Never Cry Wolf

What is it with people and drinking? Have you ever given that much thought? One can imagine chimps hunting together, foraging together, eating together, sleeping together, fighting together, being together together, but can you imagine them sitting around drinking cups of adulterated water together? I can’t.

How about going for a swim? Maybe some fishing? Do chimps ever go after frogs? Turtles? Are chimps inclined to float around on a log for a spell? Perhaps tie—dare we say “raft”?—together a few big logs?

Ever read Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf? There’s a scene in there where he’s trying to see if a wolf, who regularly passed close to his tent, would respect his boundary markings; which he figured meant pissing in the corners, so to speak, just like the wolf did. It worked, but he learned something about peeing in the process. He began by brewing up a pot of tea, having a couple cups, and then waiting.

Until he had to go.

Which he did, and then he’d repeat the whole process over again; but, Christ, he was belting down a lot of tea. He got to wondering, “How does that wolf do it, he doesn’t drink a quarter of what I drink?”

For one thing, he—the wolf—only pees a little bit at each marker, Mowat observed. Unlike people, the wolf was able to turn his urination on and off at will, with no ill effects; he did not walk away with his legs crossed. Furthermore, the wolf’s pee was much more concentrated than his pee; a little went a long way. Compared to the wolf, his pee was, well, weak tea. Farley accidentally came to the realization that people guzzle water like nobody else. At least nobody else out living on the savannah, where we were supposed to have come from. Other animals come to the water hole for a drink; we camp there for the whole afternoon. Us and the elephants.

I wrote a note to Elaine Morgan yesterday. Elaine is the chief apologist for the Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT). I Stumbled Upon a 2009 TED presentation by the delightful lady and felt duty-bound to respond. I noted that I wrote her occasionally and was sorry she hadn’t incorporated demographic data into the understanding of AAT. In her video she lamented academe’s reluctance to even consider AAT, and I was reluctant to point out that she treated demographics the same way.

I repeat my note here:

“The failure of AAT to capture its rightful place in human paleontology is due to its insistence on some untenable assumptions, but the unfortunate consequences are worse. I think it's quite true that much of homo sapiens' physiology comes from an association with water, but because AAT focuses on an unlikely interpretation of the evidence, it has turned most of the profession against the demonstrable associations between people and a water-based environment.

“I think you start the argument from the wrong end. The reason there is no fossil evidence for a previous semi-aquatic existence is probably because there was no such stage. On the other hand, there's abundant evidence that our ancestors—at least many of them—lived in close proximity to water. They may have used the savannahs as hunting grounds, but they evidently lived close to the water's edge and in relatively lush environments. For example, it's one thing to live on the savannah; it's another thing to live on the bank of a river that cuts through the savannah.

“All of that, of course, is somewhat speculative; how does one interpret the evidence, and what is ‘all’ the evidence? What's not speculative is modern demographics. Demographically speaking, humans are currently semi-aquatic animals; there is no question about that, it's absolutely and scientifically demonstrable. A) Everyone on the planet lives within close proximity to a source of fresh water; we know that because we know that without that a person will die. There is no exception. Those who live any distance from potable water spend most of their day acquiring that water. In the ‘civilized’ world, most people have running water in their home or an easily accessible common source. No one lives in the desert; everyone lives at the oasis. B) I would wager that 80% of the people on the planet live within four miles of navigable water. That's a guess, but it can't be too far off. Everyone depends on controlling and having access to water. We have been oceanic seafarers for at least 60,000 years; and we surely didn't start out as capable of crossing long distances, such as to Australia. It implies we began crude sailing much, much earlier. Like probably by the time our species evolved 200,000 years ago. And it would be hard to imagine that, if we were sailing by 200,000 years ago, that we wouldn't have been fishing and harvesting clams and turtles, as well. Which it seems we were doing.

