about the temperatures of many mammals which are higher than
ours, all of which are quite unrelated to us: horses, cattle, guinea pigs,
rabbits, sheep, dogs, cats, goats, oryx, gazelles -- oddly enough no
primates>
<snipped>
> (Slijper, 1958, p. 359). In other words, humans have a normal temperature
> resembling that of sea mammals, lower than most terrestrial ones, and
> markedly lower than that of any active savannah species. As well as
See below re primates and especially the open-country dwelling Hamadryas
baboon.
<snipped>
> and Grant's gazelle of 46.5°C for many hours, whereas humans feel ill if
> their rectal temperature rises to 38°C. Different mechanisms have been
> developed in warm-blooded animals for selectively keeping their brain
> temperature lower than the body temperature (Taylor and Lyman, 1972).
These
> mechanisms, well developed in savannah dwellers, are poorly developed in
> humans (Cabanac, 1986), so that in man a rectal temperature of 41°C may
> result in permanent brain damage (Cabanac, 1986; Krupp and Chatton, 1981,
> pp. 1, 939). In a savannah-type environment there is an unusually wide
> difference between day and night temperatures. Consequently, one final
> characteristic of thermoregulation in animals living in this environment
is
> that they have evolved a wide range of body temperatures. Many show a
> fluctuation of more than 6°C between day and night temperatures: the oryx,
> for example, ranges between 38°C and 45°C, and the gazelle's rectal
> temperature may increase by 5 or 6°C during a single run, which - through
> muscular warming-up - has the advantage of enhancing its speed (Taylor,
> 1970; Taylor and Rowntree, 1973). At the other extreme are the
medium-sized
> and large aquatic mammals which display almost no body temperature
> fluctuations. For instance, the core temperature of the East Siberian
> dolphin shows fluctuations of less than 0.5°C (Slijper, 1958, p. 205).
..."
Note that human runners, after running 3 miles, can show a rectal
temperature of 40.5 degrees C, yet do not feel ill, and also can exhibit a
less than normal temperature when measured at the skin. The fact that
gazelles and other relatively unrelated mammals have quite different
thermoregualtory systems from humans isn't all that surprising, ot at least
it shouldn't be that surprising. It also shouldn't be surprising that
humans have similar body temperatures to our primate relatives, including
those which commonly live on savannahs (such as the Hamadryas baboon in this
example):
Macaca mulatta (Rhesus macaque) 36-40 degrees C
Macaca fascicularis (Crab-eating macaque) 37-40 degrees C
Papio hamadryas (Hamadryas baboon) 36-39 degrees C
(From 1987 *The Care and Management of Laboratory Animals* Trevor Poole, ed.
Longman Scientific and Technical: Harlow, Essex)
Also note that these temperature ranges are likely slightly higher than
those of wild, resting individuals, since in order to take their
temperature, these primates must be forcibly restrained:
"In most cases, they are likely to represent normal ranges, but normals are
difficult to establish for animals which readily become excited when
restrained". (Poole 1987: 602)
The human "normal" temperature is 37 dgrees F, and contrary to the idea, oft
stated by AAT proponents, that humans' body temperature doesn't fluctuate,
it does fluctuate even in resting humans (exercise of course makes it
fluctuate even more). Temperature typically varies in a resting human
through the day in a range of 2-3 degrees C. It is true that this is less
than herbivores such as gazelles but it's like our primate relatives --
antelope such as the oryx have a system of blood vessels that can be cooled
by evaporative cooling through the nostrils. The fact is that we closely
resemble our primate relatives rather than distantly related animals such as
antelope in this regard. Why this is considered odd by AAT proponents has
always perplexed me.