“All that means that we, as a species, have most probably been water-side dwellers for at a minimum 200,000 years, but more likely for millions of years. Obviously you and I think the evidence goes back much further than a few hundred thousand, but I think we can safely say it goes back that far. However far it goes back, it evidently goes back far enough to have affected our physiology for, you're perfectly correct, our physiology more or less demands a semi-aquatic environment. But it doesn't require more of an aquatic environment than we currently enjoy. I repeat: we currently are a semi-aquatic animal. The only real question is, when did we become this way? If you put the question this way, then it becomes incumbent on the paleoanthropologists to find a date when that cross-over occurred. I don't think the demographics are assailable.

“The other part of your argument that, I believe, has to be abandoned is the theory that bipedalism is necessarily connected to our semi-aquatic existence. It's the weakest part of the argument with the least fossil support and logically isn't compelling. It's obviously advantageous to be bipedal if one wants to go wading, but it's doubtful than our ancestors ever got so into wading that the best waders supplanted the non-waders. I don't see that we were ever that dependent on or spent that much time in the water. Whatever water we started out next to, it apparently was fresh. I can't see that we were ever about ready to go swimming with the crocodiles. I can, though, see us, as the smartest ape, moving our abode to where the food was most abundant: the water's edge. We didn't have to hang out with the crocs to benefit from the lush water-side. Furthermore, a water-side existence would have aided our survival in times of shrinking habitat. It's easier to defend ones own turf than to dislodge someone from theirs. We could have spent millions of years living alongside and using water resources just as we do today: food, transportation, safety. If that's true, we would have turned out, well, just the way we turned out.

“My guess about bipedalism—though I have nothing like a demographic argument to buttress it—is that it's a result of habitual tool carrying. I suspect that, as meat eating increased in our diet, those apes who were more able to quickly take advantage of hunting opportunities—i.e. those who were always armed with a pointed stick or a rock—ate and reproduced better than their less prepared brethren; and slowly, habitually bipedal apes took over the species. Once everyone carried weapons all the time (and other things, as well, by the time carrying was habitual), those who were physically better suited to upright posture slowly increased their percentage of the species until we were obligate bipedal. Of course, there's nothing to say that those apes living down by the water, who were already the smart apes, wouldn't have figured out the carrying weapons trick first, as well. It does, though, suggest that bipedalism could have arisen more than once and under more than one condition. In any event, if you abandon connecting bipedalism with a semi-aquatic environment, I think you'll have a greater chance of success.”

•

What surprises me is that I don’t see the “demographic conundrum” being addressed anywhere. Granted, I’m a dilettante, but I don’t recall anyone other than myself ever asking the question of when did we move to the shore where we currently live? Likewise granted, they keep pushing back the age of aquatic resource utilization—only recently reporting 42,000 year old fish hooks—but they appear to think of aquatic resource utilization as an adjunct to a life that was predominantly lived elsewhere. Like on the savannahs. Not as a way of life unto itself.

I’m not here—in the words of Obama, let me be perfectly clear—to argue for any theory about our past behavior (although I have plenty of those, too) but rather to ask, when did our current demographic preference for the water-line take place? Everybody is trying to figure out when we climbed down from the trees, but nobody seems to be trying to figure out when we moved to the lake, river, swamp, ocean, mud puddle, oasis? I guess that’s what bothers me about so much of paleontology, it’s not that their data are wrong, but that they’re asking the wrong questions. Or more aptly put: not asking the right ones. We don’t live on the savannah. Proportionally, the percentage of the population that lives on a savannah anywhere approaches zilch. Even those who look like they live on the savannah, if you look closely, you’ll find they live in a town by the river or they built their house down by the creek. The rest of them? Why, they drive pipes deep into the ground and make artificial springs right where they live. How many of them live out on the savannah—forget about the prairie or the desert? Not a whole lot.

So, I’m not saying here that we didn’t, God only knows, live on the savannah at some distant point in our past; I’m only saying that we don’t live there now. Almost none of us. Every single one of us has moved as close as possible to the water hole, if not a navigable body. When did that happen? If you read current theory, it appears that most professionals think the move to the water’s edge happened after the rise of home sapiens some 200,000 years ago. All I’m looking for is the evidence that makes them think this transfer of habitat took place and when it occurred.

It appears to me that the modern scientific community credits the human species with an incredible plasticity and ability to change its environmental habitat at will. The usual reason given is “culture,” as if culture could change ones resistance to cold or need for water. The current scenario has the early hominin first coming down from the trees, leaning to walk upright, and inhabit the savannahs. That’s the first major habitat change. We know from demographics that said hominins now live next to water courses; which, if the savannah theory is correct, requires a new shift of habitat. That’s two big shifts to get us out of the trees and to the shore where we now live. The simpler scenario, that we came down out of the trees to inhabit the shore line, doesn’t appear to be seriously considered. I would just like the profession—me being a simple layperson—to explain the evidence for those shifts. I simply don’t understand it and would like some help.

For example, I don’t understand what sort of culture an Australopithecine would have had that would have insulated them from climate change; weren’t they some of the people to have first come down from the trees? And doesn’t the theory say that they came down because the forest was disappearing underneath them? That they had to adapt or die? I get to wondering about their cousins, the chimps, wasn’t the forest disappearing under them, too? How did they adapt or how come they didn’t die? Or did their territory and population simply shrink?

Then I get to thinking about the polar bears? I couldn’t begin to count the references I’ve seen to the story that polar bears are in danger of going extinct because their habit is disappearing underneath them. Really? What’s the matter with the polar bears; how come they don’t simply adapt like we did? We had culture? That’s why I wonder what kind of culture the Australopithecines had? Did they really have enough culture to protect them from habitat change? Could someone explain that to me? Being a naive nebbish, I would have thought the Australopithecines obeyed the same natural laws the polar bears do: in the face of habitat extinction, you die. Where did I go wrong?

Why couldn’t it be that we came down from the tree to right where we are now, at the shore line? (Not in the water, silly, kingfishers don’t live in the water; they go in it, but they don’t live in it.) I get it that the profession says we didn’t, but I don’t follow the evidentiary logic. My apologies for being so slow, but I’ve yet to see the fossils that said, “These people definitely didn’t live in the river cut-bank or down by the lake.” Perhaps I missed something; could someone point me in the right direction?

Nonetheless, I think Elaine would have a much better argument if, instead of trying to defend an improbable past, she began chipping away at the props of the current academic position. What savannah? Show me the savannah. I think the savannah is a chimera. Ask them to prove it. And ask when we left it?

Later we can talk about the notion that people stood up to see over tall grass? Oh, come on!

Ardi Listening?

Re: “River bank life of Early Humans,” Past Horizons, Jan. 15, 2012

In speaking of Ardi, Ardipithecus ramidus, some 4 1/2 million years ago, the author states that geological studies of where the bones were found would suggest proximity to a large river. That’s all fine and dandy and fits into my scheme of things quite nicely, but the article finishes with a scandalous assertion: “Based on these two pieces of information, the team suggests that it appears Ardi, who many researchers believe is our oldest found ancestor, lived in a savannah, near fresh flowing water. Some suggest that such an environment would be consistent with learning to walk upright to see over the tall grasses [my emphasis].”

Please. That’s so highly improbable as to be impossible. How come no other animal did so? Because no other animal had to carry tools at the same time. Name me one other primate that went bipedal just because it moved out of the jungle? Or, hell, anyone that stayed in the jungle? There ain’t none.

Upright? Tool carriers. All others? Knuckle grinders. See over tall grass? My left hypotenuse.

Fishing in Germany

The Reuters headline for Jan. 14, 2012 reads: “Fishy find shows humans skilled anglers 42,000 years ago.” Worse yet, the story opened with the assertion that “fish hooks and fishbones dating back 42,000 years found in a cave in East Timor suggest that humans were capable of skilled, deep-sea fishing 30,000 years earlier than previously thought….”