JMoore
--
For a scientific critque of the aquaticape theory, go to www.aquaticape.org
Michael Clark
> I wanted to correct some incorrect information that was presented in this
> newsgroup; I have snipped some bits to shorten the post:
>
> Marc Verhaegen <fa20...@skynet.be> wrote in message
> news:c097pq$1pcr$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> >
>
> The human "normal" temperature is 37 dgrees F, and contrary to the idea,
oft
> stated by AAT proponents, that humans' body temperature doesn't fluctuate,
> it does fluctuate even in resting humans (exercise of course makes it
> fluctuate even more). Temperature typically varies in a resting human
> through the day in a range of 2-3 degrees C. It is true that this is less
> than herbivores such as gazelles but it's like our primate relatives --
> antelope such as the oryx have a system of blood vessels that can be
cooled
> by evaporative cooling through the nostrils. The fact is that we closely
> resemble our primate relatives rather than distantly related animals such
as
> antelope in this regard. Why this is considered odd by AAT proponents has
> always perplexed me.
>
> JMoore
> --
> For a scientific critque of the aquaticape theory, go to
www.aquaticape.org
Jim, please take this discussion over to SAP. The folks
over there could use this information and would really
appreciate some help with the resident wet apes. A
certain Verhaegen clone has gone so far as to claim
to be demolishing your website --which he further claims
to be non-scholarly and a mere shadow of Langdon's
paper (which he has labelled "shoddy").
Thanks,
MClark
--
Yada, yada, yada.
Marc Verhaegen
> > > Our heat regulation is in fact excellent - we are capable of sustained
exertion for hours at temperatures of 90 degrees F.
> > No nonsense please. Our heat regulation is extremely poor. From one of
my
> <snipped bits about the temperatures of many mammals which are higher than
ours, all of which are quite unrelated to us: horses, cattle, guinea pigs,
rabbits, sheep, dogs, cats, goats, oryx, gazelles -- oddly enough no
primates>
Moore is apparently unable to answer. I guess the man believes primates are
no mammals?? If Moore had data on primates, he could have shown them.
The man is unable to understand that if a forest dweller goes to the savanna
(Moore's fairy tale), it has to evolve, like all savanna dwellers, more body
Tp fluctuations. Not difficult, but too difficult for Moore.
I wonder how Moore could measure rectal Tps of running baboons. Anyway,
humans in the afternoon have lower Tps than other primates, eg, Bell,
Davidson &Scarborough 1968: "The range of body temperature in a group of
healthy persons is quite small. Indeed, the co-efficient of variation of
body temperature in man is one of the smallest for which quantitative data
are available." This is clear to everybody except to biased people like
Moore. If we had been, as the man believes, savanna-adapted over millions of
years, we would have been able to accommodate with ease a Tp rise to more
than 40°C in the afternoon. It's clear except to closed-minded savanna
believers that man is anything but a savanna animal. This is not a question
of science but of religion.
> Also note that these temperature ranges are likely slightly higher than
those of wild, resting individuals, since in order to take their
temperature, these primates must be forcibly restrained: "In most cases,
they are likely to represent normal ranges, but normals are difficult to
establish for animals which readily become excited when restrained". (Poole
1987: 602) The human "normal" temperature is 37 dgrees F, and contrary to
the idea, oft stated by AAT proponents
The man is an obvious liar. And he hasn't even read what he snipped.
> , that humans' body temperature doesn't fluctuate, it does fluctuate even
in resting humans (exercise of course makes it fluctuate even more).
Temperature typically varies in a resting human through the day in a range
of 2-3 degrees C.
That's nonsense, as every doctor knows. See the quote of Bell etc. above.
> It is true that this is less than herbivores such as gazelles but it's
like our primate relatives -- antelope such as the oryx have a system of
blood vessels that can be cooled by evaporative cooling through the
nostrils. The fact is that we closely resemble our primate relatives rather
than distantly related animals such as antelope in this regard. Why this is
considered odd by AAT proponents
?? This guy is apparently making up his own facts. Typical of savanna
believers.