Than who thought? Is someone suggesting humans only took to fishing 12,000 years ago? That’s going to shock the seafarers who got to Australia 60,000 years ago.

Guys, you can ignore the demographics and the physiology all you want, but homo sapiens have always been fishermen; it’s what separated us from the rest of the primates (and possibly hominins). Haven’t you figured that out yet? You still stuck on the savannah myth?

Oh sure. And the folks trudged across the Bering Land Bridge, too. You still believe that?

Anyway, good to be on top of it, Reuters.

On the Rez

Fact: I’ve known two Indians in my life. Well, a couple more, but not so much as to talk to. Of those, there are only two. The first was my cellmate in Hennepin County jail. He was a nice guy, short, from the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. There was a bunch of Indians in the can; that’s where I first got to know any of them, but, really, only my cell mate to any degree.

Booze. That’s what got him there. For any of them, whatever else the charge was, it was booze. My mate was a serious guy; he knew booze was killing his people. He asked me, in all sincerity, what I thought they could do about it? He mistook me for an apostle or a prophet because I had long hair and wouldn’t eat the jail food. “Easy,” I told him, “take LSD.” I’m pretty sure you can get LSD on the reservation by now, but the reservation is still the reservation. That didn’t work; maybe it was the setting.

The other Indian is Glen Lafontaine, a Métis from Canada (whom the Canadians consider a distinct, indigenous group). Glen was a book scout when I was a dealer. Book scouting attracts a discriminating clientele. More than a book scout, Glen would occasionally turn up with an ice chest full of salmon at a reasonable price, so long as I didn’t tell anyone. Good enough by me.

My only other significant encounter with Native Americans came when I innocently asked the cultural attaché to a local reservation to find someone who could help me understand the history of Indian burial practices. Whew! Did that set off fireworks!

But enough about me. I’ve been thinking more upon what my cellmate asked: is there anything to be done?

No, not really. At least there’s nothing I can do or suggest. I haven’t spent my life in Indian affairs. My voice isn’t even shouting at the wilderness, much less in it. But I’m as free as the next person to give my off-the-top-of-my-head opinion, no? If I had been studying Indian affairs, I’m sure I would come upon these same conclusions; they aren’t original. They’re merely observations.

•

Let’s start out brutally and observe that, for all intents and purposes, there were no Indian Wars. Maybe a few locals scrapped it up with the Vikings, but…

Let’s observe Squanto, my vote for the greatest American of all time. When Squanto returned home to his farm on Cape Cod for the second time, having been twice enslaved and hauled off to Europe, he found his village deserted and his fields lying fallow. Having been a slave in England on one of those occasions, he had learned English. He was subsequently enslaved in Spain, so he probably knew Spanish, too, but that skill wasn’t important to the American story.

English was, because shortly after returning the second time another group of Englishmen (and women) arrived on his shores; but this time they weren’t slavers. They called themselves “pilgrims” and didn’t know beans about beans. Lo and behold, the English looked around, found the fallow fields and went about trying to plant crops. Lucky for them, Squanto showed up.

It’s important here to understand why the village had been deserted and the fields left untended. It wasn’t because slavers periodically showed up and stole people away—though that might have been reason enough—but because the slavers left disease behind them which killed nearly everyone in the village, including Squanto’s parents. The survivors did move away, and that’s what Squanto came home to. Nothing.

You and I in the same position, I believe, would be very wary of welcoming any English, even if they weren’t slavers. Personally, I’d be more of a mind to kill them than to save them; but Squanto was a better man than I. Much better. I relate this story, not to extol Squanto—though, God knows, he deserves it—but to point out that by the time the Pilgrims arrived, the Indians were, essentially, gone. There were no Indian Wars, unless you count killing women, babies, and a handful of old people. Nonetheless, what happened to the Indians was no worse than what they inflicted upon each other. The worst thing the Europeans did to the Native Americans was bring them disease, and for that they can hardly be blamed. Peoples, whole peoples, have been up and migrating for countless millennia. In their paths other peoples have been overwhelmed and obliterated, absorbed and forgotten. Many a people exist now only in place-names.

But the Indians were caught in a crucial transition in world culture: for the first time, a people, a nation, could suffer collective guilt. For the first time in history there was a voice within the victors calling for preservation of the vanquished. It was the beginning of national conscience. It wasn’t universal and it wasn’t necessarily benevolent, but it meant that, instead of being enslaved by the conquerors, the defeated could be left a remembrance of their selves: they were herded onto reservations.

Admittedly, life on the reservation has not been good. Casinos may have ameliorated conditions somewhat, but life on the rez is still life in prison. Furthermore, the remnants left on the reservations fight an endless battle with the government for rights that, as time goes on, become more and more abstract. There is never freedom for people on the rez.

And I think about why is that so? Why is the Indian experience different from other minorities? How long before we have an Indian President? How long before an Hispanic? Jewish? (Forget about atheist.)

I think reservations have a lot to do with it. We have ghettos and we have Chinatowns, but we don’t legally prescribe them. Only, God bless them, for the Native Americans. Because we created these de facto prisons for them, they are stuck on them. Maybe they can make theme parks out of them. Maybe they can become tourist attractions. Maybe casinos can be their oil well to happiness. Maybe not.

But I can’t stop thinking about the Palestinians. They got herded onto reservations, too. I’m not sure that was a good idea, either. 

Sometimes you win a war; sometimes you lose a war. Win or lose, we are still all one people. We are a species entire. We are many, but we can all breed together. There is no one who is not, in the larger sense, our brother or sister. And I’m not even a New Ager. Nor am I a hipster, bro. I’m just family. Like us all. Reservations were an improvement, but not the answer. The answer is, we’re all in this together.

And I’d like to take you down to the Norse Hall and buy you a beer on that. They don’t take reservations.

Walking Gorilla

The Net has been abuzz of late over a video of a gorilla that prefers walking upright. Seems he's talked a couple relatives into doing it too. Why? It's easier to carry things. Logs in Abraham's case (Abraham is his name). Thanks God gorillas never got into spears.

Addendum to Yesterday

In my latest diatribe I wrote, again, about a fundamental law of evolution, which we might call the Law of Opportunity, and its corollaries. I neglected to emphasize what might be called the Law of Anticipation: i.e. evolution cannot anticipate future states.

I. Evolution is driven by opportunity, not necessity;
its corollaries:

1. Evolution cannot outrun ecological change
2. Evolution cannot fill an occupied eco-niche

II. Evolution cannot anticipate

Two current theories of human bipedal evolution make the logical error of evolution envisioning a future condition and hence heading that way. One is the common theory that proto-humans stood up to lessen their surface area available to the sun. The second is Daniel Lieberman’s (see the PBS show, Becoming Human) suggestion that people stood up because it was more efficient to walk that way than to walk like a chimp.

As to the common theory, aside from the problem that the sun is rarely directly overhead, if it really were the case of less solar exposure in an upright posture, the benefits of such a posture wouldn’t be realized in a chimp-like walker until many, many mutations had passed; which means that there would be no selective pressure to maintain any one of those mutations active, if each were isolated. Selective breeding only works if each mutation provides immediate benefit, not a future one.

The argument is the same for the efficiency of human walking. It’s a result of evolution, not a goal of evolution. Evolution has no goals, it simply bulges out where the walls are the weakest.

I’ll stick with habitual tool use morphing into obligate bipedalism. We know that tool use preceded the split between chimps and humans, because chimps use tools today (unless you think they might have learned from us). But chimps only use tools occasionally. I’m willing to wager that our tool habits led to the split between us and our cousins.

***
It is a reasonable question whether or not a tree falling alone in the forest has made any sound. Why, Good God, do I keep on writing this for my eyes only? So that one day in the far distant future someone will stumble upon this and say, “Good Lord, look here, this fellow had it all figured out way back when.”