For a scientific discussion of AAT (pro & contra - unlike the biases of
Moore's website) see http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/Symposium.html
At some time after the human/chimp split (~6-4 Ma), human ancestors were
seaside omnivores: this lifestyle (collecting coconuts, shellfish, turtles &
turtle eggs, bird eggs, crabs, seaweeds etc., beach-combing, wading
bipedally, swimming) explains many human traits (absent in chimps) much
better than dry savanna scenarios do: brain enlargement (but olfactory bulb
reduction), improved breathing control & diving skills, varied vocality,
handiness & tool use, reduction of climbing, reduction of fur, more
subcutaneous fat, very long legs & straight body build, reduction of sense
of smell, late puberty, high needs of water, iodine, sodium &
poly-unsaturated fatty acids etc.
Probably this seaside episode happened late Plio- or early Pleistocene when
early Homo followed the Mediterranean & Indian Ocean coasts: Homo fossils or
tools ~1.8 Ma have "suddenly" been found in Israel, Algeria, Iran, Kenya,
Georgia, Java... In spite of sea level changes (Ice Ages), Homo (but not
australopith) remains have frequently been found amid shells, corals,
barnacles etc., throughout the Pleistocene, in coasts all over the Old World
(eg, Mojokerto, Terra Amata, Table Bay, Eritrea), even on islands that could
only be reached by sea (Flores 0.8 Ma
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm ).
J Moore
>
> Moore is apparently unable to answer. I guess the man believes primates
are
> no mammals?? If Moore had data on primates, he could have shown them.
Macaques and baboons are primates. I didn't think this had to be pointed
out.
> it shouldn't be that surprising. It also shouldn't be surprising that
> humans have similar body temperatures to our primate relatives, including
> those which commonly live on savannahs (such as the Hamadryas baboon in
this
> example): Macaca mulatta (Rhesus macaque) 36-40 degrees C Macaca
> fascicularis (Crab-eating macaque) 37-40 degrees C Papio hamadryas
> (Hamadryas baboon) 36-39 degrees C (From 1987 *The Care and Management of
> Laboratory Animals* Trevor Poole, ed. Longman Scientific and Technical:
> Harlow, Essex)
> > , that humans' body temperature doesn't fluctuate, it does fluctuate
even
> in resting humans (exercise of course makes it fluctuate even more).
> Temperature typically varies in a resting human through the day in a range
> of 2-3 degrees C.
>
> That's nonsense, as every doctor knows. See the quote of Bell etc. above.
You are, as far as I know, a medical doctor. Yet you don't know this rather
basic physiological fact?
> > It is true that this is less than herbivores such as gazelles but it's
> like our primate relatives -- antelope such as the oryx have a system of
> blood vessels that can be cooled by evaporative cooling through the
> nostrils. The fact is that we closely resemble our primate relatives
rather
> than distantly related animals such as antelope in this regard. Why this
is
> considered odd by AAT proponents
>
> ?? This guy is apparently making up his own facts. Typical of savanna
> believers.
I did not say that we first evolved our hominid characteristics on
savannahs, although it is obvious that we were able to live there, as for
instance chimpanzees can. I was simply pointing out that it is silly to
think that we would evolve the same thermoregulatory system as antelope
instead of using similar systems to what we see in other primates, including
savannah-dwelling primates. You can't simply order up features out of a
catalog and install them -- phylogeny does play some part in evolution,
after all. And I was pointing out that in regard to our body temperature,
we resemble other primates, including savannah-dwelling primates, unlike the
oft-repeated claims of AAT proponents.
Marc Verhaegen
"Michael Clark" <bit...@spammer.com> wrote in message
news:c0ei46$cmm$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...
> Jim, please take this discussion over to SAP. The folks over there could
use this information
"information"?? biased prejudices you mean
[moderator's thunderbolt: That Is IT. There will be NO MORE
AQUATIC APE DISCUSSIONS HERE. Any submitted article on this
thread will be redirected to the APPROPRIATE newsgroup. You
know where to find it. And on behalf of the sbe readership,
don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out - JAH]
>and would really appreciate some help with the resident wet apes.
:-D
The savanna believers are losing the battle you mean!