It’s not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen; it’s really not. Why, oh why, am I falling here alone?

Well, Duh

First, an apology of sorts.

For decades I thought bipedalism was connected to our aquatic addiction, although I could never quite find a convincing argument. I figured eventually someone would figure that out, too. Until it became obvious that it was tools, not water, that was crucial in getting us to stand up permanently. I was wrong about that connection and I apologize.

But it doesn’t affect the reality of us as the Aquatic Ape. It doesn’t change our demographics or our addictions. It simply brings into focus the question of when we moved to the water’s edge? It still looks like it must have happened long before we became human.

*

I am perpetually amazed at the thinking patterns of academics. Does graduate school simply drive critical thinking underground? Is lack of vision synonymous with conservatism?

The headline (Discovery News 8/12/10) : “Tool Use by Early Humans Started Much Earlier: Small-brained ancestors used stone tools to whack into large animals some 800,000 years earlier than previously thought.”

Oh yeah? Thought by whom? Those damned academics again.

So, what are they saying? They’re saying that the oldest stone tools they’ve found are 2.6 million years old and that they’ve now found cut marks dating back 3.4 million years, hence the 800,000 year difference. They’re saying “our human ancestors were using stone tools and eating meat from large animals nearly a million years earlier than previously thought.” What that is saying is that the people doing the thinking were thinking that the 2.6 mya tools they have were evidence of earliest tool use by primates. This is where I worry that they failed their logic exams. Or their statistics exams. If one finds a stone tool, knowing nothing else about it except its age, what are the odds of that stone tool being among the first of its kind ever made?Approaching zero, right? What are the odds of that tool being from the heyday of its production? Approaching 100%, eh (bell curves and all)? How long do you suspect tools of that design were in production? Hundreds of thousands of years? Millions of years? Whatever the number, you can be pretty sure that whatever tools made those marks were around for a million years or better by the time we see evidence of them.

But it’s further apparent by the quotations that academia is still confused as to why people/primates stood up in the first place. They really don’t have a clue, even though it’s another case of those confounded trees obscuring the view of the forest. It’s as if they have no idea what drives evolution.

What drives evolution? Food. And to a lesser extent sex. Basically, it’s morphology for food, ornamentation for sex. Animals will change their basic shapes in a quest for food, but they’re willing to grow stupidly long feathers to get laid. You don’t stand up because you think it’s pretty; you stand up because you can eat better.

Eat what better?

Doesn’t make any difference (although we’ll get more into that in a bit). If standing up won’t feed you better, you won’t do it. If it will, you will. Standing up to eat, of course, is fairly common. Squirrels do it, bears do it, gazelles do it, even educated fleas do it. But none of them give up the ability to get down on all fours (forget the fleas) and run like hell, should the occasion demand it. How come only primates (and we don’t know how many times) gave up speed to stand up permanently? How come we were willing to be lion fodder just so we could stand up all the time? What was so great about standing up? How could we get more to eat by being lion lunch all the time, not just when feeding?

Well, you’ve got to hand it to us. It’s the hands, silly, it’s the hands. It’s the primates’ hands that guaranteed that eventually one of them would become us. Or many of them would. Hands certainly evolved for climbing trees and manipulating food products, and they could well have forced our brains to become bigger in the process of keeping track of the minutia of separately movable digits. And once we had hands, it was probably inevitable that someone was going to start using those hands to hold tools. It’s certainly common among primates. And a tool is anything that helps you get more/better food. Chimps use tools; bonobos use tools. Neither of them is an upright, obligate walker, but they both clearly use tools, so it’s reasonable to assume that protohumans began using tools before they were upright, too.

If you look at what chimps use for tools, though, you’ll realize that none of them would survive recognizable as tools. Sticks to tease out termites would be just sticks. Stones used to break open nuts would be just stones. Teeth-sharpened spears to stab bush babies would quickly turn to dust. Chimpanzees have undoubtedly been using such tools for millions upon millions of years, yet no one has ever claimed discovery of a stash of chimp tools of any age anywhere. We wouldn’t recognize a chimp tool, if we saw it.

Nor the average early hominin tool. We wouldn’t recognize a hominin tool until we could see a manufactured edge, preferably one that has travelled.

Hands lead to tools; tools lead to upright walking. Tools say that you can be foolishly slow, slow as a sloth, provided you’ve got a good weapon at hand. And if there are a bunch of you.

When did we start throwing stones? Chimps will certainly throw things, but not, to my knowledge, as a weapon (and underhanded, if I understand correctly); not in the sense of their spears being conscious weapons. Perhaps it’s a question more of offense versus defense. We start teaching babies, as yet unable to walk, to catch a rolling ball. Do chimps ever play catch?

It’s important to realize, though, that not only wouldn’t we recognize the first tools primates used, but that the period of primitive tool use (“primitive” here meaning “unrecognizable”) must have stretched back prior to recognizable tool use by multiple millions of years, if the length of time shaped-stones stayed unchanged is any indication. Indeed, logic says its stretches back as far as the first upright hominin. (And there’s always the question of how long the transition takes/took from scrambling to genuine, obligate bipedalism.)

One thing is certainly true: brains didn’t become big in anticipation; they could only have grown as an adaptation to circumstantial pressures and possibilities. Something had to be directly driving the creation of a bigger brain; it couldn’t have happened simply because it was fun. A brain doesn’t grown to meet anticipated demands, but rather in response to immediate opportunities. There is no chicken/egg debate over which came first, big brains or tools: tools, hands down (pun intended). Nor is there any debate over which came first, tools or bipedalism: tools, no choice. There is absolutely no reason slow, weak, toothless (as in big, ripping teeth), clawless, flightless apes such ourselves would give up the only defense we had—climbing trees—unless we had an equalizer. We had an equalizer. Forget carrying food for your family, forget seeing above the grasses, forget sweating theories and standing up naked with a patch on our heads. But that spear and that rock? Don’t leave home without them.

Or your friends. Ever wonder why dogs are so smart? Maybe it’s because they hunt in packs with their friends/family. Those animals which have better communication undoubtedly eat better. And tell me, which pack hunting animals are dumb? Orcas? Don’t think so. Jackals? Huh-uh. Lions? Doubt it.

Understanding how tool use led to bipedalism and big brains doesn’t explain the human addiction to water and our choice of proximity to water for nesting grounds. We undoubtedly left Africa some 100,000 ya savvy with water. We already knew how to sail and how to fish by that time. We had added aquatic food to our diet by then. (The Flores Hobbits may have taken to sailing much earlier than us.) In any case, you can be sure that the humans who spread out from Africa 100 millennia ago were already hairless, sweaty folk who drank a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we find the gene(s) responsible for our liquid addiction, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out when that addiction began, as well.

And it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that the addiction is what separates us from the other hominins. (Already I worry that somewhere in the depths of the jungle a group of chimps has taken up fishing.)

*********

While we’re on the topic of surprising news about the obvious, let me comment on a report from the BBC website on August 24, 2010: “Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claim”

No, not outer space, elbow room. The report contends that “new research identifies the availability of ‘living space’, rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution.”

Okay, I accept the reason I’ll never be taken seriously is that you can never say, “Well, duh!” in an academic journal. For years I’ve been stressing the maxim that evolution is guided by opportunity, not necessity. Admittedly, I did no research, as these people did, to prove my point. I used the old-fashioned approach: I thought about it. I’m not even going to say I did well in my logic class at the U, because I didn’t. The logic I used was pretty elementary. First I looked at the current situation of climate change and species die-off. Nobody, it seems, is saying, not to worry about the polar bears, they’ll just evolve, like our ancestors did when the forests disappeared and they were forced to walk upright. Once I’d made that connection, it was easy to see that A) animals don’t evolve quickly enough to accommodate a quickly evolving climate; and B) thinning forests could not have been the impetus for our ancestors to take to the ground. Impossible. No way. Couldn’t happen.

One of the primary problems with the standard model is the “lion lunch conundrum.” (Or “eagle lunch conundrum,” or…) How did we avoid being lunch for a predator in the interval between standing on our own two feet and acquiring tools/weapons? One solution is to not have the interval. If one assumes that acquiring weapons opened up new opportunities that led to bipedalism, the gap then becomes the reverse: between acquiring tools and standing on our feet. You can be assured we still did get picked off, but weapons leveled the playing field: we could pick them off, too.

What concerns me is the quote from the opposition, as it were. As the BBC reports it, “Professor Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, US, told BBC News he ‘found the patterns interesting, but the interpretation problematic’.

“He explained: ‘To give one example, if the reptiles had not been competitively superior to the mammals during the Mesozoic (era), then why did the mammals only expand after the large reptiles went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic?
“‘And in general, what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?’”

Mt. Stearns has a decidedly curious interpretation of the facts. He makes it seem like there was a battle between reptiles and mammals, as if Godzilla and King Kong were going at it in the first rumble in the jungle. How many times, offhand, have you seen inter-species combat which was territorial in nature rather than one side looking at the other as lunch? When has anyone caught on film the fierce war waged between bears and blue jays for control of the huckleberry fields? I have a feeling something was awry in my childhood education, as I seem to have missed those documentaries. Has Mr. Stearns forgotten the fact that reptiles appeared on earth a hundred million years prior to the first mammal? A hundred million years is a long time to fill up all available eco-niches. What’s amazing is that mammals appeared at all given the reptiles’ dominion.

Mr. Stearns is apparently unaware of or has forgotten (which is troubling, considering his profession) that basic evolutionary axiom: that a species cannot evolve into occupied space. It’s a corollary of the rule that evolution is driven by opportunity, not necessity. This is the sort of stuff that should be taught day-one in evolutionary science, so it’s disturbing that a practitioner in the field should not be aware of it. What sort of fight is he envisioning? If not hand-to-hand (paw-to-paw, paw-to-hoof) combat, then fighting for resource dominance? We’re back to the bears and the blue jays.
There are no “necessities” in the living world. There is no necessity for life on this planet. Most planets in our experience have no life on them; it’s obviously not a necessity for any given celestial object. It only arises where it can, not where it has to, and that distinction maintains itself forever. You do what you can, not what you have to to survive. If there’s a gap between need and ability, you die.

The second portion of Stearns’ argument, “what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?” makes it sound like one evolves to avoid danger, which is impossible. It again implies direct inter-species competition, which is not seen in nature. The lion and the vulture do not fight with each other over the spoils of a kill, they fight among themselves. The vulture doesn’t evolve with the hopes of knocking off the lion as king of the kill. It doesn’t even evolve to outpace the jackals. It evolves to be a better vulture than its neighbor.

And we didn’t evolve a bipedal life because chimpanzees were taking over the forests. Instead, becoming bipedal opened up previously nonexistent eco-niches: that of armed primates.

One wonders what sort of competition Mr. Stearns envisioned took place between the reptiles and the mammals after the die-off of the dinosaurs? Reptiles didn’t disappear during the Great Extinction, even in Connecticut there are lizards to this day. In Mr. Stearns’ view, it would seem, that the reptiles suddenly lost their competitive punch, or how else to explain that they couldn’t simply outmaneuver the mammals again, if that’s what they did they first time? Why did they loose their “competitive superiority,” as he put it? Unless, of course, they never had competitive superiority to begin with. Unless it was a case of first come, first serve, which is appears to have been.

To reiterate, the Basic Rule and its corollaries are:

Evolution is driven by opportunity, not necessity.
1. Evolution can not outrun ecological change
2. Evolution can not fill an occupied eco-niche

Accept neither wooden nickels nor excuses.